The Daydreamer is a 1966 stop motion animated–live action musical fantasy film produced by Videocraft International. Directed by Jules Bass, it was written by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Romeo Muller, based on the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. It features seven original songs by Jules Bass and Maury Laws. The film's opening features the cast in puppet and live form plus caricatures of the cast by Al Hirschfeld. Among the cast were the American actors Paul O'Keefe, Jack Gilford, Ray Bolger and Margaret Hamilton (both from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz), and the Australian actor Cyril Ritchard as the voice of the Sandman. Three of the voice actors: Burl Ives, and Canadian actors Billie Mae Richards and Larry D. Mann, were the voice suppliers for Videocraft's stop motion Christmas television special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964). Some of the character voices were recorded at RCA Studios in Toronto, Ontario, under Bernard Cowan's supervision. The "Animagic" puppet sequences were staged by Don Duga at Videocraft in New York, and supervised by Tadahito Mochinaga at MOM Production in Tokyo, Japan.

The film was Videocraft's first theatrical feature production to be distributed by Embassy Pictures, located in Los Angeles, California and headed by executive producer Joseph E. Levine. Embassy Pictures later theatrically releases the company's two other films in 1967, Mad Monster Party? and The Wacky World of Mother Goose. As an association with Rankin and Bass, Ritchard also made his voice appearance in three of their studio's other animated productions: The Enchanted World of Danny Kaye: The Emperor's New Clothes in 1972, The First Christmas: The Story of the First Christmas Snow in 1975, and The Hobbit in 1977 (his final film role shortly before his death).