Lady and the Tramp

Lady and the Tramp (1955)

When I was a kid, Lady and the Tramp was the only one of the “classic” Disney movies I never saw; in fact, other than a few of the package films like Make Mine Music or Melody Time, it was the only Disney movie I never saw. I used to have a babysitter who would look after me at the same time as her grandchildren, who she’d pamper and spoil, while I got pretty much ignored, making her oddly similar to a character from this movie, incidentally. I remember one thing very vividly – she would always put on Lady and the Tramp for her grandkids to watch, but I was never allowed to watch with them and I had to sit in the corner with my back turned to the TV and look at the wall. Perhaps it was this experience, which looking back on it now sounds like something out of a Roald Dahl book, that turned me against Lady and the Tramp, because for years I intentionally dismissed and ignored it and deliberately avoided ever watching it; it was only very recently that I finally saw it for the very first time. I came to Lady and the Tramp with no childhood memories and few preconceived notions – I only ever knew about the spaghetti scene and those creepy Siamese cats – and viewed it with completely new eyes. Is that really so important? Probably not. Would I have liked it more as a kid? Probably not. Either way, for about ninenteen years of waiting, Lady and the Tramp delivered about as best as it could – it’s pretty okay.

Artistically, the film is thankfully a bit of a step up from the last few films, but not by all that much; though it’s not as colourful or imaginative as Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland, the animation quality and attention to detail is generally improved. The character designs are mostly pretty standard, the human characters look very similar to those from Peter Panand Cinderella, they are mostly wooden and bland looking, but fortunately, they are not the focus of the movie. While the animal characters are hardly fantastically designed either, they at least have some level of personality and creativity and all stand out from one another; Lady is probably the best designed of them all, her wide, round eyes and open mouth relate her sense of naive curiosity and sweet innocence very effectively. She has a very cute and cuddly design that means you just want to reach in the screen and pet her, which I imagine is probably what the animators were going for, so well done there, I guess. The animation on the dogs is pretty good too, Disney demonstrate once again that they seem to have a better handle on animating animals than they do humans, at least in these earlier years, though some of the more cartoony humans such as Tony and Joe, who work at the Italian restaurant, are well suited to their animation style as well. The animators studied a lot of different dog breeds in order to get their particular quirks and nuances down right and it definitely comes across – the dogs all move like real dogs, they have a lot of nice little touches, particularly in the way that they walk, which they got just right; it’s not quite as good as the animal animation in Bambi, but it’s more complex animation than we’ve seen in a while. The backgrounds are great, they don’t exactly stand out, but I suppose they aren’t really supposed to, they are more like paintings that have carefully been constructed for the characters to walk around in. The shots of the suburban street that Lady lives on, particularly the opening shots, which take place on Christmas night, are very beautiful and perfectly capture a sense of early 20^th century American suburbia, the attention to detail is very impressive and it really helps create a strong setting for the film. Another great shot is of Lady standing on the landing, looking up the stairs to the baby’s room, as light shines in through the large window; the use of angles and lighting is fantastic; on the whole, the general art design of this movie is very nice.

Looking like Kubrick or something

The story is sweet and simple, if not very engaging, the plot is very basic and lacking in much drama – there is no real villain, except the rat, who seems to have a weird fixation with killing the baby (Really, what does the rat get out of it, is he just that evil?) and to an extent, Aunt Sarah; Lady is an upper-class dog who is afraid that her owners’ new baby will take attention away from her, but soon grows protective of the child, she then meets the lower-class Tramp and they fall in love. That’s really all there is to it, this is simply another light hearted comedy, though rather than Alice in Wonderland which is more over the top and zany or Peter Pan, which tries to add in action and adventure as well, Lady in the Tramp remains grounded and never goes too wild or farcical. Though to some degree, this is a good thing, as it means there are no awkward shifts in tone and the movie doesn’t have to split its running time between comedy and action, it also means that the film never really takes off or goes anywhere that interesting, it’s just consistently pleasant. The humour isn’t exactly laugh out loud funny either, it’s just cute, as is most of the film, but it never becomes too cute or anything, it’s just kind of nice all the way through; one of the funnier parts of the film is the fact that all the dogs think that Lady’s owners are called Jim Dear and Darling, because that’s what they always call one another. That’s what the humour is like, it’s hardly comedy gold, it’s just cute little stuff that’ll make you smile; this might not be much, but I don’t think the film was really going for much more, so I suppose in that regard it does its job pretty well.

The World’s Greatest Criminal Mind

There are quite a lot of characters in Lady and the Tramp, though they mostly only get a couple of scenes each, they aren’t really characters so much as character designs, vehicles to show off how differently Disney can animate each different type of animal, most prominently, different breeds of dog. It’s a nice idea, but it gets old pretty fast, in one scene Lady is taken to the pound pretty much solely so we can see a bunch of different dog breeds say about two lines each, many of which are given stereotypes to match their origin, such as a Chihuahua who speaks in an over the top Mexican accent and sleeps a lot. Yeah. Similarly, there’s a scene where Lady and Tramp go to a zoo and meet a bunch of different animals, including a beaver who seems to be the origin for Gopher from The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, then of course there’s the famous scene with the Siamese cats, there’s just a lot of scenes where Lady meets different animals for Disney to animate, you get the idea. The human characters aren’t given much time either, Jim Dear and Darling are just nice and that’s about it, though admittedly, they are supposed to be distant figures, removed from Lady and the other animals, so this works pretty well. Probably the most lively of any of the characters is Aunt Sarah, whose extreme personality is kind of jarringly at odds with the rest of the film’s down to earth and relaxed nature; she’s really annoying, but she’s supposed to be, so I guess she works pretty well, for what she is.

The most prominent of the side characters are Jock and Trusty, Lady’s neighbours and sidekicks who are also pretty generic clichés – Jock is a Scottish Terrier who speaks in a strong Scottish accent and has a bit of a temper and Trusty is a slow talking, dim-witted bloodhound who rambles on a lot; there’s nothing especially annoying about them, but they’re a bit of a bore. Lady herself is alright, once again she’s another nice but boring and relatively passive protagonist, but it works better here because she’s a pampered pet so it fits that she’s kind of naive about the world; still, the archetype is wearing a little thin. Lady does have a degree of charm to her though, helped by her aforementioned cute and cuddly design and her voice, provided Barbara Luddy, which is enjoyably breathy and husky and helps add a lot to her character. Tramp is probably the best of the characters, he’s a classically loveable scoundrel, a bit of a trickster and a joker, but he’s got a good heart; it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but it’s done well enough that he comes off as likeable and fun rather than generic or annoying. The romance between the two isn’t exactly well developed or powerful, but it’s at least given more time to grow than previous ones, such as Cinderella and Prince Charming or Snow White and her nameless Prince, who both share about two scenes and seem to fall in love over a few minutes. Lady and Tramp at least spend a decent amount of time together, get to know each other and we see the sowing of the seeds of their relationship, before it blossoms; it’s not a fantastic love story and, surprisingly, it’s not even really the focus of the film, but it’s sweet enough and it's refreshing to see Disney do a love story that is a little more downplayed.

Lady and the Tramp and the Spaghetti and the Meatballs

There aren’t that many songs and they’re a little disappointing, though they are more like actual musical numbers than those in Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland, they are still pretty short and don’t really take centre stage, they’re more like short breathers the movie takes before getting back to the “action”. “Bella Notte” is rather nice and its use in the movie’s most famous scene, where Lady and Tramp have dinner, is good; it’s a sweet song, though not an inventive one. Disney also continues its tradition of progressively more racially insensitive songs with “We Are Siamese”, featuring Siamese cats that act like Asian caricatures, with big buck teeth, broken English and accents close to Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s level. They’re definitely pretty rough stereotypes, but the song is still very memorable and enjoyable with some nice lyrics, though unfortunately it doesn’t really last as a song for very long and the cats quickly start just speaking the lines, rather than singing them, which is a bit of a bummer. Still, while it lasts, “We Are Siamese” is a good, if slightly offensive number – any song that manages to rhyme something with ‘domicile’ is okay by me. The other songs are pretty forgettable, except for “He’s a Tramp”, though I personally don’t really care for it, if only because it strikes me as just an excuse for Peggy Lee to do a number, as she voices the dog who sings it who is also called Peg. If it was a great song it might not bother me and to a degree it has a nice, jazzy tune, but I dunno I just don’t really like it, something about that Peggy Lee dog singing it like she’s a lounge singer or something just rubs me the wrong way.

After years of build-up, constantly hearing about it being one of the classic Disney movies and seeing a few of its more famous scenes over and over, Lady and the Tramp was never going to meet my expectations, but that isn’t the movie’s fault. As it is, Lady and the Tramp is a perfectly fine movie; the animals are cute, the love story is basic, but sweet, the animation is good and it never gets too in your face. It’s a very warm comedy, seemingly designed not to make you laugh so much as make you smile and it definitely achieves that, I find it hard to believe that anyone could hate or especially dislike this movie, it’s just too darn pleasant. While unfortunately, this desire to please means thatLady and the Tramp never takes any risks and so, never becomes all that interesting or unique, it also prevents itself from ever taking any nasty missteps. Lady and the Trampseems to have been made with the almost deliberate intention of just being “pretty good” and while something can be said about the dangers of setting low goals for oneself, it paid off here; Lady and the Tramp isn’t a knockout, but it’s pretty good.

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