Pretty Good

A Major Disappointment

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

This cartoon would look super with a good restoration job. The colors are magnificent but the picture is somewhat blurry, even on the DVD. It needs a very good transfer. The stunning visuals would make - at least for adults watching - for the story, which is geared for little kids."The Red Lantern" is a fish who is caught by two little kids in a canoe. He talks and tells the kids about the magical "Land Of The Lost" at the bottom of the sea. They trust him, and he takes them there. Magically, they are able to breathe and talk and are given a tour of this incredible place.While the young boy and girl get rides on the "Taxi Crab" the scene switches to the "Distribution Center" where King Fido is meeting the new arrivals: lost items that have dropped the the sandy shore of the water. One of them is an emerald pen who turns out to be a singing grasshopper named "Happy Go Lucky." He also plays the violin! (Hey, it's a cartoon.) He entertains King Fido with a nifty little song. The kids come by and Isobel, the girl, spots the pen. Isobel, who looks just like "Little Audrey," knows him; it's hers and also belongs to the toy shop elsewhere in this underwater land. The grasshopper wants to go back but the king is adamant that the emerald stay out with the other lost jewels. It's the rules.Can the girl get her talented, talking emerald pin back at Toyland? That's the question in this unusual cartoon which may be geared for the little ones but has appeal and stunning artwork that makes it a good one to watch for adult animated fans. The dialog is all in rhyme and isn't bad, either.

During the late 1940s and early '50s, a popular children's programme on American radio was 'Land of the Lost', in which a boy and a girl travelled through a magical underwater kingdom (the realm of lost toys) guided by a talking fish named Red Lantern. The series was so popular in its time that the very early EC Comics (before 'Tales of the Crypt') launched a comic-book adaptation. The series was meant for VERY young children, and surviving recordings of the transmissions are of interest to modern listeners only because Red Lantern was voiced by a rising young actor named Art Carney, who would soon go underwater again as Ed Norton the sewer worker.Paramount, which always seemed to produce the dullest cartoons with the worst animation, launched a short-lived series of cinema toons inspired by the radio programme, and scripted by that programme's creator Isabel Manning Hewson. The participation of Hewson, a radio scripter, probably explains why this cartoon's story doesn't feel like a cartoon story at all ... except for one vaguely amusing gag when the underwater kids ride a taxi CRAB, geddit?Billy and Isabel, two insufferably twee kiddywinks, are fishing in a dinghy. Isabel calls attention to her costume jewellery: a cricket-shaped pin named Happy Go Lucky. This immediately pops off and falls into the water. Cue the arrival of Red Lantern (not voiced by Art Carney, alas), who gives the kids some magic seaweed which will enable them to breathe and speak underwater. Hey, kids, don't you know you shouldn't take seaweed from strangers?SPOILERS NOT WORTH SPOILING. Red Lantern escorts the kids to the underwater Land of the Lost Jewels, where they meet (in a surprisingly adult gag) Diamond Jill, a Mae West lookalike. Happy Go Lucky (now a talking cricket) has been consigned to this place, since his pin apparently contains a valuable emerald. However, this turns out to be mere costume jewellery, so he ends up in the Land of the Lost Toys instead, much to the delight of himself and the kids. The cricket sings a song, 'Happy Go Lucky', which sounds suspiciously as if it were written for some other plot line and bunged into this one.I find it annoying (although very plausible) that the denizens of the Land of the Lost Jewels would want to keep Happy Go Lucky against his will -- thinking he's valuable -- but would then do a volte-face when they learn he has no intrinsic worth. I was also somewhat dismayed that the animators of this cartoon have contrived to draw the little-girl character Isabel (a Little Audrey lookalike) so that her underpants are exposed at every possible opportunity. This cartoon is garishly coloured and badly animated -- up until Disney's 'Little Mermaid', underwater toons were always notoriously difficult to animate -- but at least this cartoon does represent some sort of record of an important radio programme; I'll rate the toon just 3 out of 10.

This is a relatively cute short, but it was far too uneven to be very effective. It's just plain tedious is spots. It's well done at times, but just doesn't stay engaging for me, though kids will enjoy it for the most part. It drags far too often and probably should have been shorter than it is. I won't be discussing too many details, but there will be minor spoilers: The little girl in this cartoon may be called Isabel, but she looks and sounds a lot like Little Audrey. The short starts off promisingly enough with the two children meeting a talking fish, but it doesn't really do much with Red Lantern. There are good sequences, like the few scenes focusing on Hoppy-Go-Lucky, but entirely too much time is wasted on the tedious and the uninteresting, like the "test" of the emerald grasshopper to see if he "belongs" with the jewels tucked away in display cases.There are some nicely animated bits, but this is way too uneven in quality. I think the print I watched was an incomplete one, so that may have something to do with the problems I had with the plot. It's available on various tapes and at least one DVD that I know of.