Fairy Tale Spotlight: Rupert and the Frog Song [Short Film Review]

I had a weird incident recently. I was busy at my job, and this song I haven't heard in more than 30 years began playing on the store's radio. It drove me absolutely nuts. I just stood there like an idiot, trying to hear the lyrics. I was pretty sure it was a showtune of some kind, but I just could not place it. There was a lot of weird additional stuff my brain was adding to it, such as some cats joining in on the notes in a few places. It was super weird. When I finally gave up and went to go Shazam it on my phone, the song ended before I could get the app running.

Many weeks later, I heard the song again. I immediately wanted to go Shazam the song to identify where it came from, but work suddenly got extremely busy after being dead for hours. The busy period lasted exactly for the length of the song. It played its last notes just as I made it into the back room to open the app. Another failure, but I tried to keep the melody in my head, and for the next hour or so I was humming it. I was desperately trying to lock down this ancient cartoon [I believed] that I had seen as a child.

The melody was so haunting, yet it was also quite optimistic. But there was another feeling I was getting. It felt like, for some reason, the song should be interrupted by some sort of terror. I had in my mind that, even though the song was quite a happy sounding thing, that there was some evil that wanted to kill the singers, and everyone would scream and run for their lives in a panic. None of this was heard in the song coming over the radio, yet I believed I was thinking of the plot of whatever this cartoon was.

These feelings were so powerful, and I yearned so very hard to figure out the riddle my memory was trying to give me. I was also rather shocked that the radio was playing some showtune from such an obscure cartoon that probably nobody cares about anymore, but it happened. And at the end of that hour of constant humming, I had a working theory of what the cartoon was, and when I finally was allowed to make it home, I got on my phone and did a search. My theory was confirmed. I found the film in all of its glory.

"Rupert and the Frog Song" is an animated short film from 1984. It stars the character Rupert Bear who was from a popular series of young children books, which, although popular at the time, nobody really talks about them anymore today. The film seemed largely written and produced by Paul McCartney which seems the most logical explanation as to why the song itself was playing over a store radio so many years later. Still, it surprises me.

The film is an outright fairy tale experience and more than sufficient to be reviewed by this blog. Rupert Bear heads outside to adventure and play. There's a few little bits of dialog at the beginning, showing a few of the other characters from the books, however they are merely cameos. Rupert ends up making his way to a cave hidden by a waterfall where a mass of frogs are preparing for an event which only happens every couple of hundred years.

This is where the song comes into play. They are all getting together to sing the song that I heard at my store. At this point, Rupert, although the main character, takes a step back, and the frogs get center stage for almost the rest of the film. This song is really wonderful. The animation is beautiful and charming. The whole spectacle of it was the point, and the addition of Rupert was really to allow the viewer to feel as if they had come across some amazing secret. I don't mind his inclusion at all.

I laughed when I saw the two cats join into one part of the song. It let me know that I wasn't crazy to think about that earlier. The cats were actually two of three villains. They were paired up with an evil owl who wanted to catch and eat the king and queen frogs. The owl himself was surprisingly spooky and a good addition to the film.

There is a crappy VHS version of this film available on YouTube. I'll link it down below. It's only 13 minutes long. The VHS quality may be bad, but honestly, I think the version I saw as a kid had the same quality, so I wasn't really bothered by it.

I am sad this beautiful piece of animated joy has been sort of forgotten. I am pleased to see that the song is still floating around. That song, by the way, is called "We All Stand Together," and there is a music video for it from the time the short came out. They just show bits and pieces of the short film while showing Paul McCartney singing along with it. Seeing the actual short film is a better experience. Highly recommend this one. Give a piece of quality forgotten media a look and listen.

Here is a link to the YouTube video: https://youtu.be/LSwV-e1J1Oo

This blog was written on February 5, 2022.

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