Classic love story of an orphan and the carnival.

A perfectly amiable if rather aimless fantasy rooted in pleasant dance choreography, an admittedly appealing candy-colored aesthetic & the good sense to wrap it up in 80 minutes rather than tilt toward 180 as most such stories from the era tended to do.

Its widespread popularity is amusing when one considers that it’s basically a story about jailbait caught between a shallow, 42-year-old womanizer and a self-pitying, 36-year-old grouch, with the latter even smacking the hell out of Lili at one point.

This is an astonishingly fragile and lovely film and is hereby highly recommended.