Characters design for an educational project incorporating animations. It was exciting to dive into vivid world of Norwegian mythology. The trolls have had to look more like men, a common human family with its everyday duties. Nothing scary or offensive. They are not bad, but just like humans, sometime bad and sometimes good. The family has never visited places where people live. None of the children are allowed to go near people, as that would scare them, and the Troll family don’t want that, they want to be left alone.
The Troll family - Props.
Father Dovre
Mother Solveig
Thunder - Thunder is a very active boy and always in trouble because he does so many strange things that creates problems. He has been the cause of many avalanches and landslides. When he walks the trees are shaking as he can’t walk like others, but have to trample along. People living far away can hear this and always say: It sounds like Thunder is coming. Besides Thunder is afraid of people, because we’re all afraid of things we don’t know.
Clever - Clever is the opposite of Thunder. She is very quiet and love to sit by herself and read books, play with her dolls and do puzzles and colouring. So she knows a lot and even if she isn’t the oldest of the children she is the one everybody go to when they wonder about something. Even mummy and daddy Troll go to her to ask about things. She is also very helpful and everybody know that if they ask her for help, they will get it. But she can also be a bit boring. When the others want to have fun and play some games she often answers that she don’t want to, as she rather will read a book or do a puzzle.
Sulky - Sulky enjoy playing with the others, but it happens quite often that he quits in the middle of the game and go by himself. He is easily offended and very moody. When he is happy, he is very happy and friendly towards everyone and smiles all over his body, but when he is in a bad mood, everything seems terrible. Things that others just shrug away, makes him sulking for hours. When his parents are angry with him he becmes very unhappy and sits by himself far away from the others. The others often cries: ”Don’t be sulky” to him and then he becmes even more sulky.
Pert - Pert is usually happy and contented and the one that easily made Sulky sulky. She loves to make up nasty answers, she can’t only answer ”yes”, but has to say something like ”Yes, sulky sulky”, ”Yes stupid”, ”Yes little pest” – she always finds new nasty ways of answering. Her parents have got several notes from her teacher saying that she hasn’t behaved properly and has answered the teachers in nasty ways. Otherwise she is always happy and friendly and quite popular because she dares to answer the adults in such a way.
The baby - The last one – which they have not found a name for – they have called Baby. She crawls around and irritates the others. Not because she is bad, but because she does a lot of damage when she tries to do the same as the others. But everybody love her and she knows that. If someone get angry with her, she looks at them with big, sad eyes full of tears and starts to cry, so streams of water flows down to the valley where the people live. Even if it her that has done something wrong it is always someone that comfort her and then she smiles. She loves to hear someone say: ”Don’t be angry with her, she’s only a baby, she didn’t know what she was doing”. When she hears this, she’s thinking: ”How stupid you are”, but fortunately she can’t speak so the others don’t know what she’s thinking and she can be grateful for that.
