Finnish Animation Before the Digital Age

The beginnings of Finnish animation did not rely on large studios. Early creators were often cartoonists, illustrators, commercial filmmakers, and technical experimenters who produced moving images with limited resources. In 1914, Eric Vasström produced short Snapshots, in which topical caricatures appeared on the silver screen as if by magic. By the 1920s, Finnish cinema was already featuring animated commercials and experiments in which animation was combined with live-action footage.

The earliest fully preserved Finnish animation is Hjalmar Löfving’s A Few Meters of Wind and Rain from 1932. The three-minute animated film depicts city dwellers who are suddenly caught in the rain and wind. The work is interesting precisely because it is not an advertisement but a small, independent animation. Löfving also made several advertising films, however, which speaks volumes about the early days of Finnish animation: commercial commissions kept the technique alive at a time when animation did not yet have an established production field.

After the wars, animation flourished, particularly through advertising films and sponsored short films. Among the creators were Ernst Roose, Antti Peränne, Veikko Savolainen, and Seppo Suo-Anttila, whose object animation Impressio won the top prize at the Mamaia Animation Festival in 1970. These works often displayed an inventive approach to materials: bottles, objects, paper, and drawings could be moved frame by frame.

With the advent of television, animation became part of children’s everyday lives. Heikki Partanen’s Hinku and Vinku and Heikki Prepula’s Kössi Kenguru represented cut-out animation, in which characters were constructed from paper, cardboard, and other cut-out pieces. Mediametka describes cut-out animation as a technique in which characters can be made from, for example, cardboard, paper, pieces of wallpaper, and photographs. This was the strength of Finnish animation before the digital age: a recognizable visual world was created from minimal resources.

Camilla Mickwitz continued this tradition with her own socially acute and visually distinctive style. Her work, such as Jason, Emilia, Mimosa and the original logo of Pikku Kakkonen combined children’s culture, illustration, and animation. Before the digital age, Finnish animation was often exactly this: hand-crafted, slow-paced, tied to specific materials, and bearing the creator’s distinct style.

Yle’s Living Archive features Finnish animation classics such as Kössi Kenguru and Satutalo, Kössi Kenguru’s Gentle Spells , and Beware of Thin Ice.