Raggedy Ann and Andy in The Great Santa Claus Caper (1978)

              It took me 29 seconds to recognize this as a Chuck Jones production, and frankly that’s about fourteen seconds longer than it should have, those are some distinctive smoke trails on screen a quarter minute in.  The thing about Chuck Jones productions is that if you’re going to find fault with them it’s not going to be anything technical or aesthetic, the man was a legend in animation and anything with his name on it was quality.  His comedic skills were always superb, you may not find individual jokes funny but you can’t argue with their construction or timing.  The whipsaw I got going from that last barely-a-cartoon to this fully-realized piece of corporate synergy was sudden and severe.  But as professional as it was little things kept bugging me over the course of the special.  I have no proof of this, and I admit the idea is a stretch, but this entire special comes off to me as a very cynical fuck-you from Chuck Jones to the entire idea behind such branded for-hire cartoons.  It might be the only sarcastic Christmas special in existence.

              I can’t really bring myself to believe that, though.  By this point in his career Chuck Jones had been kicking around the industry for going on forty-five years.  He’d worked himself up from starting as an assistant animator to having movie studios build entire departments around him.  He’d headed animation at Warner Brothers, MGM, had put his distinctive stamp on the Looney Tunes characters and Tom and Jerry, had struck out on his own and made such stone-cold classics as ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas.’  By 1978 he was still relatively young at sixty-six but all of his major works were behind him.  He would still be active and continued to direct shorts or animated segments until his death in 2002 at the age of eighty-nine, but this was one of his last full-length productions.  I honestly don’t think that after almost a half-century of creativity he’d want to go out on a deliberately sour note.  And yet ….

              Other than Chuck Jones’ involvement the big thing of note here is the original property itself, namely Raggedy Ann and to a much lesser extent Raggedy Andy.  Technically three years younger than Mr. Jones, Raggedy Ann began as a book written by Johnny Gruelle in 1915.  His stroke of marketing genius was to package the book with a Raggedy Ann doll, and five years later with a Raggedy Andy one.  There were other characters over the years, including Camel with the Wrinkled Knees, their dog Raggedy Arthur, which was actually created by Chuck Jones and originated in this very cartoon, and Beloved Belindy, who you don’t hear much about anymore for … reasons.  The doll has remained popular over the years, selling millions of copies. 

              The impetus for this special was clearly spillover from the previous year’s theatrical film ‘Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure,’ directed by ‘A Christmas Carol’ helmer Richard Williams, who we will see again.  The movie was an attempt by The Bobbs-Merrill Company, the rights-holder of Raggedy Ann, to capitalize on their intellectual property.  That movie was not a success and hasn’t been released on home media since the late 80’s, although thanks to the miracle of modern technology a digitized scan of the 35mm print is up in full on YouTube.  Despite the movie’s financial failure the profile of the doll had been raised enough to justify some television specials the following years.  In addition to this one there’s a Halloween special, ‘Raggedy Ann and Andy in The Pumpkin Who Couldn't Smile,’ which was released in 1979 and also written and directed by Jones.  There would be a cartoon show in the late 80’s as well as a few more attempts at various theatrical and home video releases over the next few decades.

              Oddly enough there could have been a real resurgence in popularity in 2014 if the makers of the movie ‘Annabelle’ had been more historically accurate and kept the supposedly possessed doll a Raggedy Ann doll, as it had been in real life.

              What got me thinking that maybe, just maybe, this special was some kind of reaction against the cynical exploitation of IP, of taking some existing property and twisting it into a holiday shape to get some eyes on commercials, is just how badly this special is paced and put together.  Plot is hardly the most essential thing in a cartoon special but it’s fairly astonishing how little happens in this thing.  Here are the events, in their entirety: the antagonist, Alexander Graham Wolf, introduces himself to the audience, tells us he’s going to go take over Santa’s workshop, Comet the reindeer hears this and gets Raggedy Ann and Andy to help stop him, the two of them arrive at the workshop and see the machine Wolf has built to encase all of the toys in unbreakable plastic, Andy sets the machine to encase Wolf, they discover that love can break the plastic so get the audience to shout at their tv screens to do so, Wolf is freed and has a change of heart, they cause the machine to delete itself and leave before Santa notices anything, the end.

              A good third of the runtime of this cartoon is just expository dialogue.  Wolf tells us what he’s going to do, Comet tells us she’s going to get Raggedy Ann and Andy, she then tells them what’s going on, Wolf tells Ann and Andy his plans, they tell him it’s a bad idea, you get the idea.  The audience never gets a chance to figure anything out for themselves.  This from the man who made so many Roadrunner cartoons without a word of dialogue.

              This is what first made me suspect that this was a cynical enterprise: it’s a lot harder to convey plot and character through action in a cartoon than it is through dialogue and Chuck Jones doesn’t even seem to try.  The plot is not so complicated that it couldn’t have been conveyed artistically.  We could see Wolf wordlessly barreling towards the North Pole, his jaw set, a slow pan across his massive rocket sled displaying his technological know-how, Comet could have frantically searched through town before coming across Raggedy Ann and Andy and begged them for help out of sheer desperation, instead of simply having Wolf explain his plans to them Ann and Andy could have crept around the workshop piecing it together, these are not complicated ideas.  The problem is that this is much harder to do than just having characters on either side of the screen talk to each other and explain what’s going on. 

              It’s already bad enough when Wolf explains himself to the camera right at the start, but there’s something close to cheating about having Comet learn of his dastardly plans because she overhears him breaking the fourth wall.  Except it’s even worse than that because when she’s explaining his plans several scenes later she knows details he didn’t say anything about.  This is kind of breaking the fourth wall by proxy, when characters know story details they otherwise couldn’t because it’s convenient for the plot.  This in-universe acknowledgment that they inhabit fiction comes up again later when Ann and Andy address the audience at home in order to foil Wolf’s evil plans, but at that point if you’re going to break the fourth wall that often why are you bothering to pretend there’s an actual story?  The plot kicks off with a fourth-wall break and another one resolves it, that’s hardly trying at all.  Most stories with self-aware characters limit it to every once in a while so audiences let their suspension of disbelief kick back in and let themselves forget it’s all make-believe, this special is constantly reminding them.

              After magically learning about Wolf’s plans Comet runs off to get help, loudly working through a train of logic for the audience’s benefit that the only people who can help her are Raggedy Ann and Andy.  Her reasoning is not sound but the implication is that their names are in the title so shut up.  She shows up outside their window and wakes them up.  They immediately recognize her by name and you’d think this would set up some kind of backstory we’d then find out about, how Santa and Ann go way back and this isn’t their first adventure together, but in the next scene they explain to each other their mythologies, how Raggedy Ann and Andy can only talk when humans aren’t around and how reindeers can only fly when everyone is asleep, so no, it’s just for convenience.  They all know each other so the special doesn’t have to waste time justifying why these two got picked for the mission.

              Alexander Graham Wolf’s plan is fine so far as it goes: during his introduction he claims to be an efficiency expert and his justification for encasing all of Santa’s toys in a propriety plastic called Gloopstick is so they’ll last forever and never need to be replaced, which makes a kind of sense if you squint at it really hard, but this will also allow him to charge the children money for the toys.  Somehow.  After they’ve already been given to them.  They breeze past this very quickly because it doesn’t even make cartoon sense. 

              All of this lead me to wondering if Chuck Jones was getting it deliberately wrong, because these are just basic, fatal flaws for a Christmas cartoon.  You don’t establish peril by having the antagonist turn to the camera and bluntly state the nature of the peril.  Either he was doing it on purpose or he was suddenly drained of his decades of cartoon expertise.  Where it gets genuinely bad is during the climax.  Raggedy Arthur gets sealed in the plastic and by telling him they’ll still love him no matter what Ann and Andy find that love dissolves the plastic.  That’s par for the holiday cartoon course, I have no problem with this.  After bringing up Tinkerbell by name and explaining the whole ‘clap your hands to bring her back to life’ deal Ann turns to the camera and implores the audience to fix the situation with love.  In addition to being a completely lazy cop-out the way she does this is all wrong.  She asks the camera the question, “Do you want all your presents sealed in Gloopstick?”  So our demonstration of the power of love, what frees the toys and foils the evil plan, is a bunch of adults shouting “No!” over and over again.

              They wrap things up at the end as quickly as possible.  Wolf is good now for reasons they don’t even attempt to give, the Gloopstick machine has a self-destruct button that causes it to eat itself in what I admit is a nifty bit of animation, the dolls and Wolf stride merrily south from the North Pole into the arctic wilderness with no means of transportation, and Comet joins the rest of the reindeer as Santa takes off overhead, cracking a very long and very loud whip as he does so in a way that other cartoon specials have rather carefully omitted.

              I will say that the animation and production is top-notch, nobody can complain about that.  The previous year’s film was obviously much higher-budgeted and looks it but I have to say Jones’ designs for the dolls are a lot more approachable and would influence their portrayals for years to come.  My theory can’t be true, nothing in Jones’ history supports it.  I guess looking back on his filmography that while he did write plenty of his own directorial efforts most of the real classics were written by others.  It wouldn’t be the first time that a great director was undone by trying to write their own material.  It’s certainly not a bad special but Raggedy Ann and Andy are hardly characters for the ages and what fun there is to be had in this special is around the margins, where Jones can stuff in some of his trademark cartoon business.  It’s worth seeing once out of curiosity but it’s hardly a forgotten gem.