Many of the finest cartoon strips, like Charles Schultz's Peanuts, reflected the lives of their creators. Finnish artist Tove Jannson's Moomins certainly reflected hers. What may seem odd or fanciful reflected real people and events. In Zaida Bergroth's assured feature, Tove (the appealing Alma Pöysti, equally adept at joy and heartbreak) starts drawing her stylized creatures during World War II.
Her sculptor father believes she should channel her talent towards more high-brow projects, but she's part of a bohemian milieu that appreciates her work, which includes satirical drawings and expressionist paintings. That includes her lover, Atos Wirtanen (Shanti Roney), a supportive MP in an open marriage.
At a time when artists like her father benefit from government funding, Tove struggles to make ends meet, but it doesn't discourage her from illustrating the adventures of Moomintroll and friends. She finds another married admirer in theater director Vivica Bandler (Krista Kosenen), the mayor's free-thinking daughter. While Vivica's husband is away, their friendship grows into an affair. Tove models Thingumy and Bob after their relationship. At a time when she desperately needs money, Atos hires Tove to contribute panels to his socialist newspaper.
Vivica believes they better reflect Tove's inner life than her paintings. "You aren't your paintings," Vivica observes. "Yes, I am," Tove insists, a statement that will prove prescient in light of the final sequence. Bergroth (Maria's Paradise) posits that the bisexual Tove has greater feelings for Vivica than Atos, though both prove beneficial to her career, since the mayor commissions a mural and his daughter encourages her to write a play that becomes a sensation, but Vivica doesn't share her interest in commitment.
If Atos has greater feelings for than she does for him, none of these romantic entanglements play like mere soap opera machinations. Her personal life may be a mess, but Tove's career gains traction as the 1940s give way to the 1950s, culminating in a weekly comic strip in a major newspaper. It's every creative worker's dream, a regular paycheck, even if she had originally intended to become a fine artist. By the end of this handsome film, she has also gotten her personal life in order, thanks in part to Tuulikki (Joanna Haartti), a Finnish painter she meets in France.
Tove doesn't completely break the biopic mold, and there's no reason that it should, but it's refreshing to find a portrait of an artist who may have had her doubts and fears, but the concept of "torture" never enters into it. "I believe life is a wonderful adventure," she claims at the outset, a viewpoint reflected in her enchanting work. Few women enjoyed the same sort of success in the comic strip world, a feat even more remarkable in light of the Moomin books, TV shows, and theme parks to come. Recommended.