Le dragon de calicot

THE CALICO DRAGON is truly a beautiful, enjoyable cartoon tale about a little girls stuffed animals coming to life in her dreams and looking for adventure. The calico dragons and their song are engrained in mine and my friends minds and having seen "Calico" on CartoonNetwork last year, it still holds up. I only wish it was available on video along with some of the other MGM classic cartoons, or that CN would have a regular MGM Classic hour!

So, my appreciation and enjoyment of this lovely short animation is mainly due to the ingenious quilt-world design that is featured throughout, I found it so different and cute and charming. I mostly found the beginning part of it with the weird doll-faced girl reading just a little on the dull side, but things definitely perk up toward the ending as the cuddliest dragon ever shows up, I found him very interesting to look at and way too cuddly to be scary! The form of the dragon reminded me a little of that old stop-motion animated show Bagpuss, and that thing the dragon did with its tongue was so startling with the creepy noise of one of those funny paper birthday party whistle thingies! That foul lil' noise actually gave me a tiny chill and I'm supposed to be a grownup! Something that I found pretty amazing and enchanting about the ending was how the landscape and everything subtly changed back into the little girl's bed covers and toys, revealing everything to be the classic "just a dream" twist in the tale, I actually thought it was remarkably similar to what it's really like when you awaken from a dream as a child. I have never really come across another animation quite like this. Many of the best cartoons I've ever seen were made in the 1930s, and while I grant you that a lot of them weren't perfect, but the ones that really counted were pure animated magic! True animation art, and they are still 😊

A little girl reads the fairy tale story, The Princess and the Dragon, to her dolls. She falls asleep. In her dream, her dolls come alive. A doll rides a horse to battle the dragon with a little dog in tow.

It's Happy Harmonies from MGM. It's a Hugh Harman - Rudolf Ising cartoon. It's an old-style animated cartoon. It's colorful but dull looking. It's the age of the animation. It's not one that I particularly like. The little girl is a bit problematic. She has the fake doll look. I do like the concept of these stuffed animals coming alive. It's a good short. They just need to make a better girl.

A young girl is regaling her toys with stories of a legendary and fearsome dragon when she dozes off to sleep. That gives her brave rag doll and his trusty steed just the opportunity that they need, and so together with their terrier they set off to find and confront this menacing creature. When they finally get to it's castle, after a little mischief along the way, they discover it has three heads! What hope they can defeat it? It's all obviously set amidst the chintzy world of the girl's patchwork bedding with some musical proof that it wasn't just Col. Sanders who could rhyme chicken with lickin'. The animation is a bit muted, but it's still quite a fun illustration of just how our imagination could be left to do a lot of the work if we had a good book to set the scene for us. Not great, but still quite charming.

A little girl -- I should write "widdle gir-rl" because that's how she would say it -- reads the end of a story, then goes to sleep. Whereupon all toys come to life and do cute things while singers sing cute songs.

Whoopee. Clearly this was the effect that Harman and Ising were trying for -- cuteness, I mean. They certainly do a fine job of color design with their two-strip Technicolor effects, where everything looks like calico, cheap decorated cotton fabric. It got that name because it used to be imported for Calcutta in Indian.

Anyway, if you have a taste for this sort of thing, or need a good purgative, this is a cartoon for you.