In her fourth and final film outing, the amazing Pippi Longstocking (Inger Nilsson) embarks on a crazy, fun-filled road trip with friends, Tommy (Pär Sundberg) and Annika (Maria Persson). Fed up with doing chores on a wonderful summer’s day, the siblings decide to run away from home. Their fretful mother (Öllegård Wellton) asks Pippi to protect them, which she dutifully does. Sure enough, her superhuman strength and magical talents spark an incredible series of adventures involving a friendly peddler (Hans Alfredson) and his bottle of amazing green goop (which serves as everything from superglue to rocket fuel), a spooky house, an impromptu tightrope walk, a grouchy farmer (Walter Richter) whose infant son is endangered by a rampaging bull, and a flying car. All in a week’s work for the world’s strongest little girl.
Creator Astrid Lindgren pulls out all the stops for this grand farewell, the best film in the entire series. It’s a madcap adventure, driven by a spirit of amiable anarchy and eight year old logic, that propels our child heroes from one outlandish incident to another. Lindgren’s pet themes of freedom and childhood liberation are very much to the for, as despite Pippi’s occasional heroic intervention, Tommy and Annika are often left to their own devices and learn to survive in the wilderness through trial and error. Neither Lindgren nor series director Olle Hellbom sentimentalise childhood. The kids squabble, make mistakes, go hungry, and lose their clothes to a hungry cow, but quick thinking and gumption manage to set things right.
In an age of mollycoddling and preteen anxieties, there is something life-affirming about three kids roaming the idyllic countryside, carefree and with no grownup supervision. Regular cinematographer Karl Bergholm does his finest work, capturing the sun-dappled Swedish scenery in all its golden glory. The overall effect is like reliving the wildest, weirdest, most wonderful summer adventure you ever had with your best friend. Only here your best friend is multiplied by a magical factor of ten. Irrepressible Inger Nilsson explodes across the screen, a bundle of energy whether performing a frenzied drum solo, swatting that enraged bull aside with nonchalant cool, or flapping her arms in a demented (and successful) attempt to make a ramshackle roadster fly!
This movie finally admits that more than just super-strong, Pippi is plain supernatural. Having been frustrated in her earlier attempts to fly, here she rides a wheel-less bicycle past astonished onlookers in a rural village and climaxes the film whizzing around Villa Villekula aboard a flying broomstick. Indeed, in Japan this film was titled That Little Witch, Pippi Longstocking. It’s sad to think that in real life, Nilsson drew little joy from her stardom. A homebody at heart, she was more comfortable away from the attention wrought by fame. Yet she (and her charming co-stars Pär Sundberg and Maria Persson) inhabited the junior daredevil with complete conviction. Nearly forty years on, no-one has replaced her in the hearts of Pippi Longstocking fans.
