Restored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2014, Little Annie Rooney is remembered today for Pickford's performance and the high quality associated with its production.

[2] She was perhaps the most powerful woman in Hollywood at the time, and as one of the founders of United Artists, she was able to produce and star in films like Rosita and Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.

[4] The idea for the film's subject – a tough Irish girl from the streets – came to Pickford as she was wandering through a vacant city set on a Hollywood backlot.

The song is referenced twice in the movie's intertitles; written in 1889 but now largely forgotten, it was very popular at the time, also inspiring a comic strip and an animated short film.

[6] To help realize her story, Pickford hired some of the top-tier talent of the day: husband-and-wife screenwriting team Hope Loring and Louis Lighton, who also wrote Wings and It, adapted the story for the screen; Charles Rosher, who would later win an Academy Award for Sunrise, served as the film's cinematographer; William Beaudine, who had found much success working with children in films like Boy of Mine and Penrod and Sam, was chosen by Pickford to direct.

One of the advertisements for the film identifies Annie as "the Princess of the Bowery",[7] an area home to many immigrant populations at the time and known as the skid row of New York until the 1980s.

[8] Pickford's return as a scruffy young girl in Little Annie Rooney was a critical success as well as a triumph at the box office, becoming one of the highest-grossing films of 1925.

[12] This restoration, with a new score composed by Andy Gladbach, has been presented at college campuses, by the American Cinematheque at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual "Mary Pickford Celebration of Silent Film", and on Turner Classic Movies.

[13][14][15][16] Writing in his program notes for the restoration's premiere, Jeffrey Vance observed: "Little Annie Rooney has always been overshadowed by the films that have chronologically surrounded it.

The Academy Film Archive's restoration of Little Annie Rooney reveals the work to be one of her most accomplished efforts and a fine introduction to the art of Mary Pickford.

"[15] Kevin Brownlow wrote of the film, "when you think that it was all shot on the Pickford-Fairbanks backlot... it is all the more remarkable... All the artistry, technical skill, and emotional impact of a medium only thirty years old shine triumphantly through.