12/11/2013 - Norwegian director Rasmus A Sivertsen’s Solan and Ludvig: Christmas in Pinchcliffe takes 137,000 admissions during its opening weekend – the second best result in the last 10 years, only exceeded by Espen Sandberg and Joachim Rønning’s Kon-Tiki

Launched domestically last week (November 8) by Nordisk Film, Norwegian director Rasmus A Sivertsen’s stop-motion animated feature Solan and Ludvig: Christmas in Pinchcliffe [+see also:
trailer
interview: Rasmus A. Sivertsen
film profile] took 137,000 admissions during its first weekend, to become this year’s No 1 opener (followed by Iron Man 3’s 98,802 in late April). The result is the second best in the last 10 years, only exceeded by Norwegian directors Espen Sandberg and Joachim Rønning’s Kon-Tiki [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] in 2012.

Local audiences had apparently not forgotten Solan the Magpie and Ludvig the Hedgehog, the lead characters in Norwegian director Ivo Caprino’s Pinchcliffe Grand Prix (1975), which became an overnight success and was shown every day in a cinema somewhere in Norway for 28 years; it sold 5.5 million tickets (to a population of 4.9 million).

Also based on Norwegian author and cartoonist Kjell Aukrust’s characters and Harald Sommerin Simonæs’s novel Solan and Ludvig’s Christmas, and actually selling 174,000 tickets including previews, Solan and Ludvig: Christmas in Pinchcliffe was produced by Cornelia Boysen and Synnøve Hørsdal, for Maipo Film, with Qvisten Animation and Kari and Kjell Aukrust’s Stiftelse.

In the €3.2 million movie by Sivertsen, who most recently directed Kurt Turns Evil [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2008) and Ploddy the Policecar Makes a Splash (2010), Solan (an optimistic and cheerful magpie) and Ludvig (a melancholic and pessimistic hedgehog) are really looking forward to snow for Christmas. Their friend, the inventor Reodor Felgen, comes up with the world’s largest snow canon, which unfortunately falls into the wrong hands, so they have to take action in Karsten Fullu’s screenplay.