MOVIE REVIEW : Pippi Loses Spark in New Incarnation

In Sweden in the 1940s, the irrepressible and extremely Swedish Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efriam’s Daughter Longstocking was born, heroine of Astrid Lindgren’s long-running series of children’s books. In that time and place, the rules of child rearing were strict and clear; they were certainly more unyielding than they would be a continent away for American children of the Dr. Spock generations to follow.

To Swedish children, Pippi’s outrageousness, the fact that she lived by herself, told tall tales, shunned school and stuck out her tongue at anything resembling normal behavior, must have had a truly seditious allure to it. In the late ‘60s, she was at the center of a series of Swedish films, whose badly dubbed American versions have now virtually disappeared from video rental stores.

Now, however, via an American production, “The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking” (citywide), she’s been re-imported. Washed ashore in a small, coastal Florida town with her appaloosa horse Alfonso and her monkey Mr. Nilsson, she arrives ready to shake up well-behaved American children, purely for their own good.

Even by setting the story in the 1940s, this Americanization brings on terrible problems: Pippi’s outlandishness is what some Europeans think of as the usual behavior of American kids anyway, so most of the contrast is gone. And how can you bring a message of sedition to the home of the film food fight?

Then too, through writer-director Ken Annakin’s effort to be slavishly faithful to Lindgren’s text, Pippi still lives in the Villa Villekulla, right next to Tommy and Annika and their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Settigren--though this is supposed to be Florida, not some Scandinavianesque Solvang.

The very young and undiscriminating children, who are this film’s only hope, may not notice, but they deserve better. Pippi, “who always comes out on top,” has lost this time, to a badly thought-out, glaring, grating American hybrid, stuffed full of forgettable plastic songs and threadbare special effects.

What carefree appeal Pippi had on a printed page has evaporated. Although she’s passable in Pippi’s few somber moments, Tami Erin, who plays her, is brashly charmless for most of the film’s 1 hour and 40 minutes; she doesn’t just lead, she overpowers the kids next door (David Seaman Jr., Cory Crow).

Pippi’s liberating spontaneity now seems like brattiness, pure and simple; she creates one mess after another: flying feathers, ice cream or pancake batter, then strides on to whip up the next disaster. (The film is MPAA-rated G.)

Her one notable invention, the homemade crate and pedal-power plane, which flies when Pippi whirls about, using a broom as a rotor, seems flat and unrealized with none of the soaring wonderment a sequence like this should have.

Lindgren’s book spoke about independence and self-reliance and a liberation from routine; the film has you rooting for the adults, particularly Eileen Brennan’s Miss Bannister, since her points seem so well taken.

By the film’s end, Pippi seems worn out, dirty and with no sense of values. In this case, perhaps a classic should have been left untranslated. It’s like that old Irish joke: By rights they shouldn’t start from here at all.