8 / 10
Official trailer
After Walt
The Aristocats is the first Disney animated feature completed after Walt Disney’s death. He had approved the project before he died in December 1966, and the studio’s animators finished it without him, working in the relaxed, jazzy style of The Jungle Book. It came out in December 1970, and it’s a gentle, charming, very enjoyable film, and also a slighter one than the studio’s best.
Wolfgang Reitherman directed it, as he did most of Disney’s animated features of that era. It was a big success, and it has become a favorite with families, especially for its music.
I give it an 8. It’s not one of Disney’s masterpieces, but it’s warm, funny and stylish, and its best musical number ranks with anything the studio ever produced.
What wins me over is how little this film asks of me. It wanders around Paris with a family of cats, plays me some jazz and sends me home happy, and I find that disarming. It never grabs me the way the studio’s best do, and that’s the gap between this film and a 9.
It’s also a film with a particular place in Disney history. The studio had lost its founder, its guiding creative force for more than forty years, and there were real questions about whether it could continue. The Aristocats proved it could, at least for a while, and its success kept the animation department going through a difficult decade.
Paris, 1910
The film takes place in Paris in 1910. Duchess, an elegant white cat, lives in luxury with her three kittens, Toulouse, Berlioz and Marie, in the grand house of their owner, Madame Adelaide Bonfamille, a retired opera singer. Madame adores her cats, and she decides to leave her fortune to them, with the house passing to her butler, Edgar, only after they die.
Edgar overhears, and he does the arithmetic. Cats have many lives, and he doesn’t want to wait. So he drugs the cats’ cream, carries them into the countryside at night and abandons them. Duchess and her kittens wake up far from home, lost and frightened, with no idea how to get back.
The setup is simple, and the film treats it lightly. Edgar is less a villain than a bumbling crook, and the danger is never very great. The film is more interested in the trip home, with its barns, rivers, trains and rooftops, than in the peril, and in the characters the cats meet along the way. It’s closer to a gentle road trip than a thriller, and it’s all the more relaxing for it.
For Writers
Edgar abandons the cats to get the inheritance sooner. The villain’s motive is small and petty, and the film keeps the danger light to match its tone.
When you write a story with a gentle tone, the villain’s scale should match. An overly frightening antagonist can break the mood the story needs.
Decide the emotional temperature of your story before designing its villain. Choose a threat that fits the tone, and keep it consistent throughout. I cover this in more depth in my piece on why villain motivations fall apart.
Duchess
Eva Gabor voices Duchess, and she gives her an elegant, warm, faintly Hungarian charm that suits a cat who has spent her life in luxury. Duchess is refined, graceful and kind, and she’s determined to raise her kittens properly, teaching them music, painting and manners even while they’re lost in the wilderness, and her calm under pressure is dryly funny.
She’s also braver than she looks. She has never fended for herself, and she’s out of her depth in the countryside, and she keeps her head and protects her kittens throughout. It’s a gentle, dignified character, and Gabor’s voice makes her one of Disney’s most appealing heroines, and she’s one of the few Disney mothers who survives the whole film.
Duchess is also a mother first, and the film never forgets it. Every decision she makes is about her kittens, and her gradual willingness to trust O’Malley comes from seeing how kind he is to them. It gives the romance a gentle, grown-up logic that most animated love stories lack, and it makes O’Malley’s final decision to join the family feel earned.
O’Malley
Thomas O’Malley, a streetwise, charming alley cat who wanders through life with no home and no responsibilities, rescues Duchess and the kittens. Phil Harris voices him, just as he voiced Baloo in The Jungle Book, and O’Malley is Baloo as a cat: relaxed, funny, warm-hearted and a little lazy, a charmer who has avoided responsibility all his life.
O’Malley falls for Duchess and offers to guide her and the kittens back to Paris. Their relationship, between the refined aristocrat and the scruffy vagabond, is the heart of the film. The romance is gentle and grown-up. The kittens adore him, and by the end, O’Malley, who never wanted a family, has found one.
His introductory song, in which he explains his carefree philosophy of life, is charming, and Harris’s easy, growling delivery makes it one of the film’s best moments. It’s a sign of how much the studio relied on his warmth that they built another lead around him so soon after Baloo, and he went on to voice Little John in Robin Hood three years later.
Harris is my favorite thing in the film after the attic number. He sounds like he’s having the easiest afternoon of his life, and the ease is contagious. I don’t mind at all that O’Malley is Baloo with whiskers, and the studio was right to go back to him a third time for Robin Hood.
For Writers
O’Malley, the carefree vagabond, falls for Duchess, the refined aristocrat. The attraction of opposites gives the film its warmth and gentle humor.
Give your two romantic leads different backgrounds and values, and let each change the other a little. Show at least one moment where each teaches the other something. Comedy Writing Secrets goes into this in detail.
When you write a romance, pairing characters from different worlds creates natural conflict, comedy and growth, as each learns something from the other.
The Kittens
Toulouse, Berlioz and Marie are the film’s comic energy.
Toulouse wants to be a painter and a tough alley cat like O’Malley. Berlioz is a pianist. Marie is a prim, bossy little girl who insists she’s a lady and whose brothers constantly annoy her. The three of them squabble exactly like real siblings. It’s one of the film’s most accurate and affectionate touches.
They’re adorable, mischievous and full of personality, and their bickering and play give the film much of its humor. Marie in particular has become one of Disney’s most popular characters, decades later, with a huge following in merchandise and fan culture, especially in Japan, where her image appears on everything from stationery to cafés. She’s a small character who has taken on a life of her own far beyond the film.
The kittens also deliver the film’s lessons. They learn that the world outside their comfortable home is bigger and rougher than they imagined and that kindness can come from unexpected places. Toulouse, in particular, idolizes O’Malley, and his delight when the alley cat finally joins the family is one of the film’s sweetest moments.
Everybody Wants to Be a Cat
The film’s best sequence takes place in a crumbling Paris attic, where O’Malley’s friend Scat Cat and his band of alley cats play jazz. The number, Everybody Wants to Be a Cat, is one of the great Disney songs: a swinging, joyful jam session that builds and builds until the whole attic is shaking and the floor falls through.
The animation is wonderful, full of color and movement, and the song’s celebration of jazz and freedom is irresistible. Duchess sings along, the kittens join in, Scatman Crothers leads the band as Scat Cat with gravelly delight, and for a few minutes the film becomes pure joy. This number justifies the 8 almost by itself. I’d put it against any musical sequence the studio ever made, and when the floor finally gives way I laugh out loud.
The band includes a Siamese cat, Shun Gon, drawn and voiced as a crude caricature, playing the piano with chopsticks and singing in broken English. That’s a stereotype that was unacceptable even at the time and is now painful to watch, and Disney has since added a content warning to the film on its streaming service. This is a real blemish on the best sequence in the film.
For Writers
The jazz sequence is joyful and irresistible, and it contains a crude racial caricature. A great scene can carry a serious flaw, and both deserve to be named.
Look at any character in your story built mainly from an ethnic, cultural or social stereotype, and replace the stereotype with an individual quality. For a writer, humor built on stereotypes may get a laugh in the moment, and it can poison otherwise good work for later readers.
The Supporting Cast
The film is full of charming minor characters. Roquefort, a timid, helpful mouse voiced by Sterling Holloway, is the cats’ friend at home and helps rescue them. Two English geese, Amelia and Abigail Gabble, walking to Paris, adopt the cats for a stretch of the trip, and their drunken Uncle Waldo, who has escaped from being cooked in white wine, provides one of the funniest scenes.
Two farm dogs, Napoleon and Lafayette, who attack Edgar in the countryside, get a running comedy routine as they argue over who’s in charge. Their bickering is some of the funniest material in the film. It’s reprised when Edgar returns to the farm to retrieve his belongings and the dogs recognize him instantly, with predictably painful results.
None of these characters is essential to the plot, and I wouldn’t lose one of them. The film is in no hurry, and it’s better for it. It’s happy to wander off with a pair of geese or a pair of dogs for a few minutes simply because they’re funny, and Napoleon and Lafayette squabbling over who’s in charge make me laugh harder than anything outside the attic. Disney would largely abandon this kind of leisurely storytelling in later decades, and I miss it.
The Music
The Sherman brothers, who wrote the songs for Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book, wrote the title song. It’s sung by Maurice Chevalier, the great French entertainer, who came out of retirement to record it. It was one of his final recordings, and his voice gives the film an instant Parisian elegance.
The film’s score, by George Bruns, is light, jazzy and lively, and the songs, including the scale-singing Scales and Arpeggios and O’Malley’s introduction, are charming. Everybody Wants to Be a Cat, written by Floyd Huddleston and Al Rinker, is the standout, and it has become one of the studio’s most popular songs.
The music gives the film its identity. The Aristocats is a film about the meeting of high culture and street culture, opera and jazz, the grand house and the attic, and its songs dramatize that meeting perfectly. By the end, the refined cats have learned to swing, and the alley cats have been welcomed into the grand house.
The Look
Like 101 Dalmatians and The Jungle Book, the film uses the xerography technique that gave them their sketchy, visible lines, and it has the same loose, modern look. The backgrounds of Paris, the countryside and the attic are beautifully painted, and the animation of the cats, especially Duchess’s graceful movements and O’Malley’s swagger, is superb.
It’s also a film made on a tighter budget than the studio’s classics, and you can see it in places. The backgrounds are simpler than in earlier films, and some sequences feel economical. The studio was in a period of transition, and The Aristocats has the ease and charm of a team working confidently and the modesty of one that had lost its leader.
Where The Aristocats Falls Short
It’s slight. The story is thin, the villain is barely threatening, and the film doesn’t have the emotional depth of the studio’s great films. That’s a gentle, pleasant ride. It’s easy to forget how it ends. The Siamese cat caricature in its best sequence is a real stain. It’s impossible to watch that scene now without noticing it.
On the other side: Everybody Wants to Be a Cat, O’Malley and Duchess, the kittens, the geese and Uncle Waldo, and a warmth that makes it a pleasure to watch. Few Disney films charm me this easily, and that’s why it’s an 8 despite its thinness. It’s a lovely one to watch with young children.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The Aristocats builds its story around a trip home, and it spends that trip on charming encounters. The warmth of the characters carries a thin plot.
In a gentle story, likeable characters and memorable encounters can carry the reader even when the plot is simple. But they have to be vivid enough to justify the time. If your plot is simple, make every character your hero meets unforgettable in one specific way, a voice, a habit, a song, so each encounter feels worth the detour.
The Verdict on The Aristocats
Yes. It’s an 8 because I have a wonderful time with it and still wish it had a little more weight. The attic number would get it most of the way on its own, and O’Malley and Duchess carry the rest, but a thin story and that ugly Siamese caricature keep it out of the studio’s top tier. Watch it with young children and enjoy it yourself, and be ready to talk about that one scene, because it hasn’t aged well.
