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. 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.

Raggedy ann and andy story