Reflections: The Aristocats (1970)

I remember this movie from my childhood—not seeing it, primarily, but rather listening to the songs on a record. (Yes, a record; I do go back that far, though I wasn’t yet born when the movie was first released.) Thinking of it always gives me a sensation of energy, happiness, and excitement. The soundtrack still delivers that, because the film is a full-on jazz and swing party.

I did see the movie as a child, too, but I couldn’t tell you just when.

• The art in the movie retains a sketchy quality, not fully polished, sometimes with unerased pencil marks preserved below the coloring. A couple of spots might’ve needed a little more cleanup, but generally I appreciate it, and it’s in keeping with the film’s overall lively, spontaneous tone.

• The fact that the characters are cats, whose movements are naturally slinky and sinuous, provided a lot of leeway for the romancing between O’Malley and Duchess to be quite sensual. It would NOT be G-rated if human characters did the same things.

• The two boy kittens get kind of a bad deal. They don’t have much chance to shine, while their sister Marie, by comparison, gets a spotlight. Personally I think Marie is awesome, so I’m not too upset by this.

• A simple glance at Duchess’s kittens will show you they are not purebred, except maybe Marie, which suggests Madame has not been too concerned with show-cat breeding standards, foreshadowing her attitude towards one Thomas O’Malley.

• “Rich person leaves all the money to a pampered pet” is a premise you can find in many places (for instance, a Martha Speaks episode about a dog who inherits several million dollars), and generally the person leaving all that money to an animal comes off looking crazy, or at best pitiably eccentric. Madame in The Aristocats, however (who sets off the action by changing her will, not by actually dying) is someone the audience is led to take seriously: she might be lonely but doesn’t feel ridiculous. Much of this is due to her character design, which is stately and elegant; her graceful movements; and her warm, caring expressions and vocal tones. A comic-relief character would likely have been short and round and had glasses that kept slipping down her nose, combined with shaking, fumbling, and fidgeting—without changing any dialogue or plot points.

• Edgar the butler had a LOT to put up with over the years. For instance, who else was going to clean up all that paint the cats left on the piano? And that scene was framed as a regular event.

• It’s interesting how unconcerned the rich, pampered, diamond-collar-wearing Duchess is regarding class. She has no trouble accepting O’Malley or Scatcat or their run-down housing, and it’s O’Malley, not her, who brings up the class divide. He’s not prejudiced against her either, but he knows this is an issue and that someone like her is likely to look down on someone like him. Rejecting plot cliches, both characters can acknowledge their vastly different backgrounds without being hindered by them and without those differences being the source of the attraction.

• Listening to “Everybody Wants to Be a Cat” when I was a child, I didn’t know the slang meaning of “square.” It was some years on before I understood that setting music back to the cave man days was a bad thing; I had some vague idea this meant it was so amazing you felt like you’d been knocked through time.

• The movie has a short “drunkenness is comedy” scene, which to me isn’t so much offensive as quaint, a relic of a different time. Within the story it’s arguable whether the goose was inebriated by choice or as one step in a recipe, which may affect how you judge the scene.

• The dogs with their highly un-Parisian “classic hillbilly” accents are not my favorites.

• My only serious problem with this movie, today, is the presentation of a certain cat among Scatcat’s jazz band. The group is international, with Russian and Italian and supposedly British (I would peg him as Californian, but the credits say otherwise) cats all jamming together. But along with them is a Siamese cat: Siamese by breed, but back then that was considered close enough to merit full-blown racial caricature as Chinese. It’s great that the Asian cat is included as an equal in the band, with no hint of being secondary to the others, but . . . the square-teeth design and the atrocious stereotype dialogue are really hard to stomach. Overall he doesn’t have much screen time, but he actually gets more lines than the other band members (except leader Scatcat), so it’s especially sad that it’s cringe-inducing. In a better world he would’ve been drawn with regular pointy cat-teeth and speak sensible dialogue.