Raggedy Ann and Andy - A Musical Adventure (1977)

[Nelson Swillie]

Most fans of old-school frame-by-frame hand-drawn animation will list a small handful of geniuses who've won their undying admiration. Chuck Jones is usually high on the list, as is Tex Avery. Then there are the Termite Terrace grafters, who made all the classic-era Looney Tunes shorts that still provoke bursts of manic laughter decades later. Then there are Disney's nine old men, character animators extraordinaire. But one of the most skilled animators of all time is frequently overlooked. Step forward Richard Williams, the man behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Ziggy's Gift, A Christmas Carol, the Cresta "frothy, man!" advertisments (among countless others) and an odd (that's putting it mildly) little film he made back in 1977 called Raggedy Ann and Andy - A Musical Adventure.



I hadn't heard of this film until I read an article about it on the Unknown Movies website, which made me curious. As a cartoonist and illustrator myself, I'm an admirer of Richard Williams's work - I rate Ziggy's Gift as one of the finest Christmas specials of all time, and even though Who Framed Roger Rabbit stopped being one of my favourite films when I got past the age of sixteen, I still have the highest of regard for the amount of work, care and attention to detail that went into creating the visuals - but it seems the man has his faults, most notably a propensity for self-indulgence, trying the patience of investors by repeatedly going over budget and over schedule, and this film is a testament of just how far wrong even a super-talented individual like Williams can go, given the right circumstances.

Raggedy Ann and Andy is a strange confection that tries to be weird and experimental and off the wall - at least I assume that's what's going on here, because this film often becomes so uniquely weird it's really difficult to tell exactly what is happening sometimes - within the confines of a children's cartoon. It tries also to be a musical, with tunes courtesy of Sesame Street / Electric Company regular Joe Raposo. It tries to be a thousand and one other things as well - is it a freakout, along the lines of 1976's Czech curiosity Hugo the Hippo? Is it a mind-blower, like Yellow Submarine? Is it a paean to the innocence of childhood imagination? - In truth, it's all these things and more = until it finally collapses under the weight of its own limitless ambitions and aspirations. None of this, incidentally, is helped by a screenplay that should have been overhauled several times before the final draft was approved, and the fact that Williams - and a crew of animators that included several old hands who'd been providing eye-pleasing happiness to children for years - opted to give the thing a ludicrously over-detailed visual style that may be technically impressive but which, and let's not mince words here, is bloody difficult to look at most of the time.



It wasn't all Williams' fault, to be rigorously fair. Warner Brothers veteran Abe Levitow was originally tagged to direct, but sadly died before he'd got much work done, so Williams stepped in - and quickly found out that too many cooks were in the process of spoiling the broth. The decision to give the foreground characters such an ornate, fidgety, compulsively cross-hatched and fiddly style for the foreground characters (further complicated by the then-commonplace practice of photocopying the original pencil test outlines onto transparent cels, which gives everything a feathery look - see also The Aristocats and Robin Hood) is baffling. Add to this the fact that the bland backgrounds look like unappealing, sunbleached, generic greetings cards, and you seriously have to wonder what Williams was thinking here. Ziggy's Gift has beautiful, smooth, eye-friendly animation with uncluttered designs, simple shapes and warm colours. Raggedy Ann and Andy just looks like a frenzied migraine most of the time. And when you're confronted with the hallucinogenic absurdity that constitutes much of the 'action' here, the whole thing takes on a further dimension that begs the question...was this really intended for kids?

Raggedy Ann and Andy themselves are, as the title might suggest, are supposedly the stars of the show, yet they have no personalities. To be fair, the cult of these characters grew out of depression-era rag dolls - not the richest of source materials. We get the message that Andy is a wannabe tough guy ("I'm no girl's toy", he sings, in a memorable sequence animated by Williams himself that provides a teasing, nagging glimpse of the good movie that could have been, had things not gone so drastically awry) and that Ann has a unique perspective on things because her owner, a little girl called Marcella, carries her upside down, but that's all we get to find out about these dull-as-mud characters because the overwhelming weirdness of this film kicks in not long after. I use the word "weirdness" advisedly, because some weird films can be hugely entertaining (who doesn't love Ken Russell?), but this is just flat-out strange. The toys and dolls in the playroom are supposed to be cute and loveable, but they're actually bizarre and disturbing. The two marionettes who do and say everything in sync are a prime example of the troubling mood that hangs over much of the proceedings. With their staring eyes and sinister chipmunk voices, they're reminiscent of the Grady twins from the Shining. Still, even they're relatively normal compared to the constantly sneezing pirate captain, whose moustache becomes erect and whose groin visibly swells when he first catches sight of a glamorous French doll. Yes, this is supposed to be a children's film!

Then there's the music, some of which is memorable, but all of which is sung by actors who can't sing. And to add insult to injury, there's a lot of singing in this film. Traditional musicals will throw in a song to illuminate a character, a situation or an emotion, but in this film, there seems to be a song every couple of minutes. (Raposo must have been working overtime.) When Ann and Andy finally make it out of the playroom, the first thing they do is sing a LONG number in the woods about how scared they are, about how they'll always have each other and...yes, we get the message. (There's also a disturbing whiff of incest about the brother and sister dolls' too-close relationship.) This seems to go on forever, but at least it brings some semblance of normality back to the film. Not for long, though, because the Camel with the wrinkled knees leads us into a bizarre world where everything looks like it's made from worn and faded denim, and - bad enough that he's clearly a paranoid schizophrenic - he also starts hallucinating. Still, at least there's the best song of the bunch to enjoy in the camel's solo number, 'Blue'. (Muppet Show fans might remember Helen Reddy singing it.)



Then we meet the Greedy, a living, breathing. belching, farting, constantly eating pool of taffy, and everything goes to hell again. Someone on YouTube poses the theory that these scenes coincided with the arrival of LSD at the animation studio, and this sequence is indeed so trippy, creepy and ultimately nauseating, you'll hardly believe what you're seeing - this is as close to a drug-free psychedelic experience as I've ever seen on film. Then, after a l-o-n-g time spent with the Greedy, along comes the psychotic (and strangely camp) Sir Leonard Looney and his master King KooKoo, whose throne resembles a urinal. I can't believe I'm actually writing a capsule description of a real film here - I just had to rub my eyes and remind myself that I'm not blogging about an overwhelmingly whacked-out nightmare I had. Part of the sequence in Looney Land resembles one of the old Winsor McCay / Little Nemo cartoons, for no good reason other than somebody felt like doing it, probably. All this would be fine if there was some kind of rhyme or reason behind it, but there isn't. These scenes are just strange, and very, very long.

Spike Milligan and the Monty Python team reminded us that surrealism only works when there's a strong idea behind it, or takes place against some semblance of reality, a lesson the Beatles should have learned before the cameras started rolling on their Magical Mystery Tour project. But NOTHING in these scenes points towards any kind of reality. It's just pretentious and confusing. Take away the element of realism, and you're left with pure self indulgence.

As the final scenes unravel, even the animation begins to look less impressive (the pirate ship, ludicrously detailed, jerks about on the water in a manner that suggests some of the cels went missing during the production) and there's a non-event of an ending that simply suggests money ran out. In a nutshell, King KooKoo inflates when he laughs, and having inflated roughly to the size of a zeppelin, he gets punctured by the captain's parrot, which somehow creates a time/space continuum wormhole that dumps everyone back in Marcella's front garden. She takes them indoors, and they've all suddenly learned to get along.The End.

Even at a meagre 86 minutes in length, the film - aside from a few decent moments and a couple of Raposo's tunes - feels like a never-ending ordeal, and it's understandable why it flopped on its original release. Animation buffs will probably scratch their heads and wonder just how Williams managed to flub this one so spectacularly, but he did, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Here's a timed (from the VHS, should you care) run-down of salient 'points' from this bizarre flick. Just, you know, to show that I do actually care about this stuff.

00:00 Film begins. That is, the first scene begins. I don't count logos or other preliminaries.

02:08 Opening titles. And this is where the problems start. In short, what would look fine as a book cover or an illustration looks horrible on screen. The titles are so flowery, so ridiculously over-detailed, so migraine-inducing, they're nigh on impossible to read.

04:00 The animation begins. And the lap dissolve segue may scar young children for life.

04:32 First appearance of Susie Pincushion, an uncanny dead-ringer for Kitten Natividad.

05:02 Those BLOODY twin dolls. "Woooh-oh!"

05:38 First song. This is going to be a chore.

08:16 Okay, that clown's going to give me nightmares.

09:34 Twin dolls again. Christ...

10:50 Second song.

11:14 Andy gets a faceful of Susie's cans. Honestly. (Does Richard Williams have a thing about face-in-the-cleavage gags? It happens a couple times in Who Framed Roger Rabbit too.)

13:26 Jeez, that poor kid's parents must hate her, dressing her up like that. On her birthday too.

15:48 Third song.

16:12 The Captain's first sneeze. You see, this Captain lives inside a snow globe. Cold, snow, sneeze - you follow? This is a running joke that gets old after its second time out. In fact, there's a good drinking game here waiting to come out.

19:11 Fourth song. Oy.

20:50 The notorious bit where the Captain gets 'aroused'. It's disturbing, but in the light of some of the freaky shit that follows, it almost seems quaint.

22:55 Twin dolls. Again. And rhyming 'scary' with 'scary-ee' is bloody cheating.

25:00 Fifth song.

26:21 Twin dolls. Can you say "more padding than a cheap settee"?

28:10 Hooray! We're out of that bloody playroom for a while.

28:45 Sixth song. And it's the 'Candy Hearts and Paper Flowers' number that drags on for almost six fucking minutes! This wouldn't be so bad if the accompanying animation was anything to write home about, but this turgid song coincides with some extremely drab visuals, meaning anyone over the age of four will be getting itchy feet within seconds. (Strange, isn't it - after the overanimated playroom sequences, with more movement than anyone would deem necessary, we get a character-building song and six minutes of dull blue-tinged visual atrophy!)

34:21 I knew this film had been "normal" for long enough so they over-compensate for the normal (if tedious) nature of the last five minutes with...camel hallucinations. Oh Lordy...

35:35 Seventh song. Actually, I like this song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAJ4pMLXRTA

35:47 This whole scene appears to take place in a wonderland of faded denim and sequins, as if the characters fell into Dolly Parton's laundry bag circa 1977.

40:18 Second camel hallucination.

41:20 The Greedy. Okay, I kind of understand the reasoning behind this. Kids can never get enough of the things they like, and the Greedy takes that to its ultimate extreme, but I find this whole sequence nauseating. And I can watch things like Bad Taste and Society whilst eating.

43:54 Oh joy. Eighth song. The Greedy sings.

49:09 Taffy pit perspective shot that momentarily looks as if the camel's taking a giant shit! (I'm easily amused, I know. Sometimes.)

50:01 Third camel hallucination. Somebody get him to a camel shrink.

52:32 NINTH song.

53:40 The Little Nemo sequence. Yes, it looks good. But in these surroundings? Looking good is not enough. It's swamped by the fucked-up insanity all around it.

55:48 Tenth song. Also marks the point the animation starts to look ugly. The grotesques in the court of King Koo Koo are just...hideous. Remember those fuckwit kids at school who hid behind the bully and laughed like wankers as people got beaten up or insulted? That's what these things look like.

56:30 Wow, a throne that looks like a giant urinal. Nice.

57:53 Eleventh song. I'm losing the will to live. Especially as it's sung by someone who sounds like a Teutonic Mel Brooks.

1:06:31 Here's possibly the worst animation in the film, the crappy-looking pirate ship.

1:07:04 Twelfth song. Enough already.

1:08:17 Not a chance! Song THIRTEEN!

1:14:35 The tickling scene. Described on YouTube as "this cartoon satisfies 2 fetishes at once! it's for those with an inflation fetish and those with a tickle fetish!". Hmmm.

1:16:20 The King explodes. Honestly.

1:18:20 ANOTHER camel hallucination. Seriously, is this a suicide analogy or what? Is "home" actually death?

1:19:30 Fourteenth song. Followed by a reprise of Candy Hearts and Paper Flowers. Jeez.

1:25:25 It's OVER! Rejoice!

The Raggedy Ann and Andy drinking game

Not much to it. Simply get the drinks in, load this into the VCR and drink every time...

The characters burst into song.

The camel hallucinates.

The Captain sneezes.

The twin dolls sing or do anything in unison.

Someone else in the room says "What the FUCK?"

The Greedy says "Excuse me".