Moomin boom

Fan is a new column about the way fandom touches every sector of our culture. First up: Claire Marie Healy on Tove Jansson and licensing.

Once you start looking, you realize the Moomins are kind of everywhere. In the space of a week in London, Moominpappa wished me Happy Birthday from a rack of greetings cards; Little My waved from a woman’s Keep Cup on my train commute; and Moomintroll and Snufkin peered from a strappy slip dress—Viscose 69%, Linen 17%, Lyocell 14%—on my late night doom scroll of the Arket sale. As for me, I’ve been wearing a baseball cap from the official Moomin Shop U.K all summer, an item I bought ‘at source’ after deeming the 2022 IDEA Books collaboration caps too expensive. I am, let’s say, a fan (a quick search of my phone throws up a link to a sex advice column titled ‘The Woman Who Has a Thing for Moomins’ that a friend sent to me, I hope in jest, in 2019).

All of the items above are the official products of licensing partnerships with Moomin Characters, the company that owns the rights to the creatures—from Moominmama and Moominpapa, to Sniff and Stinky and Tooticky—that Tove Jansson first shared with the world with the release of The Moomins and The Great Flood in 1945, and later in eight more best-selling books and a globally-syndicated comic strip. Much curatorial work has been done in recent years to, rightly, expose the wider artistic talents of Jansson—a painter, writer, novelist and even librettist—as well as her radical pursuit of a free, openly queer life. These include the latest exhibition Houses of Tove Jansson, a show that just opened in Paris, which showcases her artistic output in dialogue with contemporary artists.

But if it’s true that people mainly come to Jansson’s work through these snub-nosed, hippo-like creatures—an inherent ambiguity that leads non-fans, such as my boyfriend, to insist they are “scary”—it is also true that this encounter is currently more likely to happen through a tea towel, or a notebook, than attached to their original stories.

Licensing is nothing new. Right now, you can buy Keith Haring t-shirts at Uniqlo; Heaven by Marc Jacobs has used imagery from ​​directors Wong Kar-wai and (friend of the brand) Sofia Coppola. It’s easiest to respect the wishes of a living auteur. However, licensing questions often fall to the children of artists. As Diane Arbus’ daughter Doon said of looking after her mother’s estate in a recent piece in How To Spend It, “I realized I was going to have to stop thinking about what she would have wanted and just go ahead.”

Jansson was still around when the Moomin Characters company was set up; overwhelmed by merchandising requests (and struggling to say no to any of them), she started the company in 1958 with brother Lars Jansson. Today, her niece Sophia is chairman of the board and co-director, having joined in the late 90s with a desire to return the company back to its original text after the popularity of the animated television series: “I felt I had to do right by this inheritance,” she said in an interview. “To return it to its core—the art and the text.”

This return to values has been big business. In 2022, the Moomin Characters company—working with its worldwide master agent Rights & Brands—had over $820 million in sales and 800 licensees worldwide, including ARKET, DeAgostini, KFC, and Rovio Entertainment; it says that it ‘connects’ with over 65 million fans each year physically and online, a figure that presumably includes the popular Finnish and Japanese theme parks. While traditionally less visible in the USA, as of this year, Barnes & Noble launched what was described as the brand’s first significant foray into that market: including books, home goods, notebooks, and of course, the perennial gift mug. It’s no wonder Disney has tried, and failed, to buy the Moomins over the decades: three times apocryphally, but the official first recorded attempt in the 1950s may have been what prompted the founding of Moomin Characters in the first place.

It's a pointless exercise to consider what Jansson herself would make of the fact that Moomin was nominated a finalist in the category “Best Brand – Publishing, Stationery, Social Expression” in the “prestigious” 2023 Licensing Excellence Awards. As revealed in correspondence and interviews, Jansson was actively considering marketing possibilities for Moomins as early as 1950, but equally defined herself as a painter first and foremost. She longed to focus on her fine art once she passed over the reins of the comic strip, creating abstract canvases in tune with the times, but she also continued to converse with fans on matters like Moomin-themed toilet paper (quoted in this lovely Sheila Heti piece). The more I read about Jansson, the more I relate to this internal push and pull, and feel that this tension should be part of the structure of her exhibitions: rather than to always say to audiences, “here are the Moomins” and, somewhere else, “here is the art.”

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If Moomins are everywhere—800 licensees is no joke—where does Moominvalley end and the real world begin? “You don’t use Moomin in politics, or in connection with violence,” Sophia has said of where the line gets drawn (as a spokesperson of a mobile game company developing a Moomin game noted, “imagine, a game without violence, it’s difficult”). “You’d like to develop Moomin products as some sort of extension of what the Moomins represent in general, their philosophy.”

Even with this stated degree of control over the illustrations and their spread, tensions occasionally rise in the space between Jansson’s legacy and the commercial expansion of her Moomins. In 2020, the company had to pull out of a deal to be part of the redevelopment of Lapinlahti, a mental wellness-focused space in Helsinki, after protests that it went against Jansson’s own community-driven values. An official Moomin podcast, The Moomin Phenomenon, narrated by big names Jennifer Saunders and Lily Collins, is baldly promotional in tone, but contains sweet stories about the fandom. However, even the podcast script oscillates uneasily between telling a story about the Moomins, a story about their creator, or a story about what is available to buy. One woman is interviewed as she gets her latest Moomin tattoo, and she has several on her arms already. But it didn’t surprise me much that none of her designs are based on the books’ illustrations—they’re based on the official, limited-edition mug releases.

“It’s not the same thing at all just looking at them,” says Sniff, perusing treasures in the book Comet in Moominland. “I want to touch them and know that they’re mine.” He’s right—of course, if we love something, we want to hold it. That’s how a character—once in the imagination, then on the page—ends up adding so much stuff to the world. Looking at that Viscose dress again (marked down from $140 to $84) it does all seem like too much. Moomins, initially reflective of the wartime scenario which birthed them, have a delicate relationship with their environment. The characters of the Moomin stories journey through flooding forests, flee extraterrestrial comets, and hibernate in extreme colds. And they feel deeply relatable because they are never blandly moralistic—within these tales they act on their desires, get sad, and make adult mistakes. Shouldn’t it be enough to hold each other?

The Dirt: Oh, the Moomanity!