The Aristocats

The Aristocats (1970)

The Aristocats was the first Disney animated movie to be released after Walt Disney’s death and his absence is definitely felt in this confused, awkward and disappointing feature. The Aristocats is a film that seems to be built entirely on a pun, with an attitude of ‘Eh, we’ll just make up the rest along the way’; it fills the rest of the movie out with pointless filler, while borrowing heavily from any previous Disney film it can along the way, focusing especially on two or three. The result is a confusing mess lacking any sense of heart, drive, or purpose, an empty shell of a movie propped up with unfunny slapstick and boring character stereotypes. And besides, the pun wasn’t even that good to begin with.

Once again, the xerography technique of animation is used (like I said, it lasted a while) and by this point, it’s really getting boring to look at; the first use of it in 101 Dalmatianswas so new and visually striking that it worked, it got along alright for the next two films but by this point, I’m growing kind of sick of looking at it. On top of that, this may very well be the roughest the animation has looked yet, perhaps even moreso than in its debut in101 Dalmatians; the lines are so thick and scratchy it frequently looks as if we’re just looking at the animator’s most basic of sketches that simply haven’t been cleaned up at all. Like I said, the first appearance of this technique may have looked new and interesting, but Disney knew it couldn’t ride on that novelty and had to clean things up a bit and at least make it look a little more professional, there are slip ups and rough lines inThe Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book but nothing on the level we see here. The animation for The Aristocats just comes off as lazy and stagnant, as it seems to get worse than what we’ve seen before, rather than better; some of the characters look better than others, Duchess in particular is quite well animated, but for the most part things are rather weak.

The character designs go hand in hand with the animation style, they’re the same kind of angular, more stylised models etc. etc. we’ve seen this enough by this point too, there really is no creativity to them, they look exactly like the casts of 101 Dalmatians and, to a lesser extent, The Jungle Book, really nothing new; honestly, I think some of them, particularly O’Malley, Edgar, Roquefort and the two dogs, are borderline ugly. Once again the backgrounds are rather nice – though to be honest, it’s pretty hard to make Paris look ugly – but they don’t really gel with the character models, on more than one occasion you can very clearly see the separation between the characters and the backgrounds, which looks distracting and amateurish. The colours are all kind of dull and washed out, everything looks like it’s been put through a dark filter or had a large shadow cast over it, leaving its colours without any zest or vibrancy and making the whole film rather visually unappealing. At the end of the day, it’s Disney, so the animation is rarely going to be objectively terrible and there are some nice aspects to it here, but it’s certainly below their standard of quality.

‘Now my pets, let’s try and pretend I have a real family so that I can cover up my crushing loneliness and ignore the fact

that I’ve wasted my entire life.’

The story is one of the laziest and poorly structured we’ve seen yet, it can’t seem to decide if it wants to be Lady and the Tramp with cats or 101 Dalmatians with cats, but it certainly wants to be one of them; the setting of the movie, in early 20th Century Paris, is far too similar in look and feel to the settings in these previous films, being American suburbia and London, in the same timeframe, respectively. It borrows liberally from both film’s stories, from 101 Dalmatians it takes the group of lost animals trying to find their way home from the country side, while getting help from a cast of other kooky animals along the way and from Lady and the Tramp the budding romance between a pampered house pet from a rich family and a tough, streetwise stray. By trying to cram these two stories together, along with a number of pointless subplots, the film has no time to properly develop either one; though there is a clear plotline – O’Malley is trying to get Duchess and the kittens back to Paris – this story is never well developed in and of itself, it never becomes an exciting adventure or a fun road movie, things are just constantly sidetracked by other characters, so as to ensure the cats don’t reach Paris before the film has hit the eighty minute mark.

I mean really think about it, what is the point of this movie? What is its narrative arc? Well let’s look at the kinds of things you might expect from this kind of story, considering what we’ve seen in films like the aforementioned 101 Dalmatians or Lady and the Tramp, as well as other films that use this kind of formula; perhaps the main arc of the movie belongs to Duchess and the kittens, whose experiences in the country side, where they must fend for themselves, cause them to grow from pampered and naive house pets into more independent and fully rounded characters who are able to take care of themselves and get a new perspective on life? No, the characters are guided and constantly rescued by O’Malley from day one, they never learn to take care of themselves, they never gain any new skills or opinions, they are helpless and naive right up until the climax, where they are once again captured by Edgar and need O’Malley’s help; the closest any of them come to character development is that Duchess learns to call O’Malley’s home a “pad” and likes jazz. Brilliant. Well, what about O’Malley? Maybe the movie is all about him learning to care about others, to go from a selfish loner, who drifts from place to place, to a caring and mature father figure, with a definite home. Again, no, because all this development seems to take place completely within O’Malley’s very first scene – he hits on Duchess, gets a little scared off when he finds out she has kids, but then realises he should help her out anyway and immediately makes the switch from loner alley cat to caring family man, with no room for any further development. There is a point late in the film where O’Malley says ‘All those little kids Duchess, I love ‘em’ to which I had to ask, why? They never seem to have any meaningful interactions, there is no development of their relationship, he just seems to show up and love the kids within his first couple of minutes on screen; character development is a dirty word in The Aristocats, here, everyone ends up exactly how they started off.

Stand by Meow

Even most of the subplots are entirely pointless, halfway through the movie the cats bump into a couple of geese called Abigail and Amelia, who take complete control of the film for a while, as their quest to find their Uncle Waldo takes centre stage. Where does this lead? NOWHERE, they get to Paris, there’s Uncle Waldo, the geese go off with him and we never see them again (except as part of the big dance party between all the characters at the end) what was the point of this? That’s a question I found myself asking a lot throughout the film as it became steadily more and more apparent that very few scenes are actually important or necessary, and that most of them serve no purpose other than to pad the film out – it’s just filler. Even worse than the geese’s is a subplot about Edgar trying to get back his umbrella and hat from the two dogs who stole them, (don’t ask) Napoleon and Lafayette, because he fears the police will catch on that he’s the cat burglar if they find them; what is the point of this? You guessed it, NOTHING, this one really takes the cake as it is of absolutely no consequence to the main story – at least those two geese spent time with the main characters, even if they didn’t really help them or add anything to the situation and then just left, at least they were part of the main action, but this is just completely meaningless. Edgar doesn’t end up getting caught because of his hat and umbrella, the dogs don’t come back to fight him or help the cats, absolutely nothing about this subplot comes back in any way, making the scenes entirely pointless. Honestly, it’s like the writers of this film knew absolutely nothing about the fundamentals of screen writing or even basic storytelling; this is not the work of seasoned veterans, these are the most basic and elementary mistakes you can make.

The only subplot that even comes close to having a purpose is the one where Roquefort the mouse and Frou-Frou the horse learn that Edgar was the one who kidnapped the cats – well, learn is probably too generous, considering Edgar just tells them – and then Roquefort goes on a quest to find the cats. Roquefort does eventually end up helping the cats by getting O’Malley and his friends to help out, but that’s just because Duchess asks him to, it has nothing to do with his previous storyline – he doesn’t find the cats, he doesn’t do anything to hinder Edgar, there’s even one scene where he stows away on the back of Edgar’s motorbike in an attempt to follow him to the cats... but then he just falls off. Why put him on the motorbike in the first place if he’s not going to do anything!? It’s mind-boggling how poorly written this film is, there are so many scenes and character stories that just go absolutely nowhere, it’s just nothing but filler. I’m not asking for Hamlet, but my God, SOMETHING would be nice, the film just has no purpose whatsoever. This film is entirely lacking in not only direction, but meaningful conflict; oh sure, there’s conflict, but it’s always resolved almost immediately and then the characters go back to dicking around and doing nothing important, where is the threat? Where is the driving force for the story? For that matter, where is the story to begin with? The pacing is equally bad, things take way too long to get started and then, when the plot is finally in motion, things go absolutely nowhere and the film continually passes the baton to other characters who have little to no bearing on the situation whatsoever; to call this film a mess would be a compliment, it’s a complete disaster.

Pretty much how I ended up after this movie finished

The characters are as flat and tasteless as communion wafers, there is just nothing to them – at best they’re completely defined by a singular, one-dimensional stereotype, at worst they just seem to have no personality at all. The only characters that come close to being any good are Duchess and O’Malley, Duchess is very well voice acted by Eva Gabor who is energetic and spirited in her delivery and really brings life to the character, which is matched well by some nice, subtle touches in Duchess’ animation. Phil Harris tries his best with O’Malley and manages some good moments, but he is just not given enough to work with; O’Malley is such a lazy attempt at recreating the charm of Tramp and Baloo that he ends up with no real personality of his own, his traits are just on loan from his predecessors, to the point that they even slap Baloo’s voice on him, hoping that things will work themselves out. That sums up a lot of this movie really, just throwing stuff together and hoping things will work themselves out, but unfortunately for Disney, nothing really does.

All the other characters are awful, not just boring, but legitimately really bad: okay, the kittens aren’t nearly as annoying as kid characters can be, but they’re still a pain and I’m sorry but these kids, the little girl in particular, just cannot act, they are very difficult to listen to. Frou-Frou barely does anything at all and Roquefort is just annoying, he won’t stop yammering on and has no interesting quirks; Scat Cat and his crew don’t really get much time, except for Scat Cat himself who is okay I suppose, but all we get from the rest of his group is one or two lines which sum up which ethnic stereotype they represent. While most of them aren’t really too bad, the Chinese cat is really quite offensive – it always seems to be the Chinese in Disney movies, huh? – Honestly, I know racial inequality was hardly stamped out in 1970, but I really think it’s too late to vindicate the kind of stuff going on with this character: huge buck teeth, slanty eyes, broken English, saying l’s as r’s, playing the piano with chopsticks and singing about fortune cookies, it’s really unacceptable, even for the time and is probably one of, if not the worst racial stereotype in a Disney animated feature. I hate Abigail and Amelia, they are so obnoxious, they just won’t stop talking or cackling like idiots, they are incredibly frustrating to watch and listen to; similarly annoying are Napoleon and Lafayette who yammer on in a grating southern twang and constantly play out the same tired comic routine like a couple of Abbott and Costello wannabes. Seriously, they have this stupid bit where Napoleon says he hears something really complex, then Lafayette will say it’s just something simple, Napoleon insists that he’s the leader and therefore decides what they’re hearing, before conceding that it is indeed what Lafayette heard. Disney evidently thought this was hilarious, as they use it FOUR times over the course of the movie, this quickly becomes insufferable, as it wasn’t even funny the first time; inexplicably, this is the note that they choose to end the movie on, because the bit was just SOOOO funny, that they had to cram another one in before the ending, it’s just insane how blind they seem to be as to what works and what doesn’t, as they fill the entire movie with the things that don’t work and leave the very few things that do by the wayside.

Playing Chopsticks with chopsticks

The villain, Edgar, is just the worst, if you can even call him a villain, he is pathetic; not threatening, not charming, not cool, not interesting, not funny, not enjoyable, simply not good on any conceivable level, not in this world, or in any other world, galaxy, universe or parallel dimension. He’s not even really evil, he’s just kind of a jerk, but not in an interesting or understated way either, he’s just a frustrated guy and, to be honest, with good reason; his boss - who he has seemingly served loyally for many years, putting up with her weird obsession with her cats and her refusal to discipline them or stop them from walking all over his face while he’s trying to steer a carriage - decides to bequeath all her living possessions to her cats before him. Edgar is pretty justified in thinking this is unfair and INCREDIBLY STUPID, cats do not need money, jewels or a mansion, it makes no sense; of course kidnapping the cats is still reprehensible, but with this in mind, you almost forgive Edgar for doing it, he’s not a dick about it or anything and continually refuses to kill the cats even though it would clearly make his life easier, is he really supposed to be a villain? Yet, he’s not really likeable either because, like the rest of the characters, he is annoying and tiresome, constantly tumbling around, stumbling over his words, getting involved in goofy slapstick with animals and just generally failing to entertain. It’s like watching a clown at the circus, it’s not funny it’s just embarrassing – hit yourself in the face with a pie or trip over your own shoelaces if you want, but I’m not going to laugh, I’m just going to feel sorry for you, it’s pathetic.

There are only three songs in the film, not including “The Aristocats” which plays during the opening titles and to be honest, is decent. As for the songs in the film proper, “Thomas O’Malley Cat” is lame and fundamentally stupid, who just walks around singing their name? Is this supposed to be charming, or funny? Is it supposed to give us an insight into O’Malley’s character? I don’t get it, it’s just bad and really awkward. “Scales and Arpeggios” is crappy and, I’m sorry to pick on the child actors again, but the girl who plays the female kitten, Marie, just cannot sing; the only good song and, really, the only thing anyone ever really remembers about this movie is “Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat” which wasn’t quite as good as I remember it, but at that point I was so sick of the film I might have been in too bad a mood to really enjoy it, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. It’s a good, jazzy song, it’s very catchy and it has some fun, if not very clever, lyrics; it is undoubtedly the best part of the movie and one of the few scenes that doesn’t bore you to death, even though, like most of the others, it still has nothing to do with the story.

‘Now what do you say we go eat some spaghetti?’

The Aristocats is an embarrassingly hollow film, one without any sense of life, purpose, fun or creativity; it starts nowhere and goes nowhere, has nothing to say and brings nothing new to the table. It’s a movie comprised almost entirely of filler, a huge amount of the scenes don't service the story or progress the plot in any way, but are simply transparent attempts to pad out a movie which is based around a fundamentally weak idea. Clearly, Disney just had nothing to work with here, they should have just acknowledged that and either retooled the idea or scrapped it entirely and started from scratch, instead they lazily try to surround it with an array of subplots that go nowhere and loud, but empty characters, like covering up a crack in a wall with an ugly painting. UnlikeCinderella, I do feel a little bad attacking The Aristocats so fiercely, as it’s mostly harmless, it’s kind of like picking on the disabled kid at school, it’s just sad; nevertheless, it’s really impossible to ignore the fact that this is just a bad movie and a dreadful bore.

Other Thoughts:

At least it has the decency to tell you when it’s finally over