I sometimes wonder whether I would like the holiday specials I have watched since I was little, and which I still cherish, had I not been introduced to them at an early age. I think The Grinch Who Stole Christmas would stand the test, as the humor feels a bit more oriented towards adults. It drives a knife in my heart to say so, but I suspect A Charlie Brown Christmas wouldn’t have much of a pull. The real wildcard is Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. The Rankin/Bass classic has quirky humor, and adorably choppy stop-motion animation, but I doubt it would be very endearing.
An indication of how I might react to it is how I perceived 1966’s The Daydreamer in my first viewing of it recently. Although I have probably seen almost every one of the Rankin/Bass animated specials though, if I watched Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July, it has (perhaps wisely) been purged from my memory.
But I never knew until recently they had also done full length films, the second of which is this portmanteau of Hans Christian Anderson tales. There is no connective tissue between the Anderson tales (hope I didn’t dash your hopes for a HCA cinematic universe), so the stop-motion presentation of those are wrapped around by live-action of footage of some blond kid (Paul O’Keefe) trying to find the Garden of Paradise.
His cobbler father (Jack Gilford) put the foolish notion in his head as a distraction from their poverty. It is another night of gruel at the house where the mice eat better than them. As dad puts it, “They’re better at being mice than I am at being a shoemaker.”
O’Keefe asks why dad just doesn’t sell his mom’s wedding ring Gilford wears around his neck. This led me to believe the matriarch was dead but, no, she’s just apparently out of town…without her wedding ring. Um, might this help explain why a very Jewish cobbler has a tow-headed, blue-eyed kid who could model for an Aryan Youth recruitment poster?
Also, I’ve been hearing more and more about how businesses should try to lose their most problematic customers. With that in mind, Gilford could probably do more business if he could run off Margaret Hamilton, even if she seems to be the only person currently using his services. In a weird mini Wizard of Oz reunion, Ray Bolger is the frankly annoying pie salesman who dances all around the town, almost literally putting his goods in the faces of anybody too close to him.
His song annoyed me, but then so did the a song from Gilford, the song Halley Mills sings as a mermaid, the title song sung by Robert Goulet, and the number Patty Duke does as Thumbelina. The worst of the lot is a spotlight tune for O’Keefe I’m assuming is called “Does Anybody Have Some Luck To Spare?” It wasn’t just the title that brought to my mind the hilariously bad song from The Simpsons titled “Can I Borrow A Feeling?”
Before you (correctly) determine I am a humorless monster incapable of joy, I’d like to single out the one song and scene I did like. This takes place in the insect, bat and invertebrate infested underground home of a mole. Three bats sing the number “Isn’t It Cozy?”, which is like a “12 Days Of Christmas”, but counting down groups of creepy crawly things. It would have worked perfectly in The Nightmare Before Christmas.
One aspect of the film I appreciated whenever it was employed is the animation. It does not even strive for realism, and I like that. Especially interesting to me are moments involving water. If something is underwater, everything is simply shot through a wavy filter. But moments where figures are in water and their heads are just above the surface had me realize the animators probably only sculpted the part of the head we see, and they’re just moving that tiny bit of a figure with each frame. It was simply something I never considered before. Another water element I liked was a waterfall, which was obviously just sheets of clear plastic moved slightly with each frame.
Typical of this kind of thing, there are a great many name actors providing voices. In addition to those already mentioned, there’s Tallulah Bankhead, Victor Borge, Sessue Hayakawa, Burl Ives, Boris Karloff, Terry-Thomas and Ed Wynn. All of them appear as Al Hirschfeld caricatures in the closing credits. And, speaking of the credits, there was a curious one for “Emperor’s Clothes by…”, which I wasn’t certain was a joke.
I wasn’t swept away by The Daydreamer, though there were aspects of it I could appreciate. If nothing else, it is a curious exploration of a certain zeitgeist, where characters wonder around ye olde European village while wearing primary-colored clothes. If there’s one thing I would have changed about the film would be to have the protagonist be more interesting. I think Satan made an astute assessment of O’Keefe in the last animated segment when he says, “You’re not very bright, are you?”
Dir: Jules Bass
Starring…OK, look, I’m not going to list all those names again
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray