Il Caprino Gigante

Pinchcliffe Grand Prix (Flåklypa Grand Prix) by I. Caprino (1975)

☻☻☻

First full lenght animated picture to come out of Norway, and prior to that from the microcosm by Norwegian author Kjell Aukrust, PGP was the biggest box office hit in its homeland, thus listed amongst the Greatest Movies ever for that country, on Wikipedia; it is also aired every Christmas Eve on Norwegian TV and, I guess quite a unique case in the history of cinema, "at one point the movie was running at 75 different theaters at the same time in Japan" and it was "shown at a cinema somewhere in the world every day of the week, for 28 years" (!)

The bizzarre, almost-steampunk inventions by Theodore Rimspoke

(née Reodor Felgen)

including the outstanding racing car named (who knows why) "Il Tempo Gigante"

along with his non-human mates Sonny (Solan)

one rare specimen of short-tailed and blue-eyebrowsed magpie

and Lambert a.k.a. Ludvig 

sort of an echidna-looking edgehog

and even the resounding brass of the soundtrack reminds me of my favourite modern stop-motion British productions starring Wallace & Gromit, whose series started some 14 years after this. PGP could have been inspirational to the guys at Aardman then, and because of its accuracy and originality either in the artistic and the technical aspect, it should be regarded as a model even in today's animation.

Seen in a more-than-acceptable DvDrip copy with an excellent British English dub, I gave it 7/10 on IMDB, which means 3 smiling smiley on my post.  BTW, Mr. Caprino & Co. actually built Il Tempo Gigante, and here's the proof:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ElGigante-front.jpg

In my judgement: despite the peculiar idiosyncrasy of the blogger to (racing) cars, this is sweet.