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"Annie" goes back a long way.

John Huston's 1982 musical film version of "Annie" was based on a Broadway show that debuted in Connecticut in 1976. That musical was, in turn, based on the popular newspaper comic strip "Little Orphan Annie" which made its own debut in 1924. Authored by Harold Gray from its start until his death in 1968, "Little Orphan Annie" was a cultural staple for many decades. After Gray's passing, other authors continued the strip's run until its final cancelation in 2010. Gray based "Little Orphan Annie" on a James Whitcomb Riley poem that was first published in 1885. The poem was originally called "The Elf Child," but was later changed to "Little Orphant Annie" (employing a Hoosier dialect on "orphant"). This is all to say, "Annie" has been part of the popular consciousness for over 137 years.

Annie, as the title of her strip indicates, was indeed an orphan who was adopted...

The Annie mythos — culled from various versions, from an 1885 poem by James Whitcomb Riley to the Harold Gray-crafted syndicated comic strip to the beloved 1977 Broadway musical and its subsequent 1982 film adaptation — has evolved quite spectacularly over the years. Once a character in a poem that is straight up about goblins, Annie is now the adorable, plucky heroine of a feel-good musical about finding your own family (and copious amounts of cash) in the most unexpected of places. Still, the problem with Annie is that, jazzy song-and-dance sequences aside, the story itself is almost too wrenching to be believed. At least, that’s the problem with Will Gluck‘s Annie, which insists on foisting still more troubles on our pint-sized leading lady while also involving a weirdly adult subplot about corporate invasions of privacy. Isn’t being a goddamn orphan bad enough? No, because this orphan has to soft-shoe it through a feature that thinks that illiteracy...

As this summer’s blockbuster season reminds us comic book adaptations are big business with the latest incarnations of heroes old and new filling the local picturehouse and running merry riot over box office records.

Given the twin benefits of a wealth of material on which to draw and a ready audience primed to see their favourites fleshed out and thrown onto a movie screen it seems that we’ll be seeing many more familiar, and some less familiar, cartoon characters in movies of their own.

Jean Dujardin turned the world into a swooning mess when he led Michel Hazanavicius’ award magnet The Artist last year and in this article Anwar Brett takes a look at another of the actor’s roles, that of Lucky Luke in James Huth’s adaptation of the comic book by Morris, which is out now on DVD, as well as nine other cartoon heroes...