The Daydreamer

Studio: Kino Lorber Studio Classics

Aug 10, 2021 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

Teenage Chris (Paul O’Keefe) lives a mundane life in his quaint, Danish city. The son of a widowed shoemaker (Jack Gilford), Chris has no interest in his schooling, preferring to daydream. When he accepts a passing reference to a “Garden of Paradise” with a “Tree of Knowledge” as the hard truth rather than a bit of folklore, Chris runs away from home to search for it. Along the way, he repeatedly dozes off and dreams of going on magical adventures in an Animagic world.

Hot off the success of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), Rankin/Bass productions attempted to channel a similar celebrity-voiced, stop motion-animated formula away from television sets and onto the big screen with The Daydreamer (1966), a live action/animation hybrid overflowing with mid-Sixties star power. Burl Ives and other members of the Rudolph cast returned, joined by names like Hayley Mills, Boris Karloff, Patty Duke, Tallulah Bankhead, Cyril Ritchard, and Ed Wynn, and creating a mini-Wizard of Oz (1939) reunion by casting both the Scarecrow and Wicked Witch, Ray Bolger and Margaret Hamilton, in on-camera roles.

The Animagic sequences are the movie’s obvious draw, and are based on famous Hans Christian Andersen tales. (Spoiler alert: “Chris” is actually Andersen as a boy, making this a fictionalized origin story for the author.) The first of these dreams, “The Little Mermaid,” is the movie’s best: the puppets appear to swim fluidly in an undersea world, and the effect is impressive even today. Others, like “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “Thumbelina,” are mostly standard adaptations. They’re fun for kids and Rankin/Bass fans, but nothing too visually exciting.

The problem with The Daydreamer is not the animated sections, but their live-action framework, which adds virtually nothing to the movie except the opportunity to squeeze in a few more celebrity faces. The jokes are flat, the acting extremely broad, and the storyline little more than an excuse to have young Chris pass out over and over again. We’d rather there’d have been a brief introduction to each segment from a single (preferably animated) host, but it’s arguable that they could have gotten away simply with title cards divvying up the anthology. Almost anything would have been better than the live-action filler that drags out between each piece of animation.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray edition of the film offers a bright, crisp presentation, and includes a commentary from Lee Gambin and Rankin/Bass historian Rick Goldschmidt.

(www.kinolorber.com/product/the-daydreamer-blu-ray)

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