In 1918, writer and artist Johnny Gruelle wrote a children’s book about a little doll that would become a big deal. It was called Raggedy Ann Stories. A doll was produced and marketed alongside the book. By late 1938, the year Gruelle sadly passed away, 3 million copies of his book had been sold.
The popularity of Raggedy Ann and her brother, Raggedy Andy, who was introduced in later books, became a phenomenon. The charm and whimsy of their stories made the characters a natural fit for animation.
In 1941, the Fleischer Studio, riding high on the popularity of Betty Boop and Popeye, partnered with Johnny’s son, Worth Gruelle, to bring the characters to life on the screen in the 18-minute, two-reel animated short, Raggedy Ann and Andy, which celebrates its 85th anniversary this spring.
Written by Worth and William Turner, the short opens in a small toy shop with Raggedy Ann and Andy in the window. They are on sale for a dollar for the pair. A little girl runs up to the toy shop with her purse in her hand. She asks the shop owner to buy the girl doll in the window, but he explains they must be sold as a pair and shows their hands stitched together.
Publicity art promoting the “two-reeler” from the April 11th 1941 issue of Paramount News.
The audience is then taken to Ragland, where stitched quilts cover the landscape. From there, the story moves on to the Glad Rags Doll Factory. Here the dolls are made. All workers are objects—material, needles, scissors, spools— that are anthropomorphized. They assemble two dolls, a boy and a girl, who will become Raggedy Ann and Andy. The Paintbrush feeds them both candy hearts, and they both come to life.
However, they need their names, and for this, they are sent off to the Castle of Names, where they must arrive before sunset. On the way, they run into the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees, who agrees to give them a lift. They just have to stop off at a filling station where the Camel is filled up with sawdust.
As they continue their journey, Raggedy Andy falls under the spell of a beautiful doll who is singing. He goes off with this beautiful doll, leaving Raggedy Ann heartbroken, and riding off on the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees.
Raggedy Andy and the girl go off to “Glovers Lane,” while Raggedy Ann and the Camel continue to the Castle. Once there, she gets sick and is placed into the King’s infirmary.
Back in Glover’s Lane, Raggedy Andy is asked by the other doll what his name is. He says he doesn’t have one. She notes that he’s a nobody without a name, and he realizes he needs to get to the Castle.
Meanwhile, at the Castle, the hospital’s doctors use a fluoroscope and find that Raggedy Ann’s candy heart is broken. There’s nothing that they can do. Andy arrives at Raggedy Ann’s bedside, with certificates that reveal their names. He sings to her, and she wakes up. To make sure they can never be separated again, the two dolls have their cloth hands stitched together.
Back at the toy shop, the owner explains to the young girl that is why he cannot sell just one doll. However, he agrees to give her both, as the short ends with a happy ending.
Directed by Dave Fleischer and animated by luminaries such as Myron Waldman, Joseph Oriolo, William Henning, and Arnold Gillespie, Raggedy Ann and Andy is brimming with beautiful visuals. Ragland teems with creativity. The quilted hills seem to go on forever, and the street signs look like needles, as giant gloves surround “Glover’s Lane.”
There are also nice, themed, comedic touches, such as a street named “Linen Lane” and a bakery that sells “rag muffins.”
The Fleischer Studio also made great use of their team of talented voice actors. Pinto Colvig is very “Goofy”-esque as the Camel and also brings great charm. Joy Terry voices Raggedy Ann, Bernie Fleischer plays Raggedy Andy, and Jack Mercer, the voice of Popeye at the time, handles several characters, including the Paintbrush who brings the dolls to life.
Additionally, the musical arrangements by Sammy Timberg, with lyrics by Al Neiburg and Dave Fleischer, provide entertaining songs. These include “You’re Nobody Without a Name,” sung to the dolls in the factory, and “Raggedy Ann, I Love You,” which Andy sings to her toward the end.
The whole short comes together so well, in fact, that it makes one wish that the Studio had done more with Gruelle’s now iconic characters. (Paramount’s Famous Studios did create two more Raggedy Ann shorts as part of their Noveltoons series in the later 1940s)
Leonard Maltin noted this in his seminal book, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. He wrote, “It’s a shame that the Fleischers didn’t select this property for feature-length treatment. The ingredients are all there, including the imaginative setting of Ragland, with its echoes of Oz, and more possibilities than either Lilliput or Bugtown (in the studio’s subsequent feature Mr. Bug Goes to Town) ever offered.”
Wanting more than its eighteen minutes is just one reason why, looking back eighty-five years later at Raggedy Ann and Andy, it stands as a very well-crafted, entertaining entry in the Fleischer filmography.
Michael Lyons is a freelance writer, specializing in film, television, and pop culture. He is the author of the book, Drawn to Greatness: Disney’s Animation Renaissance, which chronicles the amazing growth at the Disney animation studio in the 1990s. In addition to Animation Scoop and Cartoon Research, he has contributed to Remind Magazine, Cinefantastique, Animation World Network and Disney Magazine. He also writes a blog, Screen Saver: A Retro Review of TV Shows and Movies of Yesteryear and his interviews with a number of animation legends have been featured in several volumes of the books, Walt’s People. You can visit Michael’s web site Words From Lyons at: 
Johnny Gruelle is clear that Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy’s relationship is that of brother and sister, whereas the Fleischer version shows them as a love interest for each other. Which is why Raggedy Ann’s heart gets broken over Andy’s dalliance with the other doll. But although it doesn’t follow the continuity of the books, this is still a charming entry in the Fleischer catalog. As mentioned above, Famous Studios later followed up with at least two Raggedy Ann shorts, “Suddenly it’s Spring” and “The Enchanted Square”. The late 70’s feature film of “Raggedy Ann and Andy” could have done well to try to recapture the charm of the Fleischer entry, although I must say it did not lack for promotion.
In the VHS era, Leonard Maltin hosted a tape entitled “Cartoon Madness: The Fantastic Max Fleischer Cartoons” which includes a thoughtfully arranged collection of clips in addition to complete shorts. It serves as an excellent introduction or even re-introduction to the work of the Fleischer Studios. This was in an era when much of the Fleischer material was available in inexpensive public domain releases, not always of the best quality but still not too hard to find. Maltin’s enthusiasm for the Fleischer work is contagious in the video. He provides a context and background. Besides paying ample tribute to Betty Boop, Maltin uses the Raggedy Ann featurette as the culminating work. The tape inspired me to go out and find other Fleischer material, some of which though inexpensive was not too bad print-wise.
This is a great cartoon. It’s fun to hear Pinto Colvin using his Goofy voice to different effect. And the Fleischer style (“there is no such thing as an inanimate object”) is abundantly evident. While the popularity of Gruelle’s characters ebbs and flows in our time, the charm of his books has proven difficult to duplicate in animated form. The Fleischer version struck animation gold.
Sammy Timberg’s screen credit was for “musical arrangement,” though he was also the composer of the music.
I think Joy Terry is the same actress who did the voice of “Betty Lou Regent” (sister of Bob Regent) in the “re-boot” of the radio series, CHANDU THE MAGICIAN (c. 1948-1949).
The Fleischers achieved something in Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy that was quite rare for them, that is, EMPATHY. The song, “Raggedy Ann, I Love You” is quite touching, considering that Raggedy Ann nearly died of a broken candy heart, Raggedy Andy cheered her up by telling her their names and singing to her. This may seem a simple thing, but to make an audience believe in the characters enough to sympathize with them was a difficult achievement in the heyday of cel animation. Walt Disney of course, found empathy many times in the features, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi and Dumbo. This feeling of sympathy for the characters, really was the bedrock of the Disney Company empire of today. The Fleischers did many wonderful things with slash and cel animation, but they rarely created empathy. They did it here.
As wonderful and memorable as this short is, the ending back in the toy shop didn’t quite land the first time I saw it. The girl only has fifty cents in her purse but she looks rather well-to-do, like she came from a family that probably wouldn’t strain to come up with another half-dollar.
If the girl had been dressed a bit more shabbily, implying that she wasn’t going to be getting more money any time soon and thus has to give up the toy she clearly has her heart set on, would have given the shopkeeper’s final charitable gesture more weight in my opinion.
I was under the impression it was her allowance.
Quite a beautiful short. It’s a shame the studio was about to come to an “end” by the time the film was released.
I first encountered this film years ago on a VHS collection of public domain cartoons, taken from a faded old NTA print. The poor picture and sound quality, as well as its considerable length, made it a cartoon that I rarely bothered to reexamine. But the version seen here is absolutely stunning. Thanks and congratulations to ULA and ASIFA for making it available.
The children who voiced the title characters were only nine or ten years old at the time, yet they delivered fine, polished, professional performances. Joy Terry (née Joyce Schultz) went on to play Raggedy Ann in the two Famous Studios Noveltoons. She also voiced the princess in the Universal Pictures English dub of “The Snow Queen”, and she did some work for Jay Ward Productions before retiring from acting by the age of thirty. For most of the 1950s she was married to Paul Frees, the third of his five wives. Bernie Fleischer was the son of Lou Fleischer, director of the studio’s music and sound department, and the nephew of Max and Dave. He grew up to be a distinguished session musician and also served as an official of the musicians’ union.