The Aristocats

Indulgence is required; the Greek chorus of the WordPress 4 have requested that I review the 1970’s Disney cat-related swingers musical The Aristocats as part of the on-going search for cultural meaning that includes us all. I had reasonably fond memories of seeing the good bits of this on Disney Time, a popular but now largely forgotten aggregator show remembered from the BBC bank holidays. This show featured a tv presenter or pop star who would stand around a rather dismal seaside resort linking clips of Disney movies. This not-so-subtle breaking of advertising rules was presumably because Disney was considered a high-end film-maker sharing content, but it worked out as a straight-up ad for their wares.

Despite live action successes mixed with animated ones, Disney corp was in something of a creative decline from The Jungle Book on. Here, we bring back Phil Harris for another go-around in the style of his lovable Baloo the Bear, this time as Thomas O’Malley, an alley cat who gets some kidnapped kitties out of all kinds of bother. Together with Duchess (Eva Gabor), kittens Tolouse, Marie and Berloiz have been left behind a fortune in a will by an aging matriarch, leaving the door open for her snide butler to stuff them in a sack and cat-nap them. The catties escape, with a little help from Thomas O’Malley, and soon get indoctrinated into open use narcotics by some heroin-addicted jazz cats led by The Shining’s Scatman Crothers doing a feisty Louis Armstrong impression.

The Aristocats is at its best when it gets a little rinky dinky dinky, a musical interlude featuring the song Everybody Wants to Be A Cat is the kind of perfect Disney moment the rest of the film sorely lacks, despite a few dated caricatures. The remainder is drab story-wise and animation wise; while the faces and characters of the wee cats are charming, the human world they interact with is rather 2D. There’s a lot of waffle in Wolfgang Reitherman’s film about wills and money; the opener is a total snoozer for all ages as various arcane legal matters are discussed.

Like The Jungle Book, The Aristocats falls into a formula of a couple of great songs and not much else. I would offer in its place, Gay Purr-ee, a superior 1962 Judy Garland predecessor about a nice little cat called Mewsette who gets lost in Paris. I think I had this back when I only had three books, and images from it are seared on my retinas for posterity. So don’t waste your time with these scaredy cat Disney aristocats, and come with me to explore the demi-monde with the modernist pussycats from Gay Purr-ee….