Ugh!

I remember when this movie came out. It was supposed to be an attempt to compete with Disney by having top-notch experienced "Golden Age" animators contribute to an animated feature supervised by Oscar-winning animator Richard Williams (he won for "A Christmas Carol" and also created the titles for the "Pink Panther").

I rushed down to NYC and the Guild movie theater on 51st street (part of Rockefeller Center). There had been a lot of hype about the opening but when I got to the theater, the only evidence that the movie was being hyped were two gi-normous Raggedy Dolls - Ann and Andy - positioned above the movie screen.

Then I saw the movie.

What a trainwreck! Some of the animation was terribly sloppy, more than a few characters were obnoxious. Most of the songs were horrible/forgettable. I particularly found the color styling deficient: the scene with King KooKoo is in garish yellow and red.

Then I bought the book on the making of the movie, written by John Canemaker. In it, many details came out which explained the deficiencies in the movie (Williams apparently was ineffective at coordinating the animation, the Pirate Captain bore an uncanny resemblance to Yosemite Sam because he was animated by the same guy who animated Yosemite Sam, the actress playing Raggedy Ann's owner, "Marcella," was terrible - they ended up dubbing her voice - but she had been cast in the part because she was Williams' daughter, etc.).

Joe Raposo is quoted in the book as saying he wrote the score but couldn't imagine it as some live-action Broadway musical with an actress in a fright wig passing for Raggedy Ann. And yet that's exactly what happened when this movie was later translated into a Broadway musical in the mid-80s!

In the Canemaker book, much was made of the fact that Richard Williams was hard at work on his own animated feature "The Thief and the Cobbler." Supposedly, it was going to be more intricately animated than anything Disney ever produced. ("Thief" finally came out many years later, in the 1990s, and it certainly did feature many intricately-detailed sequences, but the story was for sh*t and it was obvious too much time had been spent on detail with little regard of how everything was supposed to fit together - or even be appealing).

The year of "Raggedy Ann"s release, Disney's "The Rescuers" came out - confirming how the Disney machine was insurmountable when it came to animated features.

"Don't call me 'honey', mac."
"Don't call me 'mac'... HONEY!"