I love watching movies I loved as a kid. It always brings with them such a feeling of nostalgia, and Annie is no different. I loved it then, and I still love it now.

Set in the depression in New York City, Annie is a movie…based on a Broadway Musical…based on a comic strip…about a spunky little girl with a lot of life living in an orphanage and acting as a mother character for the younger kids. This orphanage is dirty and all the little girls are supposed to be in charge of the cleaning. They all wear rags and sleep in cots. And the best part is Miss Hannigan (Carol Burnett). She’s the drunk flapper orphanage manager (?) who has a lot of issues with self esteem. Her character is so fabulous. She’s constantly carrying around a bottle of what I can only assume is straight vodka, bumbling a round and running into walls, and forcing the little girls to say, in unison, “We love you Miss Hannigan!”Annie is very close with all of her little orphan counterparts, except for one older bully, but when the secretary of a billionaire, Grace (Ann Reinking), comes to the orphanage to choose a child to stay at the billionaire’s house for a week, Annie coerces her from behind a door to choose her. So she gets to stay with Oliver Warbucks (Albert Finney) for a week, who didn’t want a little girl, but a boy, but does he sure warm up to her. She gets to live the life in a huge mansion replete with marble floors and staircases, and a huge fleet of servants at her disposal, indoor pool, all the luxuries of the wealthy lifestyle, and even gets a full new wardrobe. But she’s never forgotten her birth parents who share a piece of the broken locket she wears around her neck, so when Daddy Warbucks truly grows to love her, he decides to make it his mission to find her parents.

Annie is filled with such fantastic characters, and watching it again now I was so shocked that I recognized some of the actors. Tim Curry is Rooster, Miss Hannigan’s sleeze-ball brother, Albert Finney as Daddy Warbucks, a much younger Edward Herrmann as FDR, and you can’t forget the Buddhist Turban-wearing magician, Punjab (Geoffrey Holder).

I, as a general practice, detest musicals. I’ve just never really gotten into them. In high school I was in band, so of course I had to see all the musicals and be somewhat involved as the whole performance art department was one of the same, and it didn’t make me miserable, but I’ve just never truly understood what’s so amazing about the whole musical experience. Maybe if I gave some a fair chance I might be okay with them, but I think it’s the Andrew Lloyd Weber ones that really do it in for me. But this…is not a musical. This is just fantastic. I’m sure a lot of my nostalgia is in play here, but I just love this whole movie. I even do like it on stage…I was a costume designer for the play when my high school put it together. But all of the characters are so great: Miss Hannigan especially . Carol Burnett is golden in anything she does, but in Annie especially, and her character does do a turnabout toward the end and actually winds up being not such a bad person. I even love the songs (I find myself singing them every once in a while just because they somehow found their way in my head), and the choreography with all the little orphans…just fabulous. The sets, too: the huge estate of Warbucks and the dirty orphanage…and Radio City Music Hall. It’s all too much. So fabulous.

So if anyone has not seen Annie they’ve truly been living under a rock, but if that is the case, do yourself a favor and watch it. It’s kitschy and cheesy and definitely a Chick Flick. But it’s fabulous nonetheless. My five stars may include my nostalgia, but it’s a five-star worthy film.