Review: The AristoCats

Set in Paris in the early 1900s, the film centres around the treasured cats of a wealthy elderly woman (voiced by Hermione Baddeley) who wants to change her will to leave all her belongings to her cats. Her scheming butler Edgar (who will only inherit the fortune after all the cats are dead) hears of this and plots to get rid of the cats. After being dumped in the middle of nowhere the cats, led by matriarch Duchess (voiced by Eva Gabor!) try to find their way home. Along the way they run into jazz-loving alley cat O’Malley (voiced by the inimitable Phil Harris), who agrees to help them get back home, and along the way, introduces them to the toe-tapping delights of jazz music. Scatman Crothers voices Scat Cat, a hip musician associate of O’Malley.

 

Here’s a Disney animated film I needed to catch-up on, as this 1970 film from director Wolfgang Reitherman (“Sleeping Beauty”, “The Jungle Book”, “Robin Hood”) came out ten years before I was born, and it hasn’t appeared on TV much since. That’s a shame, because although no classic, it’s still quite a lovely film. It’s an adorable film, really, and you just want to cuddle it and squeeze its cheeks. Just don’t watch “The Aristocrats” by mistake, they are absolutely NOT the same movie.

 

Things don’t get off to a great start, I must say, with an entirely unintelligible song by Maurice Chevalier. I seriously couldn’t understand one word of it. Thankfully things improve after that and never look back. The animation of the characters is in the mould of “The Fox and the Hound” and nothing brilliant, but as a cat lover, these are some really lovely pussies…er…cats. The French scenery backgrounds are interesting too, and as much as the hand-drawn Disney animation has dated, it sure didn’t date as fast as the more recent mixture of angular hand-drawn animation and computer-aided animation of the 90s-00s, which already looks awkward by 2014 standards.

 

The voice cast, however, don’t sound French for the most part. The inimitable Pat Buttram and his hayseed voice is particularly out of place here, and it’s rather unfortunate that Roquefort the mouse (voiced by Sterling Holloway) sounds exactly like Winnie the Pooh for obvious reasons. And as for Nancy Culp, AKA Mrs. Hathaway voicing a horse named Frou-Frou…no comment. When Phil Harris’ jazzy alley cat O’Malley turns up and leads the cats to see a performance by Scatman Crothers’ Scat Cat (who actually sounds more like Louis Armstrong, and apparently Satchmo was supposed to play the part originally but couldn’t due to illness), one gets the feeling this ought to have been set in New Orleans. Harris is nonetheless good as always, and Crothers steals the whole show (as he quite often did over the years). Their duet together is terrific and the film’s highlight. Eva Gabor is absolutely spot-on as the only remotely non-American or non-British sounding character in the film. Truth be told, though, the accents don’t matter because even Buttram is fun in a dopey slapstick way. There’s a very funny bit involving two very British tourist geese who try to teach O’Malley to swim…not very successfully.

 

If I have any real criticism with the film, it’s that the plot involving a butler trying to get rid of the cats who are the sole inheritors of his employers estate, comes off like a plot from a Looney Tunes cartoon. You could easily see Sylvester and Tweety acting this scenario out (And I say that as a Looney Tunes fan, don’t get me wrong). I’m not sure why it took a whopping seven people to write such a simple screenplay, in addition to two others writing the story. The screenplay is by Ken Anderson (“Pinocchio”, “Cinderella”, “The Jungle Book”), Larry Clemmons (“The Jungle Book”, “Robin Hood”, “The Fox and the Hound”), Eric Cleworth (“Sleeping Beauty”, “One Hundred and One Dalmatians”), Vance Gerry (“The Jungle Book”, “The Fox and the Hound”, “The Black Cauldron”), Julius Svendsen (a former Disney animator), Frank Thomas (a former Disney animator), and Ralph Wright (“Peter Pan”, “The Jungle Book”, “Lady and the Tramp”).

 

Personally I think this is a slightly better film than “The Fox and the Hound”, and is a cute and entertaining film. The music and the vocal trio of Scatman Crothers, Phil Harris, and Eva Gabor are worth seeing alone, even if you’re a cat hater. But if you’re a cat hater, you pretty much suck then don’t you?

 

Rating: B-