YMMV / The Daydreamer

• Awesome Music: The titular opening song, as performed by Robert Goulet.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: The ending reveal of Chris being a young Hans Christian Andersen is supposed to be a plot twist, but it's quite obvious to anyone who knows about the very premise of the film.
• Narm:
  • Burl Ives' performance as Father Neptune is supposed to sound wise and serious, but he just comes across as bored and monotone.
  • Papa Andersen frantically searching for his missing son is Played for Drama, but the sped-up video footage makes it come across as unintentionally comedic.
  • Chris repeating "Papa!" as he's dragged away by the game warden sounds less like a desperate cry for help and more like he's mumbling to himself.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The frog during the Thumbelina segment. It's practically Kaiju-sized compared to Thumbelina and Chris, it has glowing orange eyes, and its croaks sound more like a roar.
  • After Chris eats the flowers from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Paradise, everything goes dark, a large crevice appears in the earth, trees start to wilt, and loud intense music plays before Chris falls into the crevice.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The stop-motion mice interacting with Papa Anderson are obviously blue-screened.
  • In the scene of devil!Chris laughing at Chris for eating from the Tree of Knowledge, the former is clearly being dangled from a string instead of animated in stop-motion. It almost brings to mind Vitrivius's ghost in The LEGO Movie.
• Strawman Has a Point: While the game warden was needlessly cruel to both Chris and his father, kidnapping baby animals is a serious crime in most areas. The Andersen family even gets to keep the duckling at the end of the film, despite the duckling probably having a family, showing that even if Chris wasn't the one poaching ducks, he's not completely innocent.
• Tear Jerker: Chris abandoning the titular character at the end of the Little Mermaid segment, and the song she sings once he leaves.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The Rat's design attempts to combine Boris Karloff's features with that of a rodent. The result is unappealing to say the least.
• Values Dissonance: It's unlikely you could get away with a blatant Japanese stereotype like the Mole today.^note Though it's worth noting that most Rankin/Bass productions at the time were animated in Japan, so it's entirely likely that the animators saw nothing offensive about the character at the time.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: The characters' garishly bright clothing looks fine in stop-motion, but looks ridiculous on the live-action characters, resembling something from an elementary school play instead of a professionally-made film. Alternatively, the costuming resembles something closer to an early colour film, not something made when colour films were quite common.

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