Emil i Lönneberga (1971)

Michel lives with his little sister Ida and his parents on a small farm in Sweden. He is not old enough to go to school yet, so he has plenty of time to get up to all sorts of mischief, which gives the people in the village plenty to talk about. He never means any harm, though; he simply has too much imagination and a taste for adventure. One day, for example, he finds his father’s hat by the stream, where his father had forgotten it. Michel only wants to see if the hat can float. When he tries to fish it out of the water, his leather boots get soaked and water runs inside them. So he decides he should test whether there are waterproof boots, too. He goes home and fills his father’s boots with rainwater from the barrel. Michel’s father unexpectedly steps into the wet boots and immediately knows who has played this trick on him. Michel quickly hides in the woodshed, where he has often sought refuge because he can lock the door from the inside. There, he whittles little wooden figures, and over time quite a collection has built up. Also living on the Katthult farm in Lönneberga are the farmhand Alfred and Lina, the somewhat naive maid. One night Lina encounters a rat in the kitchen, so Michel sets a trap there. The next morning, his father promptly steps into it with his bare feet. Michel has to flee to the woodshed in his nightshirt. He starts carving his 98th figure and is not allowed back into the house until the afternoon. Michel’s mother is preparing blood dumplings, and in a moment of carelessness Michel spills the dumpling batter all over his father’s face. So Michel has to spend the rest of the day in the shed, too. He is so annoyed that he decides to stay there for the rest of his life and never come out again. He soon regrets this, since he was supposed to go swimming with Alfred. Lina has locked the shed from the outside as well, so Michel has to climb out through its chimney and ends up looking like a “ghost child.” By the next evening’s dinner, however, Michel is sitting at the table again. Unfortunately, he wants to slurp up the last of the soup from the tureen and gets his head stuck in it. Despite everyone’s efforts, they cannot free Michel’s head. Since his father does not want to smash the tureen, he takes Michel to town in the horse-drawn wagon to see the doctor. Now everyone can see what has happened to Michel. As soon as they arrive at the doctor’s, Michel bangs his head against the doctor’s desk, and the tureen shatters. His father is not upset about the financial loss, though, since the doctor would have cost money, too. To thank Michel for saving him the doctor’s fee, he gives him a five-öre coin. Michel puts it in his mouth for fun and promptly swallows it on the bumpy ride home. He thinks it is funny that he is now his own piggy bank, but his mother insists that they turn back at once so the doctor can get the coin out again. The doctor simply advises them to let nature take its course and, to Anton Svensson’s delight, charges no fee again. Michel’s father is very pleased with the bargain and glues the pieces of the tureen back together. Their happiness does not last long, however, because Michel sticks his head in it again, and this time his mother smashes the tureen herself to free her boy. The Svenssons are planning a big summer party and, as tradition dictates, intend to raise the Swedish flag when the guests arrive. Everything is ready, but Michel’s father is called away by the farmhand because a cow is starting to give birth. Michel takes the opportunity to hoist Ida up the flagpole, since his little sister would like to see the world from above. Their parents are horrified, and only realize what has happened when their guests point out that they seem to have raised the wrong flag. Ida’s red-and-white dress looks like the Danish flag to the guests. Once again, Michel is locked in the woodshed as punishment. When he gets hungry, he climbs from the shed window along a board into the pantry next door and helps himself to the sausages. When his father comes to let him out, Michel has disappeared, and everyone searches for him. In the end, the maid Lina finds the boy, and everyone is relieved. The parents’ joy at having their Michel back safe and sound outweighs their anger about the sausages he ate. In the run-up to Christmas, there is a lot to prepare at Katthult, and old Krösa-Maja, the Svenssons’ tenant farmer, helps out too. She tells spooky stories about monsters and werewolves, so Michel thinks it would be sensible to build a wolf trap. Naturally, he does not catch a wolf; instead, the nasty matron of the Lönneberga poorhouse falls into it. She had been looking for the poor people Michel had invited to a feast, since his parents were away visiting acquaintances at the other end of the village. The hungry poor, including Alfred’s grandfather Stolle-Jocke, leave nothing of the delicious food Michel’s mother had actually prepared for relatives who were due to visit the next day. As punishment, Michel has to spend another whole day in the woodshed, of course.