Legendary Swedish filmmaker Per Åhlin died on Could 1, 2023. He was 91 years outdated.
Åhlin was born in 1931 in Hofors, Sweden, and raised in Åby within the Småland province. He dropped out of secondary faculty to grow to be a draftsman earlier than shifting to Malmö in 1952. There, he labored as a contract illustrator and have become a self-taught animator.
Throughout the late Fifties and early Sixties, he illustrated for cultural tales within the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan’s Sunday pages. He additionally illustrated a kids’s e-book written by his pal Åke Arenhill.
“These works have been vital, and it was additionally throughout these years that I began to develop my very own fashion,” Åhlin informed Sydsvenskan in 2007. “I in all probability didn’t discover myself till the mid-60s. Earlier than that, I used to be influenced an excessive amount of by different illustrators.”
Having been mesmerized by Snow White as a baby, Åhlin felt compelled to make his personal drawings transfer after turning into an illustrator. He tried to analysis how Disney did it however the firm then, as now, was tight-lipped about its strategies. So, Åhlin constructed his personal digicam and taught himself the craft. “A minimum of I understood the precept,” he recalled.
Åhlin made his first animated clip on his kitchen desk within the late Fifties. That piece made it onto television and caught the attention of the favored comedy duo Hasse & Tage, who recruited him to work on their movie Svenska bilder (Swedish Portraits), launched in 1964. He continued to work with the duo many occasions over the next years.
“Hasse & Tage have been already icons within the leisure world, and we communicated on the identical wavelength,” Åhlin informed Sydsvenskan. “It was a mutual alternate and the assembly with them is a vital rationalization for why I’m doing what I’m doing right now.”
Åhlin made historical past in 1968 when he directed the animated scenes in Sweden’s first-ever (largely) animated function I huvet på en gammal gubbe (Out of an Previous Man’s Head), written by Hasse & Tage. Of the movie’s 77-minute runtime, 50 minutes are fully animated. Based on animation historian Giannalberto Bendazzi, Åhlin’s contribution to the movie was historic in a couple of method and may be thought of one of many “first examples of erotic animation in Europe.”
Jürgen Schildt’s evaluation in Aftonbladet was effusive with its reward for the movie upon its launch, saying: “The cartoonist’s fashion may be considerably paying homage to each Dalí, Saul Steinberg and Stephen Bosustow. It’s infantile and exuberant, wealthy in associations and jabs, i.e. in its greatest components numbingly humorous. Go and watch Per Åhlin’s jet-powered angels!”
In 1974, Åhlin directed the animation in one other live-action/animation hybrid movie titled Dunderklumpen. The fantasy movie a couple of good gnome residing within the northlands the place the solar doesn’t set received a particular achievement award from the Swedish Movie Institute’s Guldbagge Awards.
In 1975, he directed what might be his best-known work, the Nordic vacation traditional Christopher’s Christmas Mission, which nonetheless performs on television in Sweden, Norway, and Finland every Christmas Eve.
One other instance of Åhlin’s wide-ranging creative skills got here in 1978 when he contributed to the surrealist Swedish comedy The Adventures of Picasso, however not as an animator. The movie wanted quite a few faux work from the nice Spanish grasp, so Åhlin was recruited and made every of the works that appeared within the movie.
Three years later, he co-created and directed the sequence Alfons Aberg (Alfie Atkins), based mostly on the kids’s books of Gunilla Bergstrom. In 1989 he put out one other fantasy function titled The Journey to Melonia, an ecological twist on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
In 2000, Åhlin returned to function animation with Hundhotellet (The Canine Resort), against the law thriller set in a canine lodge. Over the approaching years, he would direct quite a few Lilla spöket Laban shorts, in addition to a number of different stand-alone items.
Åhlin is greatest recognized, in Sweden and overseas, for the work he did in kids’s animation. At coronary heart, nevertheless, he all the time believed that the medium was meant for adults as effectively, evidenced by his early work. In 2009, Tarik Saleh’s Metropia was billed as the primary Swedish animated function for adults. On the time, Åhlin defined to Svenska Dagbladet:
From what I can perceive, Metropia takes a giant step ahead on the trail that has all the time been apparent to me; specifically that animation is certainly a terrific medium for kids, however that animation must also be considered and made for a extra grownup viewers. It was not Disney that impressed me to make animation, however extra grotesque and superior animations from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Japan. It’s a graphic fashion that’s near my coronary heart and that exhibits poetic, absurd worlds.
All through his profession, Åhlin developed a number of different movies which have been by no means made. The one that basically acquired away although was Hoffmanns ögon (Hoffmann’s Eyes), based mostly on Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann. When requested by Sydsvenskan if he was disenchanted about not with the ability to end his dream mission, he answered:
You possibly can’t go round being bitter, even when it has taken a number of years of your life. It’s costly to make cartoons and my massive concern has been discovering the proper producers. Swedish cash alone would by no means have been sufficient, however I nonetheless consider that Nordic productions might have been made. I can’t let go of Hoffmanns ögon fully. I nonetheless do it there and draw every now and then.
Åhlin was honored numerous occasions over his decades-long profession. In 1990, he was acknowledged with the Guldbagge Awards’ inventive achievement award. In 2004, the Fredrikstad Animation Pageant gave him the Il Tempo Gigante Award alongside Jannik Hastrup and Priit Pärn. In 2006, he was given the first-ever Guldbaggegalan Gullspiran Award for a person who has made an amazing contribution to kids’s movies.
