The Daydreamer (film)

The Daydreamer, a 1966 musical fantasy film, blends stop-motion animation with live action. Produced by Videocraft International, it was directed by Jules Bass and written by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Romeo Muller, drawing on the tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Jules Bass and Maury Laws composed seven original songs for the picture. The opening sequence presents the cast as both puppets and live actors, alongside caricatures drawn by Al Hirschfeld.

The plot follows a teenage Hans Christian Andersen, the son of a poor shoemaker, who prefers daydreaming to his schoolwork and eventually runs away from home. Whenever he falls asleep or enters a daydream, he imagines himself in strange adventures with characters like two swindling tailors, a tiny girl no bigger than a thumb, a mermaid, and a devil boy in Eden. In both reality and his dreams, Hans searches for the Garden of Paradise but never finds it. The dream sequences are rendered in puppet animation, including a puppet version of Hans and the pie man. After being falsely arrested for poaching by a game warden, Hans is forced to chop wood. His father, searching for him, is also falsely arrested by the same warden for fishing in protected waters and ends up chopping wood as well, where he reunites with his son. They are only released when the father gives up the ring he wore during his marriage. These dreams later become the basis for Hans’s fairy tales as an adult: "The Little Mermaid," "Thumbelina," "The Ugly Duckling," "The Emperor's New Clothes," "Little Claus and Big Claus," and "The Garden of Paradise."

The cast includes American actors Paul O'Keefe, Jack Gilford, Ray Bolger, and Margaret Hamilton (the latter two from MGM's 1939 *The Wizard of Oz*), with Australian actor Cyril Ritchard voicing the Sandman. Three voice actors—Burl Ives, Billie Mae Richards, and Larry D. Mann—had previously supplied voices for Videocraft's 1964 stop-motion Christmas special *Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer*. Some character voices were recorded at RCA Studios in Toronto under Bernard Cowan’s supervision. The "Animagic" puppet sequences were staged by Don Duga at Videocraft in New York and supervised by Tadahito Mochinaga at MOM Production in Tokyo, Japan.

This film was Videocraft’s first theatrical feature distributed by Embassy Pictures, based in Los Angeles and headed by executive producer Joseph E. Levine. Embassy later