Tag Archives: Children’s Film

60*. RAGGEDY ANN & ANDY: A MUSICAL ADVENTURE (1977)

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“This is really weird.”–Raggedy Andy, when a camel asks him to climb on and join him as he chases an invisible caravan in the sky

DIRECTED BY: Richard Williams

FEATURING: Claire Williams, voices of Didi Conn, Mark Baker, Fred Stuthman, Niki Flacks, George S. Irving, Marty Brill, Joe Silver, Alan Sues

PLOT: On her owner’s birthday, Raggedy Ann and her brother Andy meet Babette, a snobbish new doll from France. Babette is quickly abducted by snowglobe pirate Captain Contagious. Ann and Andy venture out into the night, where they encounter a camel, a taffy pit, and an inflatable Loony king, before finally confronting the pirate ship.

Still from Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977)

BACKGROUND:

  • Raggedy Ann began her life as a mass-produced rag doll in 1915. A series of children’s books based on the character followed in the 1920s, continuing until the 1970s. Fleischer Brothers studios made three animated Raggedy Ann and Andy shorts in the 1940s. The dolls are still produced today.
  • This feature film was loosely adapted from the 1924 children’s book “Raggedy Ann and Andy and the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees.
  • Director Richard Williams took over for originally-slated director Abe Levitow, who died before production began.
  • The adaptation was originally conceived as a Broadway musical, then a TV special, before becoming a feature film. An actual Broadway musical with many of the same characters (but a different plot) followed in 1986.
  • The film ended up costing more than double its original budget, and was a box office failure. It was released on VHS, but has never officially been released on DVD or Blu-ray.
  • Voted onto the Apocrypha by readers in this poll.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The Greedy, an inexplicable being who inhabits the Taffy Pit and exists as a sort of candy-themed, eternally mutating ian horror-cum-cupcake.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Ghost camel caravan in the sky; expanding looney king

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Raggedy Ann was a hobo doll, the cheapest and most unassuming children’s toy imaginable. Throwing this plain Jane toy into a backyard “Alice in Wonderland” scenario shouldn’t have produced results as odd as it did. A Musical Adventure is uneven, but in its insaner moments, it genuinely goes for broke.

Original trailer for Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977)

COMMENTS: “Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all Continue reading 60*. RAGGEDY ANN & ANDY: A MUSICAL ADVENTURE (1977)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FELIX THE CAT: THE MOVIE (1988)

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DIRECTED BY: Tibor Hernádi

FEATURING THE VOICES OF: David Kolin, Chris Phillips, Maureen O’Connell, Peter Newman, Alice Playten

PLOT: When Princess Oriana is kidnapped by the sinister Duke of Zill, only Felix the Cat and his magical bag of tricks can save the day—so long as his arch-frenemy The Professor doesn’t interfere.

COMMENTS: It’s fun to imagine a Sunset Boulevard scenario wherein Felix the Cat hearkens back to better times, angrily reminding anyone who will listen that, back in his heyday, he was bigger than Mickey Mouse. He’d go on about how he moved so much merchandise in the silent era, but faltered when talkies came in. How he got his groove back when television snapped him up, jump-starting his career with a voice, new supporting characters, the introduction of his iconic bag of tricks, and an insidiously infectious theme song. How the lack of a deep-pocketed studio to protect him and dust him off every so often (like that infernal mouse had) left him floundering, and how his chief animator and owner of his copyright, Joe Oriolo (and later Joe’s son Don), struggled to keep Felix in the game with ever-growing levels of desperation, including a bizarre misguided attempt at a live-action series and even a Baby Felix cartoon made exclusively for Japanese television. And here’s where Felix would ball up his fist and pound it on the table, lamenting that if anyone knows him at all today, it’s as a clock.

Maybe that can be the scenario for Felix’s next feature. For now, we’re stuck with this one, probably his thirstiest bid at a revival. Felix is a simple character, a monochromatic feline with a classic stretch-and-squash movement and a seeming immunity to misfortune. But to wring 80 minutes out of him, it’s essential to complicate, complicate, complicate, first with a prologue presenting a proto-CG version of Felix’s disembodied head, then by launching an elaborate plot to save a fairy-tale kingdom from an evil overlord, with a panoply of odd characters including a heavily rotoscoped princess, a gun-toting yokel, a host of psychedelic wildlife, and an army of robot trash cans led by what appears to be an ape with a bubble for a head.

The animation, from Hungary’s Pannonia Studio, is wildly erratic, veering from elaborately detailed landscapes and imaginative creature designs to obvious looped animations and jumpy movement. Case in point: Princess Oriana is sometimes shown in the kind of fine detail one associates with the Disney Renaissance, but then is seen in a herky-jerky, poorly drawn style one associates with direct-to-truck-stop mockbusters. But even at its best, the animators’ work is undercut by a script that spends inordinate amounts of time on exposition and setup, forcing the artists to vamp to fill time. In fact, Felix the Movie is almost allergic to anything that stays focused on the plot. The vile Duke is supposedly seeking to conquer the kingdom as revenge against the Princess, but instead of showing us his schemes, we watch him make her do interpretive dance. Numerous scenes are dedicated solely to watching one cartoon beast or another go about their business, even while we’re aware of an impending danger happening somewhere way offscreen. Even the musical numbers seem completely separate from the proceedings, such as a showcase for a family of foxes who have nothing to do with anything, or an extended dance break for a pair of rat/lizard hybrids. (This latter sequence lasts for more than two minutes, almost 3% of the film’s runtime.)

Adding to the muddle is the decision to include two of Felix’s foes from the TV series, the nefarious Professor and his hyper-nerdy nephew Poindexter. They have the potential to throw another obstacle in Felix’s path, but they spend most of the film trailing behind their quarry and end up helping once they finally catch up. One presumes they represent the movie’s attempt to cater to Felix nostalgists, but they’re meaningless to the young, adventure-hungry kids who are the most likely audience for this kind of thing. The movie aims for everyone and hits no one.

Given how uninterested it is in anything logical and linear, it’s fitting that the movie just sort of stops, with Felix saving the day by throwing a book at a giant robot. (That’s literally the whole solution. Deus ex libro. He doesn’t even use the bag of tricks.) Felix the Cat: The Movie should have been a chance for the once-famous feline to get his groove back, but the film never finds a way to let him be the hero he once was, and it doesn’t have a solid idea of what it wants to do instead. So somebody buy the old guy another drink and let him rant and rave about his cruel fate. He deserves another shot at the big time, and this ain’t it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The original Felix cartoons were always surreal in some way, but not in a studied manner, more of an organic, natural development out of the character’s quirks and goodnatured ingenuity. Here, however, there is an attempt to plonk him down into a world that is already weird, almost a post-apocalyptic version of a fairytale land that suffers too many digressions into strangeness for its own sake without furthering the plot… You can see it entertaining the very young who are not aware of Felix’s history, but as a tribute to him it falls flat when it really could have been any generic character starring here: he doesn’t even take off his tail and use it as a cane.” Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image

(This movie was nominated for review by Jayzon. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LILAC BALL (1987)

Лиловый шар

Liloviy shar, AKA Purple Ball

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DIRECTED BY: Pavel Arsenov

FEATURING: Natalya Guseva, Vyacheslav Nevinnyy, Vyacheslav Baranov, Boris Shcherbakov

PLOT: In the year 2087, a research spacecraft discovers the wreck of “The Dark Wanderer,” a legendary doomed ship containing mysterious purple spheres.

COMMENTS: Enmity is nasty business, and were it not for one plucky little girl, the future of mankind would fall to self-destruction. So we learn in Arsenov’s science-fiction/fantasy outing, Lilac Ball. It covers a span in time from a century into mankind’s future—when computerized intelligence facilitates deep-space exploration—to the ancient past, the time of Legends, wherein man and myth coexisted (if not in harmony, then at least side by side). In those days, myriad dangers arose for the common peasant by way of the dark sorcery of Baba Yaga and her three sons.

Events kick off in grand future style. Captain Green, the commander of the Pegasus who speaks nearly as mechanically as the ship’s computer, is tasked with escorting Professor Seleznyov and his daughter Alice to a research vacation. All of a sudden, the ship’s sensors detect an anomaly: a craft too large and too strange to be found in the database. Behold, it is The Dark Wanderer, and its floating ruins contain dispiriting records of the crew’s fate, a fair number of vitreous spheres, and the lovable four-armed archaeologist, Gromozeka. The spheres contain a horrible doom, but little Alice knows just where on Earth to find the purple ball secreted—thousands of years in the past—by the Dark Wanderer’s crew to destroy humankind at just the right time.

This movie is not without its charm, and its seventy-odd-minutes breeze by on the winds of adventure and whimsy. The first act, very much typical science fiction, is well executed; the filmmakers push their skills and budget to the limit. The Pegasus’ interior design is refreshingly dissimilar from most outings of the genre, with an open-plan cockpit/convening area (tea is served often) featuring computer consoles, greenery, short staircases, and a central table for four. Zipping back thousands of years into the past—I had had no inkling of a time machine until Alice mentions it for the purposes of returning to the “Era of Legends”—is rather less satisfying, albeit involving some endearing puppetry. (The baby roc is cute—and wholly undeserving of its fate at the hands of the Wanderer’s evil crew.)

Arsenov appears to aim for an all-the-young-adult-adventure-tropes experience, but his reach, alas, exceeds his grasp. Still, it is impossible to feel hostile toward such winsome narrative meanderings of future and past.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Curious mash-up of fantasy and science-fiction from the Soviet Union…  a strange mixture of mythologies, to be sure; part Sinbad, part fairytale, part Wizard of Oz. All in a film whose first act was straight science-fiction! There’s nothing wrong with blending genres, of course, but it’s a tricky business, and the disconnect between the two aspects of the story here is a little jarring, to say the least.” — Mark David Welsh

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan after seeing some clips and remarking that they “resemble something that AI watched in its early stages and picked up on.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

 

FANTASIA 2024: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SUNBURNT UNICORN (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Nick Johnson

FEATURING: The voices of Diana Kaarina, Kathleen Barr, Laara Sadiq, Brian Drummond, Tabitha St. Germain

PLOT: After a car crash, teenager Frankie searches the desert for his father, who has been abducted by the Cactus King.

Still from Sunburnt Unicorn (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: An unlikely candidate, Sunburnt Unicorn is, objectively, a children’s adventure ‘toon with broad humor and a simple structure. However, it is also objectively a movie about a kid wandering the desert with a glass shard sticking out from his forehead being guided by a tortoise whose rear half has been crushed by a car.

COMMENTS: Every festival, I make it a point to see as many cartoons as scheduling allows. This is not just because I enjoy bright colors and moving objects (that said, I do much enjoy bright colors and moving objects), but also because I’m on the hunt for weird movies with a broader age appeal than, say, El TopoTetsuo: the Iron Man, or The Devils. So it is with a missionary’s—or pusher’s—”get ’em while they’re young” zeal that I seek out kid-friendly weirdo cinema. Nick Johnson’s Sunburnt Unicorn is just such a film, appealing to, judging from the audience, middle-schoolers and middle-aged reviewers alike.

First, the wholesome part. Frankie is on a road trip with his dad, who has insisted the pair of them visit the engineering college that the patriarch (and patriarch’s patriarch) graduated from—no doubt with honors. Frankie, aged somewhere in his early teens, wants nothing to do with this serious, analytical nonsense, and instead wants to pursue a career in writing. The two argue under the withering glow of the hot sun and the uninterested gaze of a insect-seeking lizard. Brakes peal, then smashcrackbang, and so begins Frankie’s exposure to the outdoors, where he undergoes challenges, earns opportunities for growth, and shares humorous banter with various animals, in particular a helpful tortoise who witnesses the car crash.

Now, the weird part. This tortoise witnessed the accident because it risked crossing the desert road, and paid for it by losing the back half of its body. From the moment we meet it, Tortoise moves, observes, and pontificates with good-natured wisdom; all the while, its jelly-pink organs dangle from its behind. During stretches of travel and talk you forget this strange state of affairs, only to be smirkfully reminded by a change of the camera angle. The reason this tortoise, and many other animals—including a trio of, heh heh, self-sacrificing desert fox cubs—aid Frankie is that every animal-jack of them believes him to be a unicorn. If memory serves, the first time we see the boy is after the crash, and a glorious, jagged shard of cracked windscreen thrusts nobly from his forehead throughout. It has its effects, and even a super power. Though it pains him greatly, he can flick it to emit a resonant and useful twing.

And so, sitting there in a cinema, having nabbed this strange beast, I was swept away by the easy flow, quality lessons, and omnipresent grisliness whenever it caught my attention that Sunburnt Unicorn tells the story of two critically injured creatures. This is by no means the weirdest thing under the sun, and there are “family friendlier” films out there, but I am delighted to have experienced Johnson’s fun little ‘toon; it hits a cozy point where conflicting genres intersect.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Gently shaken by this immediate tone and dark storytelling, the audience braces itself for whatever’s next because Sunburnt Unicorn isn’t shying away from the realities of the scenario, even if it’s about to go in a more surreal direction… It was jarring to see an animated film that looked suitable for children in both color temperature and light become so morbidly bleak that quickly.”–Sean Park, 25 Years Later (festival screening)