Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Proslavery Adventure

The Musical

*Spoilers aplenty--I will discuss the entire movie

In 1977, the beloved Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls came out in their own animated musical adventure, directed by Richard Williams. Beneath the innocent facade of Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure lie some rather dark themes. I think it's enough to say that, had this movie been released two-hundred years ago (imagining there were movies that far back), we would be viewing it through a much different lens. The images and dialogue of the movie conjure themes of slavery, suicide, and eroticism. Perhaps this is accidental on the part of the director, but it's too pervasive, too well conceived to ignore.

Raggedy Ann and Andy takes up a concept that was later made popular in Pixar's first full-length film, Toy Story. This concept, of course, involves toys coming to life when their owners are absent. While this is a very imaginative idea, I don't believe the implications of staging what turn out to be living, rational beings as pieces of property has been widely considered, if at all. I'm talking about implications of slavery. In Toy Story, favorite toys are branded with the first letter of their owner's name, they oversee the working order of the toys in the absence of said owner, and they come face-to-face with one cruel toy owner no toy wants to be sold to. Toys are, in many ways, the perfect symbol for slaves. In the eyes of their owners, they're nothing but hunks of plastic incapable of intellectual or rational thought. But when these human owners leave the room the toys come to life and speak and behave intelligently. To compare, slave-owners viewed Africans as brutes who lacked the requisite degrees of humanity to make them equal to their white owners. It was simply unthinkable that the slave could have the intellectual capacities to plan a revolution, much less a successful one, and inconceivable, as well, that they would even want to revolt. However, the slaves did plan revolts, but only when their owners weren't looking. The most successful one was the Haitian Revolution, during which the black slaves wrestled Haiti, formerly St. Domingue, from the French. Toy Story, as well, stages a revolution, in escaping the maniacal and cruel Sid, and the toys use to their advantage that Sid couldn't conceive of them being able to act on their own.

The little girl who owns Raggedy Ann, Marcella, falls somewhere between toy owners Andy and Sid. She's more like a clueless, less sadistic version of the latter, in carrying Raggedy Ann by the ankle and letting her head knock against the stairs. And after one look at the toys in her bedroom you might be inclined to think she's walked into Sid's bedroom. Why a little girl would own such toys is beyond me. Raggedy Ann has a privileged position among Marcella's toys. Not only was she taken on a journey into the outside world, but she receives a seat on a chair that elevates her above the other toys. Raggedy Ann is something of a leader character, and this becomes more apparent when the toys become animated. All the toys gather around Raggedy Ann as she tells of her adventures with Marcella, hardly distressed that the bumps to her head require stitches. The stitching is done not by a human, but a large woman doll reminiscent of an Aunt Chloe or Aunt Jemina figure (the harmless, family-oriented slave). The toys are all happy despite Raggedy Ann's beating. It's like the myth of the submissive slave, which states that blacks are naturally submissive, thus naturally composed for slavery. Raggedy Ann and company offer evidence that this myth is true. But, wait! They're toys...



In another plot device you might recognize from Pixar's classic film, Marcella receives as a birthday gift--gasp!--a new doll. A French doll named Babette. The choice of France is interesting, especially when considering that the French were the ones who fought against the slaves in Haiti. France will play a role later in the movie.

Babette's arrival, as it will turn out, has excited the attention of an unexpected party. Trapped inside a snow globe is a pirate captain and his loyal parrot. We first meet him ogling Babette with the aid of a spyglass. He falls in love with her busty figure and puts his feelings to song and dance (a very suggestive hip-thrusting dance). Many questions might arise, especially to that viewer currently enrolled in a class about slavery, such as, but certainly not limited to, why include a pirate ship captain? Go backwards a couple of hundred years, when the slave trade was not yet abolished, and we discover a precedent for this captain's lust. It was quite common that a slave ship captain would lust for one of the female slaves and take her into his quarters. Thus it shouldn't surprise us that, as soon as the captain is free from his glass globe prison, he kidnaps Babette, enslaves her to his ship, and takes her out to sea. Now the plot begins. Bondage, suicide, and pedophilia ensue.

At sight of Babette's kidnapping (a reminder, perhaps, that slaves were kidnapped from their homeland), Raggedy Ann is horror-struck. Not because this must be terrifying for Babette, but, as she says herself, because Babette is the little girl's gift--her property. In other words, the kidnapping of Babette is only morally repugnant because Babette belongs to somebody. Raggedy Ann and Andy's adventure into the dark scary world outside is driven by a sense of duty towards their owner rather than concern for Babette's health and safety.

I would like to take a break here to take a look at another possible interpretation, not necessarily related to slavery. I wonder, why include such images of kidnapping and themes of ownership/property in a children's movie? If we consider the toy as an extension of the child then the interpretation changes. Dolls are, essentially, pretend children sold to real children for parenting practice. Perhaps we can view the kidnapping in the movie as connected more so to the kidnapping of children than of slaves, and the movie could feasibly play out as a warning to parents and children. However, this interpretation is complicated by many other features in the movie.

Raggedy Ann and Andy make their way through the dark, scary outdoors world, sing a song about candy hearts and paper flowers, and then meet a camel. This camel is depressed because his owner has cast him away and now he's lost and alone, ownerless. Complications arise, for our interpretation of the movie as a warning for children and parents, when the camel has visions of what appear to be camel ghosts, perhaps ancestors, commanding him in eery, singsong voices to go home. They don't specify what home is, but the exotic music makes it sound like someplace further than his owner's house. Enslaved Africans believed that in death they would return home, to Africa. They often threw themselves overboard the slave ship in order to escape enslavement and return to their ancestral homeland. In a psychedelic vision, the camel chases after his ancestors and throws himself off a cliff. Though the camel is gloomy because, so it seems, his owner has tossed him away, the home he pines for is in a faraway land, not where he was recently evicted from. In other words, the home he desires to return to is not his human home. If the toy needs to be with its owner, then why does the camel throw himself off a cliff?

He, along with Raggedy Ann and Andy, land on top of a blob creature that has a constant hunger for candy. Remember kids, don't accept candy from a stranger. The trio escapes from their first villain and find themselves in the company of a stature-deficient king, a la Napoleon, who wants to be larger so he can conquer the world. King Koo Koo, as he's named, even cracks a joke about Napoleon. This comparison takes us yet again to eighteenth/nineteenth century France, when Napoleon sent an army to Haiti to quell the slave rebellion and force the blacks to make him lots of money as slaves. But King Koo Koo isn't simply a symbolic emblem for a king who profited off of slavery, he's also a pedophile. Allow me to explain. King Koo Koo grows larger when he laughs, but his laughter must last long enough if he wishes to achieve maximum size. His goal is to "be big enough long enough," which sounds oddly like a Viagra commercial, and he has a particular liking for Raggedy Andy. When the dolls try to escape King Koo Koo doesn't want them to get away because Andy "makes [him] expand real good." Our Raggedy dolls are now being threatened sexually.

Pursued by a pedophile, Raggedy Ann and company make their way for the sea. The audience rushes ahead to see the conditions aboard the ship, and everything appears in working order: pirates singing and dancing and cheerfully carrying out their duties. But, a second glance reveals something's amiss. The one donning the captain's outfit isn't the same captain who kidnapped Babette, but Babette herself, wielding a whip. In the viewer's absence she has re-enacted a slave insurrection and risen up against her captor. She sings about Paris, the place she wants to be, while the pirates drool over her (literally). The crew, enamored by her sexual appeal, will happily take her to France--her home. Again with the theme of going home. However, Babette's home has more meaning than just home: since France, just before Napoleon took power, was the site of a successful revolution, it is also a symbol for freedom. Babette's goal, then, is freedom. But why head for freedom if she's supposed to be happy, like Raggedy Ann and Andy, with her owner? That Babette so desires to return to France may be testimony to the condition of ownership. She'd rather be free.

Raggedy Ann, when the escape plans go horribly awry, cures Babette of her desire for freedom by admonishing her: "See what you've done!" As though it's Babette's fault she was kidnapped. Raggedy Ann blames Babette for causing this gigantic mess. Logically the blame should fall upon the pirate ship captain who kidnapped Babette in the first place. Raggedy Ann fails to take this into consideration, however. She's upset that Babette would try and go home. Readers of Uncle Tom's Cabin might recall the titular hero, Uncle Tom, chastising the likes of Cassy, who wishes to escape enslavement through violence. Why shouldn't the slaves use violence to get out a system they were violently forced into and violently subdued by? If Cassy had pursued her violent plan and caused a violent uprising, Uncle Tom undoubtedly have played the role of Raggedy Ann: "See what you've done!" Raggedy Ann and Uncle Tom fail to realize that the slave shouldn't be the one to take the blame; it wasn't the slave who started it, it was the person who decided to keep the slave as property and the system that made it possible to do so. For a Raggedy Ann and an Uncle Tom, life is much simpler if you don't question things and don't ponder rights or try to stand up for them. And everybody else should do the same. It will turn out okay in the end.

The slavery interpretation, admittedly, is complicated by the presence of nasty villains, one a pedophile and another obsessed with candy. These villains seem to serve as a warning to parents and children: beware of the dangerous outside world. Child sex slavery, as well, is pervasive in many third world countries. What complicates this interpretation, however, is that the camel and Babette have a desire to return home, a home that's far away, just as the Africans desired to return to a home across the sea. Does that mean the home their owners live in isn't really a home? This would place Marcella, and the camel's previous owner, as kidnappers. Am I looking too deep? I don't think so. The movie placed these elements in the movie and these elements happen to raise questions of property and home.

The big question is, how does this movie view the questions of ownership in the world it has created? How about Toy Story? Neither movie really allows the toys the philosophical space to ask themselves about their rights. It is their duty to serve their owners, and that's all. The viewer can see it as nothing more than imaginative fun. They're just toys, anyway. Children play with their toys all the time. But these toys have consciences and feelings and intellects. The owner of the toy only sees the toy, but the viewer sees the person behind the toy. Similarly, slave owners saw their slaves as something less than human, instruments for their own use, who they could punish and sexually exploit as they pleased, and it was a very rare person who could see the slave as a person, as most people do today. Maybe we can tolerate Toy Story and Raggedy Ann because the toys are treated well by their owners (though in Raggedy Ann this is questionable). The viewer can see Sid as a bad owner, and it's justified when the toys do the unthinkable and revolt against him. But the toys under good owners aren't seen as lacking liberties. It is their duty as toys to live loyally as toys, as things owned and played with by a child. Perhaps the fact that viewers today fail to regard these toys as extensions of slaves reflects how people regarded blacks during a time the blacks were enslaved by the whites: they weren't people, per se, but instruments. Property. The movie that conjures up a toy revolution against their masters and views these toys as heroes might shock a nation raised on Raggedy Ann and Toy Story. Just as slave revolts shocked a nation many, many years ago.