Raggedy Ann and Andy: a Musical Adventure - Movie Review (Part 1)

You make me so happy.

It's been so long since I've had a visitor at our theater! I'll prepare the cupcakes- wait, are cupcakes classy enough? Nevermind, I'll serve them tea! No, that’s too stereotypical! Oh, I'll just give them whatever we have! It just makes me so happy you’ve stumbled upon this theater, as not many humans do. Imagine that, a fairy godmother who barely interacts with humans. But perhaps you’d like to join me for a little cup of happiness? Trust me, you deserve it.

I know humans live in a world ripe with cruelty, where innocence is as fragile as it is rare. While you may have your methods of surviving such harshness, I choose to defend myself from that bitterness through my passionate performances and media reviews. And I hope what I love can be loved by others as well. Yeah, my methods for spreading joy are a bit strange, but sometimes the strangest things can offer the most joy. And there’s one movie that grants me a very unique kind of happiness. It’s a bizarre yet beautiful blend of gentleness with a pinch of melancholy, childlike innocence mixed in with candy-coated insanity, and all served with a surreal dash of messy yet touching themes about the pursuit of happiness. And if you’d let me, I want to share with you Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure. 

Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure is one of the most bizarre animated movies you’ll ever see. It’s got more technical flaws than a screen door on a submarine, it tackles depressing themes such as joys you can never possess, and it’s as disturbingly psychedelic as only the 1970s could deliver. And it’s one of my favorite films. This magically-mad musical movie was created back in 1977, and was loosely adapted from a 1924 novel called Raggedy Ann and Andy and the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees. Now, I’m sure my hip young audience is just dying to know all about a 129-year-old dishrag with a face. So let me recount the wholesomeness and the tragedy of this little cloth cutie. 

Raggedy Ann was created by a comic strip writer named John Barton “Johnny” Gruelle (1880 - 1938). His daughter Marcella had grown increasingly sick, so searching for ways to cheer her up, Johnny found a faceless rag doll once belonging to his parents in his attic. So he painted a new face for it and offered it to Marcella under the name Raggedy Ann. Using his experience as a writer, Johnny saw an opportunity to turn Ann into a storybook and comic strip star, based on his own original stories about Ann that he would tell to Marcella. The comics and storybooks were surprising hits, and so he decided that the story about a doll needed a line of dolls to go with it. Johnny Gruelle received the necessary patent in November of 1915. But tragically, that was the same month Marcella died of her illness, at around 13 years old.

Johnny Gruelle (left) and the original Raggedy Ann doll and storybook (right).

Sorry for all of you coming for a review of a happy musical about talking toys. I don’t believe child death was expected anywhere from the synopsis. But yes, the intentions of the series seem innocent enough. At least until idiotic corporate suits step in and rally to capitalize with a movie adaptation… which they did. But let's not be so cynical. Besides, no more children die from here on out! 

Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure was directed by animation legend Richard Williams, a three-time Academy Award winning animator who was best known as the animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and the writer of the book The Animator’s Survival Kit. After this movie’s script got rejected from Universal Pictures and Warner Brothers (said script written by Patricia Thackray and Max Wilk), 20th Century Fox eventually took in the film and assigned animator Abe Levitow as the director, who previously worked on the movie Gay Purr-ee. But unfortunately, Levitow died during the journey of the movie's completion, which was how Williams took the reins on leading the production. As irony continues to punch these people in the stomachs, Richard Williams ended up LOATHING the script… Yeah, that’s not a good sign.

Richard Williams’s primary motivation for taking up the job- despite his hatred of what in his opinion was a song-overloaded and confusing mess- was to get funding for his dreamed magnum opus called The Thief and the Cobbler, one of the most infamous animated disasters of all time and current record-holder of the longest production time to ever complete an animated film. When Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure was released, the movie bombed at the box office. It cost around $4,000,000 in 1977 (which accounted for inflation, would cost around $19,00,000 today) and it only grossed around $1,350,000. 

Would you be surprised to know that this wasn’t the critical darling the animators hoped it would be? Reception was just as welcome as a skunk at a perfume factory. Critics hated the writing just as much as Richard Williams did; sharing his complaints of there being too many random moments, too many songs, too many... nightmares. So this appears to have been a self-fulfilling prophecy of disaster, piss, and vinegar that was doomed from the start: an less-than-enthused director who had zero faith in the project, a lack of premise and purpose, and even its own animators expressing disappointment.

"The film unfortunately failed. There were many reasons for this. Namely, the creative intent to turn a typical Broadway musical into a cartoon proved unsuccessful. Making matters worse, the film became a family business: the producer’s daughter wrote the screenplay, which didn’t benefit the work. And the leadership was taken over by the composer, who gave too much of a role to his own songs. Lastly, 11 three-minute songs in a seventy-minute film is a little too much. That is to say, there was not enough time left for good animation. All of this together resulted in the work of John Kimball, Art Babbitt, Richard Williams and myself regrettably going to waste." - Tissa David, lead character animator

But Richard Williams and his team did their absolute best to make this movie as charming and visually-appealing as it could be, resulting in some of the greatest animation work of its decade. I’ll gush about the incredible animation, but I also have a strong belief that this silly doll movie is a lot deeper than you’d think. It’s not overly-complex or anything like that, but I think the movie is trying to say something important and I think it does it- perhaps unintentionally- sweetly. Now, my fairies, I’d like to take you down this Velveteen Rabbit hole and uncover the whimsical insanity of Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure.

But we simply cannot begin our journey without taking in the view of the places we'll travel to. If there’s one thing this movie is famous for, it’s the outlandish animation. The sensational swirling of Alice in Wonderland meets Toy Story comes tenderly, meticulously painted with soft yet vibrant colors, incredibly fluid and character-filled movement, enchanting backgrounds ripped right out of a storybook, and it manages to dip its toes into the uncanny valley without coming across as too disturbing; though, there are definitely disturbing chapters in this story. Yet the bizarre angles, shapes, and faces make this movie all the more unique. The movie is just filled with so much imagination that it's difficult to forget at least a few moments that stick to your brain like bubblegum. Even simple scenes are filled with so much love and attention to detail. My favorite part about the visuals is that they managed to not only make the dolls feel alive, but still feel like dolls. Ann and Andy rarely if ever blink, which sounds uncanny, but with how expressive their faces are, you forget that. It’s phenomenal animated acting to make you ignore what’s often considered one of the laziest things you can do in character animation. There’s also an incredible weight and flow to the characters. Even though they’re hand-drawn, you can feel that soft squishiness with how they move. The movement has a really warm and cozy feel, like you just want to reach into the screen and hug them yourself. It gives the animation a lot of texture, with all the fabric folds and fluffiness of the arm swinging, bowing, and dancing. Even a scene of Ann just standing there will have her pushing her hair shyly away from her face, trying to be welcoming in her excitement but reserved at the same time, or patting down and playing with her apron. So much to say about her personality through just standing there.

"I Never Get Enough" from Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure.

This film needed the aid of two different animation teams to bring this “eye candy” to life, one in New York and in California respectively. Richard Williams was desperately trying to sell people on the movie having a sort of tried & true dynamic storybook artstyle as opposed to just looking like it was manufactured in a Disney lab. Now you have to remember that remote work was different in the Dark Ages. Nobody had access to Zoom or TikTok, so whatever communication existed between the two studios, it was like they were sending over faxes and messages in bottles like they were in the 16th century. So Williams took routine trips back and forth to New York and California like the Taylor Swift of the animation world he was to make sure things were going according to plan. The end result was a full and complete execution of his artstyle’s vision. The misty springtime color palette of the nursery, followed by the incredible shots of the forest, to the imposing insanity of Looney Land. And the entire scene with the Greedy? It might be some of the smoothest animation I’ve ever seen. The Greedy's body positioning is constantly changing into new creative shapes so smoothly; it’s almost like this entire sequence is a surrealist art project. Every time I watch it, I notice something different and it never feels distracting. It feels like the best, sugar-induced nightmare ever; the whole tipsy scene is full of uncanny yet sincere energy drenched in wine and caramel. 

Even the credits are incredibly animated. It’s typical for older animated movies to credit animators for individual characters, but during the opening credits scrawl and preferring to credit the animators over the voice actors first is fantastic. The late Tissa David animated Raggedy Ann herself, who actually became one of the first women to animate a leading character in a major film. She was best known for her animations for The Electric Company. She and the other character animators did phenomenal jobs on bringing these characters to life in a perfect balance of the realistic and the fantastical. I could look at this movie for hours and get lost in a maze of wonders. It’s simply f-ANN-tastic. …Get it? LAUGH!

Anyway, this movie is obviously beautiful, but there’s one part I neglected to mention: the music. I will say that this movie is a mixed-bag when it comes to songs. One of the movie’s main criticisms when it came out was that there were too many songs; a whopping total of 16 songs. And I agree for the most part, even as someone who adores musical theater. I wouldn’t mind the abundance of songs if they were all high-quality or progressed the plot meaningfully. One of my favorite movies is The Nightmare Before Christmas, which is an amazing example of using an abundance of songs to make a great musical story. The problem is that, while I will be praising a lot of the amazing songs in this movie, there’s also a chunk of the songs that just aren’t good. 

I can hear your complaints now: "We get it, woman. You think the movie looks better than the Mona Lisa. You’re so based and red-pilled. Yes, the movie’s art is a visual standout. Go figure, but this soundtrack is the kind of music I’d expect to hear as I’m interrogated in a BDSM dungeon. Now, as someone who considers himself a true alpha male specimen on and off stage… I AT LEAST KNOW WHEN TO SHUT UP! This isn’t Broadway, you CAN’T have over 16 songs in a movie about talking dolls in a movie that looks like an LSD trip! About 80% are asinine anyways, either sounding more grating than the end results of my cheese platter, with the 20% being actually decent tracks. And then they immediately gave up the moment they realized they were getting paid by the word!"

But despite my presumed assumptions of your opinions, I do think this movie a solid musical overall, but the music quality deteriorates as the movie goes on. The best songs are saved for the first hour or so of the movie, and the majority of the songs around the final stretch are forgettable and unpleasant. I’ll talk about each song individually as they come. The songs in this musical were written by Joe Raposo, who did several songs for Jim Henson projects such as Sesame Street and The Muppets. He’s actually the man responsible for Kermit's iconic song “Bein' Green”. And you can definitely feel that style when you listen closely to the movie’s melodies.

You can watch the full movie on YouTube, provided above. You can watch the movie before or after you read this review! But know the movie is available for free online on various websites.

But enough of me gushing over the visuals and music, right now we got to get to the real chocolate filling of this cupcake: the absolutely bonkers story. Next time in the world of Your Clairy Godmother.