28/11/2013 - The Norwegian Film Institute programmes Family Day and an exhibition at Oslo’s Filmens Hus, while Norwegian families are crowding cinemas to watch Solan and Ludvig: Christmas in Pinchcliffe

100 years after Norwegian director Sverre Halvorsen’s one-minute short, Roald Amundsen on the South Pole, started the history of Norwegian animation, the Norwegian Film Institute will celebrate the anniversary on November 30 with a Family Day, an exhibition – Animated in 100 Years - and the release of a Blue-ray with 34 Norwegian animated shorts.

Meanwhile Norwegian families are crowding the cinemas to watch 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], which has taken 479,296 admissions in three weeks on its way to becoming Norway’s No 1 blockbuster this year.

“Since 1913 Norwegian animation has developed in all genres, from commercials in the 1920s, over commissioned films, reaching today’s shorts and full-length features of international standards,” said the institute, referring, ao, to Norwegian director Torill Kove, whose animated The Danish Poet (2006) received an Oscar.

The institute will screen Kove’s Oscar-winner, her My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts (1999) as well as Norwegian director Ivo Caprino’s fully-animated Pinchcliffe Grand Prix (1975), which was on the programme of a cinema somewhere in Norway for 28 years, selling a total of 5.5 million tickets (to a population of 4.9 million).

Both Pinchcliffe Grand Prix and Solan and Ludvig: Christmas in Pinchcliffe were based on Norwegian author and cartoonist Kjell Aukrust’s characters - Solan the Magpie and Ludvig the Hedgehog – and one of the 1975 puppets is included in the exhibition, with the camera Norwegian director Morten Skallerud used for A Year Along the Abandoned Road (1991).