Little Audrey (1956, Pre-Origin Story)

Little Audrey is a 1956 American-Spanish animated musical comedy fantasy film produced by Famous Studios and released by Paramount Pictures. The animated directorial debut of Vladimir Tytla and the archival Seymour Kneitel, loosely based on the Harvey Comics' titular cartoon character series in the 1948-1954 cartoons, it features the voices of Mae Questel, Norma MacMillan, Cecil Roy, Ruby J. Dandridge, Jackson Beck, Ray Milland, and Jack Mercer. The film was also dedicated to the director Seymour Kneitel, who died during the film's production.

After having its world premiere in United States on December 7, 1956, Little Audrey was released by Paramount Pictures. The film was a box office bomb, earning only $12 million worldwide against a budget of $5,465,679, and received predominantly negative reviews from fans and film critics for the characters including Disney's ripoffs, musical numbers, sub-par voice acting, dark and disturbing content, lack of focus on the title characters and slapstick and similarities to Disney's golden and silver age classics, although the animation was praised.

Plot
In a big American city, circa 1950, this story is just about Little Audrey is a caring, funny, lovable good girl with a little kind heart. On Christmas Eve, Santa fills the stockings in another home. This time, there are names for each stocking hanging from the mantle: "Mom," "Pop," and "Little Audrey". As Santa fills up Audrey's, he realizes that the toys are falling through the bottom of the stocking, but then sees there is a waiting basket collecting everything, and he chuckles warmly. The other side of the room, where Audrey is pretending to sleep, sneaking open one eye to check on Santa's progress.

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On his way to school, Little Audrey, alone and full of good intentions, heads off to school, but is sidetracked by Lil' Patches. Little Audrey torn between playing hookey and going fishing, or going to school, chooses to go fishing. In landing it, she bumps her head and has a terrible nightmare, complete with "Swinging On A Star"- or would you rather be a fish? During her dream, she sees singing stars. One of the stars is Bing Crosby, the second is Bob Hope and the last one is Jerry Colonna. The theme of her dream is that Audrey should be at school learning. Little Audrey, while fishing, falls to the bottom of the sea, where she encounters all types of sea-life and then is arrested by the local fish-constable. She is tried by a jury of sardines who find her guilty, and she is sentenced to the 'eelectric chair." She makes an escape attempt; however, she gets caught and she sits on the eel-ectric chair. It begins shocking her and screaming in pain. Just then Lil' Patches wakes Little Audrey up to find it has all been a dream.

Back at home, Little Audrey lay down on his bed, listening to the sound of the rain. Little Audrey ready for sleep, but just couldn't take his eyes off the falling raindrops. ?????

Little Audrey dreams about visiting a realm where dreams are made. Her tour ends badly when she opens The Black Door, an ominous door that keeps Bad Dreams from tearing apart the realm.

When the next morning, Little Audrey sitting on the bench while Patches advanced across the bench toward him. But before Audrey had made any progress, Patches walked up to him, and kissed him on the cheek. Audrey caught his breath. She turned his head toward Patches and stared into her huge, cute eyes. The park suddenly seemed to Audrey like a cloud-filled sky and he felt as though he could fly, Audrey scampered across the stream, paused to look back at Audrey teasingly, then sprang up the bank. Audrey arrived at Melvin, a delinquent boy, he is described as the most ruly of Little Audrey's class, though she is the boy's best friend. Little Audrey is sitting in the middle desk of the second row, behind Melvin who says the right answer. She is reading "Pinhead and Birdbrain" comic books, but she doesn't like Mother Goose rhymes. She gets so involved in the crooks in her comic books that she doesn't hear when asked by the teacher to recite a rhyme. Instead she comes up with hip-gangster talk. Her punishment is to wear a dunce cap and sit in the corner. She goes to sleep, has a dream and finds out that Mother Goose is a "hep" character and that there is more excitement in the nursery rhymes than in her comic books.

Meanwhile, because it is an Audrey dream, peril awaits; this time, it is in the form of Pinhead and Birdbrain, loosed from Audrey's comic and ready to turn the pleasantness to instant nightmare. They mug a piglet for a single penny, and when they discover a sideshow displaying The Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs, Pinhead imagines an egg slicer turning the eggs into a pile of gold coins in his hand. They stage a stick-up, and Audrey screams at them that they don't belong in here. They swipe the goose and make their escape. Audrey chases after them, but the duo crash through a wall, on top of which was perched, as expected, Humpty Dumpty, who crashes to the ground. What is not expected is that Humpty is played as Edward G. Robinson. Assuredly, he has been unharmed by the incident. The Old Woman in the Shoe and other nursery rhyme residents join in the chase, but it is Audrey, atop the goose, who brings down the evildoers.

When they fire their pistols at her, she bravely turns their bullets back at them through Little Boy Blue's horn. She arrests them, and tries to drag them off to jail. Of course, this is the point where Audrey wakes up, and she is being laughed at by the class because she is wrestling the stool that she was asleep on. Back outside, Lil' Patches kisses Audrey's head, blurs in her face in red.

Sometime afterward, her mother and father take a small trip, and leave Little Audrey in the care of Petunia the Maid. Little Audrey sees a baby bird learning to fly and shoots it. The mother bird tries to revive her baby, but to no avail. She begins to cry and mourn the baby bird's death, and Little Audrey feels remorse and guilt for killing it. She runs back into the house and hides under her bed.

The animals and plants of the forest arrange an elaborate funeral for the little bird. Audrey watches from her bedroom window and says a prayer, insisting she did not mean to do any harm. As rain begins to fall, the mother birds gives her child a kiss goodbye. The baby bird wakes up, revealing it was only unconscious. Overjoyed, the birds celebrate and fly in a circular formation in the sky around the mother and baby.

Audrey sees what has happened and happily rushes out with her rifle. The birds flee in terror and hide in a tree. However, Audrey breaks the gun in half over her knee and stomps it into the ground. She also sprinkles bird seed to make amends, but the birds do not understand. Audrey sadly begins to walk away, but the baby bird flies onto her shoulder and rubs its face on Audrey's. The other birds realize Audrey wants to be their friend, and make the circular formation around her as the baby bird eats seed from her hand.

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Little Audrey bakes a gingerbread man while listening to a radio cooking show. When the dough is in the oven, she falls asleep. The gingerbread man comes to life and takes her to Cakeland, a colorful musical land of candy canes and ice cream cones. There is a big celebration because the Gingerbread Man is taking Miss Angel Cake as his wife. There is a song, "Gay Holiday," with dancing and singing confections, including a drunken rum cake and a caricature of Maurice Chevalier as Mr. Eclair Debonair. This sends the Devil's Food Cake into an jealous rage. Interrupting the wedding, he kidnaps Miss Angel Cake and paddles her up the old milk stream. It's Audrey to the rescue. When Audrey wakes up, ?????

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At night, Pinhead and Birdbrain across town, they meet a coachman who promises to pay them money if he can find many children for him to take to Pleasureland. Encountering Little Audrey finds Patches, he convince him that he needs to take a vacation there. On the way to Pleasureland. Without rules or authority to enforce their activity, Melvin and the many children soon engage in smoking, gambling, and vandalism, much to Peppy Grasshopper's dismay of Little Audrey.

Later, while trying to get home, Peppy Grasshopper peek the hole in the main doors of the fairground to find the Coachman and his ape minions loading little animals into crates going to place such as the New York Circus. One donkey, named Alexander, is able to speak. The Coachman throws Alexander into a pen of other animals that "can still talk". Peppy Grasshopper realizes that the little animals are the same kids that went to Pleasure Island, meaning that they were somehow transformed into little animals and being sold into slavery. They rushes back to warn Little Audrey, the Coachman having indirectly imparted to Peppy Grasshopper the knowledge that Little Audrey needs to escape. Back in the pool hall, Melvin is still saying that something weird to affect to them when he suddenly sprouts donkey ears, a tail and even his head is transformed into a donkey. Then he uses the mirror looks into it and panics after witnessing the changes. He pleads Little Audrey for help, but she is only able to look on in fright as Melvin's hands turn into donkey hooves. Melvin's loses the ability to talk and turns into a donkey completely. Losing his mind, Melvin starts to kick everything in the pool hall, breaking a mirror and a table, and kicking his clothes off. Peppy Grasshopper arrives just in time to tell him that Pleasureland is cursed to avoid the same terrible fate as Melvin until Petunia wakes Little Audrey up from his nightmare.

Petunia is at Audrey wits end concerning what to do about it. In desperation she finally searches the entire house, discovering Audrey’s hidden stashes everywhere and destroying them all. When Audrey discovers her candy missing, she causing her to scream and faint, and enters a dreamland of Candy Horror Land. But even enough of a good thing can become too much and Audrey ends up locked in a dream world where the very things which she craves all seem to turn against her which is candy monsters narrate her painful plight in a swing song until Peppy Grasshopper returns to him.

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Why The Little Girl Won't Be Back After Noveltoon (Bad Qualities, Even Though She Did Come Back)

 * Poor writing, bad comedy, worse acting and average/weird/disturbing art and animation.
 * Like Don Bluth's Thumbelina, similar in vein to other bad Disney-esque animated musicals of the 1950s decade, it feels like an unoriginal Disney rip-off that doesn't even try to be it's own film with numerous scenes and elements that are rip-offs to various Disney animated films. There are so many of all the scenes ripped-off from various Disney animated films that listing it will take forever, so here are just a few examples:
 * The title card opening intro at the beginning is ripped-off from the cartoon opening intro seen in the older Disney movie such as Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.
 * The Coachman as the antagonist role have some pretty same name of the nightmarish villain from Disney's Pinocchio.
 * On that topic, at times it also feels a rip-off of Walt Disney's own Pinocchio, as both films also feature a childlike protagonist who get lost in a big world and embark on a big journey to find their way home through a various perils and a hostile world of crooks and bugs, as well as both films also featuring Pinocchio to the protagonist and antagonists, with the Peppy Grasshopper and the Coachman characters overall basically being a dumb version of Jiminy Cricket and the same name of the Coachman from said animated film.
 * Speaking of which, the songs, while not being direct copycats of pre-existing Disney songs and reused animation and a few scripts, are heavily derivative of those from Disney movies and other animated musicals produced beforehand, such as the script animation of Rain Drops being rivative of the song from Bambi.
 * Most of the characters are bland, poorly written, and don't contribute much value to the movie.
 * The Coachman is a generic one-dimensional protagonist who not only steals the spotlight from Little Audrey, but has very little personality apart from just being the typical villain who wishes to reunite with her father only so that the film can have a story regardless of who it should focus on. In fact, she herself is a pale rip-off of the same name from Disney's Pinocchio.
 * False advertising: Instead of being focused on Little Audrey who is the main character and get a fair amount of screen time, the film mainly focuses on ?????. For this reason, Little Audrey feel like they are portrayed more as supporting characters than titular characters. While Little Audrey is the main protagonist of the film and gets a fair amount of screen time, the movie focuses more on Little Dot and Lotta (as a cameo in the end of the film), and Patches at St. John's Comics in 40s.
 * The plot of the film is also a humongous rip-off of a few Disney classics including Pinocchio, right down to the main villain of the film being a Coachman.
 * It can be very disturbing and somewhat dark at times for young children despite its G rating, such as.
 * In The Seapreme Court, Audrey goes fishing for fun and has a nightmare wherein several sea creatures arrest her. She is put on trial and eventually gets sentenced to the eel-ectric chair.
 * In The Lost Dream, Audrey finally opened the Black Door, tries to push it closed, but a giant hoofed foot blocks its closure. Then a devilish head pops out, followed by two others of slightly less traditionally demonic appearance, they breathe fire at Audrey's little pantied bottom; she jumps from black cloud to black cloud until they turn into giant black demons that try to snatch her out of the air; she lands on what must be a quarter-mile long tongue attached to a gargantuan green dragon; and finally runs through a ceaseless series of red swinging doors until she ends up being trapped in a black cloud by the three demons. They wrap her in their hands... and she wakes up kicking and screaming in her own bed.
 * In Song of the Birds, The Weeping Willows weep, and the whole world of nature mourns the passing of the young bird as Audrey retreats to her house in shame and remorse. But sometimes miracles occur, and as the mother bird is burying her child a sudden storm breaks out, unleashing the rain which revives the fallen bird.
 * The Coachman is an extremely scary character, being a deranged psychopath who mercilessly abuses kids and sells them into slavery once they're turned into little animals and then Melvin's transformation into a donkey in one scene, we see his true colors unfold while he delivers the line "That's my... SECRET!!!", where his face becomes red, and shows a demonic expression, his eyes bulging out madly, a very wide evil grin and his ears and hair becoming pointed, and worse is that he gets away scot-free from his acts.
 * And like in the cartoon, Butterscotch and Soda, to compare that movie, but Audrey suffers a "lost weekend" after a sugar binge and then the sequence where the shadow of the canary turns into a bat's and Little Audrey subsequent scream is terrific.
 * The candy people in Butterscotch and Soda when Audrey's dream turns into a nightmare. For example, a sequence of Audrey being chased by menacing candies singing about her "Tummy Ache Blues". The song ends with her being force-fed all the candy she bagged throughout the dream.
 * The film noticeably rips off scripts, musically rip-off and the scenes from Disney films. The donkey's transformation from Disney's Pinocchio, the rain drops from Disney's Bambi also with any recycled and homage animation with Melody Time, Peppy Grasshopper was a resembled of Jiminy Cricket's name and his design of that character and The Coachman's design and his same name resemble that of that wickedness villain from Disney's Pinocchio.
 * It features kids smoking and drinking, which is pretty inappropriate for a family film nowadays. Though to be fair, people were still deciding what was suitable for children and what wasn't at the time, and the kids end up being turned into little animals after engage in violent brawls, drink unhealthy amounts of alcohol, gamble, go on rides, and generally abuse their privileges, thus giving the message that this is something they shouldn't be doing.
 * It feels somewhat unnecessary for a Disney-esque movie, it had no set up for another film and a dream sequences including The Seapreme Court has end already in 1954.
 * One of the villains, the Coachman (except Judge Fish, Devil/Goblins, Pinhead/Birdbrain, Devil Food Cake and a genetically mutated candies), didn’t receive any punishment or harsh consequences, though this can be a perfect example that realistically, life is unfair and bad people can get away with their actions sometimes.
 * It feels somewhat unnecessary for a Disney-esque movie, it had no set up for another film and a dream sequences including The Seapreme Court has end already in 1954.
 * One of the villains, the Coachman (except Judge Fish, Devil/Goblins, Pinhead/Birdbrain, Devil Food Cake and a genetically mutated candies), didn’t receive any punishment or harsh consequences, though this can be a perfect example that realistically, life is unfair and bad people can get away with their actions sometimes.

Redeeming Qualities

 * The first ?? hours and ?? minutes of the movie started off as good, with additional highlights:
 * Speaking of which, they do contain reanimated versions of sixteen cartoons.

Short Films
In United Kingdom on Warner Home Video at DVD, "Baby Puss" used a first short film in bonus features.

Reception
Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 39% approval rating based on 5 reviews, with an average score of 4.5/10.

Music
The music score is composed by Winston Sharples, but some of the underscored tracks used are taken from the Disney films such as Pinocchio and Bambi, composed by Leigh Harline, Ned Washington, Larry Moley.