Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
Little Audrey is baking a cake, and in the manner of her cartoons she falls asleep and dreams herself into the world of the ingredients: Cakeland, a kingdom of pastry where the Gingerbread Man is her guide and Angel Cake its sweet-natured princess. The villain is Devil's Food, a dark, horned cake with designs on Angel Cake, and the film is his pursuit of her through a landscape of sugar, icing and dough, with Audrey and the Gingerbread Man in the chase and the kitchen's utensils as the weapons. Devil's Food is beaten, Angel Cake and the Gingerbread Man are united, and Audrey wakes to the smell of her own cake burning in the oven, or about to.
Why It Matters
- The Little Audrey dream cartoons were Famous Studios' excuse for fantasy design, and Cakeland, animated by Bill Tytla's unit, is one of the richest, with the pastry world drawn in the soft, rounded style Tytla brought from Disney; the pun on "hearts and flowers" sets the tone.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright among the Noveltoons that National Telefilm Associates let lapse, and it was reissued theatrically in September 1955; it is one of the Audrey cartoons most often shown, and Mae Questel, the voice of Betty Boop and Olive Oyl, gives Audrey her small-girl lisp.
Notes and Trivia
- Little Audrey was created in 1947 as a replacement for Little Lulu, whose licence the studio dropped.
- Devil's Food cake was itself a 1950 kitchen fashion.
- See also: Goofy Goofy Gander (1950), The Bored Cuckoo (1948), Somewhere in Dreamland (1936).