Flåklypa Grand Prix; stop-motion animated sports film, Norway, 1975; D: Ivo Caprino, S: Frank Robert, Kari Simonsen, Toralv Maurstad, Rolf Just Nilsen, Harald Heide-Steen Jr.
Flåklypa is a small village where poor inventor Reodor works as a cycilist repairman, employing penguin Solan and hedgehog Ludvig in his workshop. When Reodor's former employer Rudolf mocks him on TV and shows how he stole Reodor's invention to help him win in car races, Solan manages to persuade a sheikh to finance Reodor's new race car, Il Tempo Gigante. A jealous Rudolf slices an oval device inside the car to sabotage it. During the race, Reodor's car starts malfunctioning, but Ludvig enters the car and holds the sliced oval device to keep it intact, and thus Reodor's race car wins the race and surpasses Rudolf's car.
Even though it enjoys a cult reputation in Norwegian cinema, since among others it sold over 5 million tickets at the local box office, stop-motion animated film "The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix" is still heavily overrated, basically nothing more than a solid kids film. It confirms the old maxim that often some of the most popular local films lose their ostensible greatness or are difficult to understand when viewed outside the borders of their countries. The film is meticulous in technical aspects, especially in painstaking stop-motion animation and work with puppets, and eye for details, but its creative aspects are severely lacking, since it doesn't even attempt to be funny or especially creative. The director Ivo Caprino is only interested in setting up the final 20-minute race car sequence, but the first 60 minutes drag as an overlong set-up, whereas the character of the hedgehog (?) anthropomorphic animal Ludvig is disturbing looking, with a bizarre giant nose/beak placed above its mouth. The humor appears only intermittently, though it has sparse charm: for instance, when the penguin Solan is watching the sheikh through binoculars, commenting how rich he is: "Gosh, he's using dollar bills as fly-swatters!"; the image of a woman playing a harp composed out of two bicycle tires; or when the names of Italian and German race car drivers are revealed: Gassolini and Schnellfahrt. The movie needed more jokes and inspiration, since it seems it just settled at being good, never truly attempting to go beyond that. The final race car tournament is the highlight, but even that is a weaker highlight than, for instance, the wonderfully creative chariot race sequence at the end of "Asterix vs. Caesar" or the chase sequence in "The Wrong Trousers".
Grade:++
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