Sandwiched between all the gore, violence and mayhem of the last entry of Theatre of the Less Obvious and the one that’s coming up next is a delightful calm in the storm: an exception to the rule, and one of the few family-friendly movies I will be spotlighting here @ T.o.t.L.O. This will be our 3rd time looking into a car-themed foreign film, but it is the only one on my schedule that does not originate from the Anglosphere. It is worth noting that Flåklypa Grand Prix, as it is known it its native Norwegian, is not in the least bit obscure outside the English-speaking world; it is extremely famous throughout northern Europe, Japan, and elsewhere in the orient. In fact, since its premiere in August 1975, the movie was shown at a cinema somewhere in the world every day of the week for 28 years, a non-stop run that finally came to an end in 2003, and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages! I first saw it on a weekend afternoon matinee when I was probably 12 or 13 years old-so that would have been 1983 or ’84-but until I set out to write this appraisal, I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of it since! So, even with these impressive metrics, it remains an oddity in North America, and thus qualifies as “Less Obvious” to those of us here in the States and The Great White North.
This is a film that I think will have a particular appeal to those of us who love scale-model cars and scale-model racing, because the entire movie is a scale-model production: The Pinchcliffe GP is true “stop-motion animation.” Based on characters from a series of books by Norwegian cartoonist and author Kjell Aukrust, director and producer Ivo Caprino invented a whole new ‘multi camera system,’ and the brilliant result is this classic movie. The animation is beautiful, the characters are lovable, the musical score is joyous, and all these elements work in perfect harmony to bring out an exceedingly comfortable energy. Not a single scene is too taxing on the soul, nor is it childish enough to put an older audience off. In sum: this is a movie that everyone should see, regardless of age or disposition!
The plot of the movie is simple enough, but its also compelling: Pinchcliffe is the mountain the home of bicycle repairman Reodor Felgen and his two animal friends, Solan Gundersen and Ludvig. Though the three of them live a quiet and pastoral life in their mountaintop hideaway, Reodor in actually a brilliant tinkerer and inventor. Through a combination of newspaper and television reporting, they become aware that Reodor’s former assistant Rudolf Blodstrupmoen (translated into English as Rudolf “Gore-Slimey”) has stolen one of Reodor’s inventions and claimed it as his own, using it to build a racing car that has turned him into a world racing champion. Reodor is despondent over his lack of ability to respond to this injustice until a chance meeting results in sponsorship by oil sheik Ben Redic Fy Fazan, allowing them to they build the car “Il Tempo Gigante” to race against Blodstrupmoen in the upcoming local “Grand Prix” road race.
Fully 1/3 of the movie’s runtime is devoted to the Big Race, and I can promise you, you have never seen a more exciting scale model event on film! The field is made of 8 cars, mixing the Can Am sports-racer styles of the mid-70’s with some of the “wedge shaped” GTs of the era. Sticking out from this sleek field like a sore thumb is our Hero’s car, a massive, antiqued-looking brass-era creation powered by a V-12 gas motor up front and a massive rocket-propelled engine in the rear, and we know this because we get to see the construction of the car bit by bit as the movie progresses.
It’s goofy, of course, but that’s the point, and it’s all great fun and amazingly exciting to watch; the sights and sounds of the engines and transmissions running through the gears are hair-raising, and the whole thing is beautifully filmed. It keeps you on the edge of your seat rooting for our hero, especially when the nefarious “Gore-Slimey” and his repellant little sidekick begin rolling out the inevitable “dirty tricks” (marked as such on the instrument panel!) and you see the way “Il Tempo Gigante” gets them through it! You feel the excitement of the crowd watching the race with you, from either the side of the track or at home with their families on TV screens, even though all the characters are just puppets!
The good guys win, the movie has a delightfully happy ending, and a good time is had by all! This is one of the few that merits the term “feel-good movie” for just how harmless and enjoyable it is, yet the best part of it is watching the scale model racing scenes; it’s enough to make you want to try to re-enact them yourself with your own model cars!
SO, where can you see it?
For a movie that is so well-known and well-regarded internationally, I found Flåklypa Grand Prix remarkably hard to track down! You can find uploads of it at YouTube, DailyMotion, and some other sites, but many are poor quality VHS rips, and all the versions I found are presented in its native original Norwegian. Some of those uploads were subtitled in English, and while that is the way I generally prefer to watch foreign films, this one was an exception: because it is animated, and because of the way I first saw it on local broadcast TV when I was a boy, I wanted to see it dubbed in English, and I was unable to find a version of acceptable quality that was presented that way. I went looking for a DVD copy of it and it found it difficult to find; I did eventually find a very expensive limited-edition Blu-Ray release touted as a fully restored version with dubbing in 6 languages, but I had to fork over $50 for it, plus postage! At first I was a little chapped about that, but once it arrived, my position softened; it is a fully restored 16×9 high-resolution version and it was absolutely beautiful; it looked like brand new movie, and the sound quality was equally superb! I had the option to watch it either in its native language with subtitles or dubbed, and the package came with a limited edition film strip, some additional ephemera, and a whole 2nd disc of bonus material.
Now, for those of you who are uninitiated and have never seen this film, its likely you won’t be willing to pay that kind of money for the price of admission, and in that case, you may enjoy one of the subtitled uploads that’s available online; below is a link to the best one I found, presented at Internet Archive (you may have to enable the closed captioning from the options menu in the lower right corner to get the subtitles).
https://archive.org/details/flaklypa-grand-prix-1975
However, if you’re like me and remember this movie fondly from your formative years but haven’t seen it since, I do recommend that expensive Blu-Ray reissue: it is “heirloom quality” and will stand the test of time for multiple viewings.
By all means, see this movie, especially if you have children of your own! It’s great family fun, and your own kids may come away with fond memories of it just the way I have from my own childhood!
Here is another one I’m embarrased to admit I hadn’t seen but it looks great. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of this and I have a fondness for those stop motion animations (probably from all the old Christmas ones we used to watch as kids). The sets look terrific and I’d say well done and the cars look super cool too! This is one I’ll have to see!