Mauri Kunnas' books are very well known in Finland and I'm not surprised! He does mostly children's books and I still enjoy reading them, probably because of the humour and his illustrations which are amazing! There are so many details in most of the illustrations that you can look at them for ages and always find a small character in a corner somewhere that you hadn't noticed before. Most of the characters are dogs but there is also for example a sleepwalking goat called Mr Hakkarainen who never really has a role in the stories but you can always spot him sleepwalking in the most random places!
Hooray! There's a new moomin film out based on an old felt animation tv series from the 80's. This is easily one of the most inspiring films I've seen all year. It starts with an ordinary summer day in the moominvalley but soon there's a flood and the moomins have to leave their house and go live in a theatre. In the original series there was no dialogue but they've added that now. The music in the film is perfect for it but I'm still not sure if I loved or hated the dialogue, some of the character's voices were just so high pitched! But it's a brilliant film. A film review from The New York Times here. The trailer is on the film website www.muumielokuva.fi, but unfortunately only in Finnish and Swedish..
I was looking through designs that Design Forum Finland has given prizes to recently and I came across with these three that I thought were quite unique. All these three designs have a certain clarity typical to finnish design. There are not that many details but there is something playful about all of them. The Design Forum awards one or two best young designers every year. These are from a couple of years ago. The shoes with wooden heels by Julia Lundsten, a lamp (inpired by a coneflower) and limited edition packaging design for L´Oréal by Janne Kyttänen.
