Nobody Knows What it is to be a Cat
The last movie to be approved by Walt Disney and the first to be made after his death, 1970's The Aristocats seems like a safe bet. The premise seems almost identical to Lady and the Tramp except with cats instead of dogs--a cat from the world of wealth and privilege finds herself cast out and her saviour is a scruffy male cat from the wrong side of the tracks. The title of the film even seems to pick up more explicitly on the earlier film's subtextual theme of class. But, while The Aristocats has some great background art and animation, it falls well short of its predecessors in terms of story, character, and suspense.
I'd never really appreciated Disney films as suspense films until I found The Aristocats so utterly lacking in suspense. The characters never seem to be particularly threatened and they don't act like they are. Duchess (Eva Gabor) and her kittens never have anxiety about whether or not their mistress (Hermione Baddeley) loves them the way Lady does about her owners. The kittens never worry about being killed and turned into coats like the dalmatians. And no-one fears being eaten or torn to pieces by a tiger the way Mowgli did.
I'm reminded of my frequent complaints about a lack of suspense in Rebels and The Mandalorian. If this is some secret, set in stone part of Disney's charter, we certainly can't blame Walt Disney himself for it. Nor does this lethal timidity seem to be a permanent fixture after The Aristocats but it does crop up all too often and it's bad in a particular, consistent way. Maybe I could coin a term for it. Would "Mickey's Impotent Softball" be too graphic? I'm not sure I'm so good at coining terms.
Unlike Lady and the Tramp, the film spends much more time focused on the humans in the beginning. Even more than 101 Dalmatians which was at least narrated by Pongo. We get to know Madame Adelaide, the owner of Duchess and her kittens, an eccentric, well animated woman with the kind of large eyes usually reserved for younger characters.
We see her cute, ongoing flirtation with her even better animated lawyer. It's a shame they get the xerox treatment. Madame in particular is unjustly served by technology as her white hair shows seemingly every pencil mark.
I wonder if anyone's considered digitally polishing these movies or if Disney's too married to the idea that this was all a legitimate stylistic choice.
The backgrounds, at least, carry something of the beauty of the French fashion art that inspired them.
Disney's love affair with England--all Disney's animated films of the '60s were based on works by British authors--would finally seem to have broken with The Aristocats being set in Paris, having been written by Americans. Though the movie features a meandering, misguided detour with a group of geese who conspicuously refer to themselves as English again and again. Aside from the visual design, there's not much to give the film a French atmosphere except the opening song is sung by Maurice Chevalier. He performs one of the few remaining songs in the film composed by the Sherman Brothers who departed from the studio after this film, apparently upset by how the company was managed.
One of the most well remembered songs of the film, "Everybody Wants to be a Cat", was written by Floyd Huddleston and Al Rinker. It's performed by the various cats led by Scatman Crothers. Crothers was a last minute replacement for Louis Armstrong but he certainly does a fine job. His presence takes on a little more significance when I'm reminded of his later role in Ralph Bakshi's animated examination of racism and the black experience in America, Coonskin. Recently Disney added disclaimers to their animated films--I was unable to skip this statement at the beginning:
The Chinese cat featured in the "Everyboyy Wants to be a Cat" is certainly a dumb racial caricature--not quite as spiteful as some of the depictions from the '50s but certainly obnoxious. The disclaimer, though, is sure to be meaningless to the average five year old and unlikely to change the mind of the average adult. I suppose it fits with the general unsubstantiality of the "Everybody Wants to be a Cat" sequence which continues the strangeness of the film deliberately invoking economic class only to say absolutely nothing about it. Lady and the Tramp showed Tramp begging for scraps and had a reference to The Lower Depths. The Aristocats showed no apparent difference to how comfortably Duchess lived and how Scatman Crothers lived. The bohemian gang of cats seems to be a softcore fantasy version of Parisian poverty. One wishes this Mickey's Impotent Softball had an ounce of Coonskin's courage, or even just that of The Jungle Book.
After his success with his improvisations as Baloo in The Jungle Book, comedian Phil Harris was brought in to work the same magic with Thomas O'Malley the alley cat. He and Eva Gabor come off a little like Gabor and Eddie Albert in Green Acres but with less tension and chemistry. Harris deliberately chose to play Thomas differently to Baloo and comes off a bit sleazy, making it odd that Duchess naively acquiesces to everything he says and does. The film seems to be aiming for an It Happened One Night style road romance but the oddness of Thomas' arrogance paired with Duchess' dull, inexplicable placidity completely undermines the idea. When two lovers from different economic backgrounds fall in with each other, there ought to be at least a few sparks, that should be obvious.
One key difference to Lady and the Tramp's premise is that Duchess already has offspring from a previous relationship. No comment is made on it by any of the characters until the geese realise Thomas isn't the father of the kittens and they immediately start to decry the scandal. When Lady spent the night in the park with Tramp, any adult would have recognised the tone of the reactions she gets as being like reactions to a young woman having premarital, impulsive sex. But children could also appreciate the tension because, on the surface level, the scandal was to do with Lady having spent the whole night out. There's no such context in The Aristocats and combined with the lack of much character for Duchess, the whole thing falls pretty flat.
The movie also suffers from the absence of an interesting villain. A good villain isn't completely necessary to make a good film but The Aristocats has a lame villain--the butler (Roddy Maude-Roxby) who's trying to get rid of the cats so he can have all the inheritance Madame plans to leave to them. He's thwarted easily by two dogs who are never even aware of the cats' existence and who speak with southern American accents. The film ends on a deflatingly postmodern note as the two dogs argue over who will say the movie has ended.
The scene also reuses animation from earlier in the film without a background. It's hard to imagine how it could have been lazier.
The Aristocats could have been an interesting rumination on the rococo beauty seen in Madame's world contrasted with the hodgepodge aesthetic of Parisian bohemians and the value in each. It could've presented the conundrum of how both worlds can coexist without one of them suffering. Maybe that's a bit much to expect from a Disney film but this is the same company that made Pinocchio.
The Aristocats is available on Disney+.