Things to Look for in Raggedy Ann & Andy

There's a lot of stuff going on in the 1977 fascinatingly bizarre children's film "Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure." Here's some things to look for....

*Live-action segments starring director Richard Williams' daughter as Marcella. Yep, nepotism exists in children's movies.

*Cool opening credits sequence. Each animator is given credit for the character they worked on. Very unusual.

*The Penny Twins. Clearly this matching pair of dolls who talk and move in unison were intended to be cute and precocious, but they're downright creepy.

*Cloth rag dolls. Unlike the TV series this film spawned, the animators made you believe these were boneless toys. Today they write code to convincingly animate cloth... but to do it entirely by hand is impressive.

*"I'm No Girl's Toy." Raggedy Andy's anthem is without question the film's one big showstopper, and clearly director Richard Williams knew that, as he animated it himself.

*Babette. First you see an ugly porcelain doll. Then you're introduced to her pretty -- but obnoxiously whiny -- animated counterpart. When next we see her, she's a slutty dominatrix cavorting with pirates. Talk about a character arc.

*"Rag Dolly." Kind of a catchy song sung by "Grease'"'s Didi Conn (Frenchy) as Raggedy Ann, but there's one big thing to watch for here... In an overly ambitious shot, the "camera" pans over and around the dancing dolls in the playroom. The problem is that the floorboards are long wooden slats that appear wobbly as the perspective shifts. It's almost nauseating in widescreen.

*"Poor Babette." There's wa-aaay too many songs in this movie, but this one stops the film dead. And annoyingly, Babette's rousing song "Hooray for Me," which she sings later, is abridged and barely heard.

*The Captain. When the Captain of a ship in a bottle spies the busty Babette, his mustache gets a boner and he begins frantically gyrating his pelvis as he sings. Yes, this is a movie aimed at kids.

*The Cuckoo Clock. As in "Rag Dolly," they attempted a dizzying shot of the Chuck Jones-esque Cuckoo Clock hoisting Raggedy Ann into the air. Unlike the earlier sequence, this one almost worked.

*A gravity-defying escape. As the pirates flee the nursery, their ship is paddled up the wall, out the window, and down the outside wall of the house. From here on in, rules no longer apply.

*An overly-familiar plot once the movie actually gets started. It's fun and games in the playroom, then suddenly the leads are off on an adventure to find their friends. Even Pixar isn't above stealing stories.

*"Candy Hearts and Paper Flowers." This is a beautiful scene.... but it gets creepy when the siblings gaze a bit too lovingly into one another's eyes. Implied incest in a children's movie.

*The camel with the wrinkled knees (and humps!). I thought Art Babbit's character was loveable when I was a kid, but from an adult perspective, I have to wonder what they were smoking. Once a beloved toy who was tossed away in the garbage, the camel has seemingly become a paranoid schizophrenic who hallucinates hoards of floating camels in the sky. Emo before the word was coined, he's also seemingly-suicidally "Blue." But the most perplexing characteristic of this character is his uncanny resemblance to genitalia. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Talk about blue balls...

*The Greedy. The Greedy is a gelatinous monster who resides in the taffy pit and spends all of his time indulging in sweets. Seemingly as one with the taffy pit, The Greedy is able to morph and contort at will. And since he's part of the taffy that he's eating, I suppose we also have self-cannibalism in a children's film. But the attention to detail in this sequence is astounding! As the camera zooms around the floating Raggedys, Camel and Greedy, it's like all the wonders of LSD without any of the nasty side-effects....

*King Koo-Koo. This little king with a Napoleon Complex finds that parts of his body literally balloon and swell when he laughs... but he can't keep them inflated. Insert any one of countless Freudian jokes here.

*The black-and-white sequence. Yes, when arriving in Looney Land, our heroes fall into a Fleischer cartoon and are only able to speak in sound effects. This bizarre sequence is visually dazzling, and the staircase sequence was recycled in Richard Williams' would-be masterpiece "The Thief and the Cobbler."