![]() ![]() Immediately after escaping the Taffy Pit, our heroes enter Looney Land (because sure). But no, we have one more hellspawn to meet. Yes, it’s a lesson to children not to stuff themselves with bad foods, and I have to assume no child who saw it ate anything sugary for the next year.With the Greedy vanquished, I figured I’d be coasting on the movie’s final 20 minutes with another 800 songs and be done with it. #RAGGEDY ANN AND ANDY FULL#The sequence lasts a full 10 minutes and it never gets less like something Jerry Garcia saw every day of his life. It’s deeply upsetting, and was absolutely the cause of some sleepless nights for ol’ child Kyle, not least because it refuses to let our heroes leave and instead want to eat them (of course). And forming out of the goo comes a terrifying monstrosity known as “The Greedy.” The Greedy is a constantly pulsating, undulating, amorphous blob of sticky confection that perpetually EATS ITSELF and all the randomly appearing candy and cakes that pop up fully formed from inside its gesticulating mass. Ann, Andy, and the Camel all fall into a pit full of yellow-orange goo. Yes, I know it’s “a musical adventure,” but still.But then. Fine musical theatre songs all, but this may as well be an opera for all the singing. I guess I never realized the camel longed for death when I was a kid, but he hallucinates ghost camels in the clouds and wants to follow them.All right, so even at this point, it’s not necessarily “scary,” and actually I was getting kind of tired of all the singing. They meet a discarded camel toy (called the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees) who becomes their friend, but constantly wants to join his kind in the sky. ![]() It’s up to Ann and Andy to save her, so they head out into the big world of outside, with no idea where to go. Maxi-Fixit, a “toy” of an old man who rolls around and has actual sharp tools in his head (what?) cuts the glass of the globe and the Captain sails out, only to capture Babette and take her out through the window. A pirate captain who lives in a snow globe on Marcella’s shelf spies Babette from afar and pleads with the other toys to be let out to see her up close. #RAGGEDY ANN AND ANDY MOVIE#The plot on the outset is actually pretty close to Toy Story: a child (a girl named Marcella) gets a new toy for her birthday (a real French doll named Babette), the doll longs to go back to Paris, and Raggedy Ann and Andy sing songs about what it’s like to be friends or whatever.But then the movie takes a turn. Sure, the animation style was squiggly and exaggerated, but it’s just toys in a girl’s toy room coming to life and singing. What was so scary to me? While watching it this week, as a 34-year-old who has seen upwards of six billion actual horror movies in his life, I thought for the first 40 minutes (of 85) that my childhood wimpiness was showing. So, okay, it all stacks up to be pretty wholesome in retrospect. ![]() The songs in the film were all written by Joe Raposo, who penned the most memorable songs from Sesame Street, including “Bein’ Green,” “C Is for Cookie,” and the Sesame Street theme itself. ![]() I obviously had no frame of reference at the time, but the movie was directed by animation legend Richard Williams, perhaps best known as the animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and infamously the troubled production that was The Thief and the Cobbler.His Raggedy Ann and Andy movie was a celebration of animation itself, and the film’s opening credits don’t tell us who voices the characters but which animators worked on each character. I wasn’t alive in 1977 when this movie was released, and in fact I probably didn’t see it until 1988 or ’89 when my grandma taped it off of PBS. New York children in the ’70s were possibly the post precocious. ![]()
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