Emil and the Piglet

Emil lives on the Katthult farm in Småland and means well while producing one disaster after another. In this film he acquires a piglet, saves a sick farmhand, drives his father to the end of his patience, and the parish council debates sending him to America. Olle Hellbom directs. The source is Astrid Lindgren's Emil of Lönneberga books, and Lindgren wrote the screenplay. Jan Ohlsson plays Emil. This is the third and last of the films. All three came out of the same shooting period and share material with the series shown on Swedish television; the features are that material rearranged. Lindgren's view of childhood is plain here. Emil is not punished, not corrected, and none of what he does is turned into a moral. The book's narrator keeps reminding us that he will become an important man one day. The detail of farm life is part of the film too: when things are sown, who does which work, how the winter is got through. Rural Sweden at the start of the twentieth century is built with something close to documentary care. Who it is for: viewers who like Scandinavian children's classics and Lindgren adaptations. Who it is not for: the story proceeds episode by episode with no single plot, and some of the scenes involving animals sit outside what a children's film does now.