What are you apologizing for, Stormkahn? MOOMINS ROCK!
Of course, I've never seen the cartoons, which for all I know are genuinely creepy, but based on the books - geez, y'all are wimps.
Does Winnie-the-Pooh scare you too? Moominsummer Madness is the book I read to settle me down when I'm having night-terror based insomnia; y'know, when you can't go into the bathroom because there's a mirror there which would show you what you'd rather not see, and you're falling endlessly into infinity because you comprehend your own mortality, and it's been three in the morning for eight hours already.
Ah, that beautiful soothing prose:
There had been a pancake once.
Snufkin understood that it was necessary to take the woodies to the play.
She didn't know what her Moomintroll had done, but she was convinced that she approved of it.
The Iron Curtain came down on his head one day, and they both cracked.
And the images - Hattifatteners growing from seed (too close, and their paws tangle). The bonfire of "don't" signs. (Never more my uncle and never more my aunt! I'll never ask them anymore. I don't, I won't, I shan't!). Little My calmly choosing between the cake tin and the knitting basket as they float downstream. Every scene with Snufkin and the woodies. Moomintroll diving for breakfast. The forest flooded with mist and water. The play on the grounded stage, performed for an audience of small animals in boats - tickets against anything eatable.
And the characters - not only the extended Moomin family, in which I include Snufkin, but the lonely fillyjonk, the conscientious little hemulen who releases the prisoners and writes their lines for them, Whomper, Misabel, Emma the Rat, even the police-hemulen who wistfully remembers a play about a princess asleep in a rose bush. I love them all - except the Park Keeper. It would be disloyal in me to love Snufkin's great enemy.
Hattifatteners are tiny and electrict btw - the tall ones you refer to must be hemulens, who always have bees in their bonnets about something but are sometimes benevolent and sometimes bureaucratic nightmares. And Little My doesn't kill anybody, though she's not afraid of anything, not even ants. She does greatly enjoy the murder mystery the Mymble reads her brood in The Exploits of Moominpappa ("This-is-One-Eyed-Bob's-sanguinary-work-said-Inspector-Twiggs-pulling-a-three-inch-nail-from-the-ear-of-the-corpse-it-must-have-happened."), and she has a child's delight in imaginary mayhem, but she never hurts anyone.
Now, I grant you, Moominland is a dangerous place, plagued by disasters no one can do anything about - floods, volcanoes, comets - and the occasional genuinely scary individual, like the Groke, who is however at least as sad as she is scary. In Moominvalley in November and Moominpappa at Sea, the characters have to deal with major emotional problems like alienation and depression. But through it all runs a basic security: the Moomin extended family is loving and accepting, all nice things are good for you, courage and perserverance result in life and happiness, and if you accept yourself, you will achieve what is in you to achieve, which is every bit as good as what is in anyone else.
