THE ARISTOCATS (1970)

* * 1/2

General. 78m, USA

D: Wolfgang Reitherman. Phil Harris, Eva Gabor, Sterling Holloway, Scatman Crothers, Liz English, Dean Clark, Gary Dubin, Paul Winchell, Monica Evans, Carole Shelley, Nancy Culp, Hermione Baddeley, Pat Buttram, George Lindsey.

Tagline: DIG THESE CATS...and all that JAZZ!

The Aristocats is a sentimental favourite of mine. I remember loving it and begging to see it over and over when I was four. Those were the days when Disney only released its animated classics once every seven years. There were no videos or DVDs to look forward to a couple of months later. You had to see the movie at the theatre at the time of release, and if you missed it, you didn't see it again until you hit puberty. And you thought waiting for Christmas morning was bad enough.

The story opens in 1910 Paris, with Maurice Chevalier warbling the title song; then we see an elegantly coiffed old woman ride in a horse-drawn carriage with her family of pampered cats. Chevalier's singing voice is horribly, nasally French – and with a name like mine, I can say that with impunity - he was good in Gaslight, but ever since seeing his leering lothario purring, "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" in 1958's Gigi, he gives me the willies.

Madame Bonfamille, a retired actress/opera singer (which, in those days wasn't far removed from being considered a prostitute), lives a comfortable life of luxury in a big townhouse with Duchess and her three rambunctious kittens. Mother Duchess (Eva Gabor), a beautiful white lady cat, is as refined and elegant as her mistress. The Aristokits are cute, squabbling siblings, all wearing different coloured bows and ribbons to show how wuvved they are. Ginger kit Toulouse is the artistic, pugnacious one, grey kitten Berlioz bangs a mean keyboard, and prissy little Marie, who's a fluffy white miniature version of her mother, is a precocious romantic whom we later discover has the beginnings of an Electra complex. True to the way girl characters were portrayed in the days before Kim Possible, she often gets in the way and needs to be saved from danger.

Madame invites Georges Harcourt, an elderly lawyer (it's hinted that he may also be an old beau) to her home to write her will. How she got this old and rich without even thinking about wills until now will remain a mystery. When the lawyer arrives, Edgar the butler admits him inside the mansion and has to assist the old boy up a 99-stepped staircase when he pooh-poohs using the elevator instead. I wondered, why not install a motorized chair alongside the wall, like Mrs. Deagle? Finally, he makes it to her parlour, and Edgar eavesdrops as Madame instructs Georges to put her cats in the will, then stipulates that dear, faithful Edgar shall inherit her fortune only after the kitties die.

Edgar, who was a good sport before, is naturally pissed off. With his awesome math powers, he realizes that with all those nine lives times four, that he'll never get his mitts on the money before kicking the bucket himself. So he decides to dope the cats' milk (and Roquefort, their mouse buddy by accident) and take them for a little ride in the countryside to 'disappear'.

Not that I blame him for not wanting to wait until the cats shop ‘til they drop, spending millions of francs, but wouldn't it have been smarter to kill Madame and the cats all at the same time and then dump the bodies into the Seine River? Or how about disguising the cats by dipping them in soot, like in 101 Dalmations? But that's just me and my evil brain.

In his attempts to help poor ol' Edgar, my equally evil brother suggested, "Why not wait until Madame dies and the kittens are in his care! Wait a few weeks and then start adding drainer fluid in the cat's milk. Poison them gradually so it looks like they're sick. The best part is he'd be home alone doing this." Upon further discussion, he also suggested dropping each cat in different parts of the country so they don’t get recognized as a ‘group’ of missing felines.

Edgar couldn't get into our gang of criminal masterminds.

Later that night, the cats wake up near a river in a storm, and are terrified and baffled as to how they got there, even though Toulouse keeps saying, "I bet it was old Edgar." Meanwhile, back at the mansion (or as I like to call it, The Cat Cave), Roquefort miraculously wakes from his drugged slumber and dons his cute li’l little Sherlock Holmes outfit and investigates the case of the missing cats, but gets nowhere. It even makes the headlines of the local papers, which is strange. Um, slow news day? Also, if his tiny body mass absorbed the same dosage as the cats, how come it didn’t kill him outright? Now, there’s a case for this Mouse Detective. It could be like D.O.A., that old 1949 noir thriller where Edmond O’Brien is poisoned and has only a few hours to find out who murdered him before he croaks. Alas, ol' Diz never took risks.

Jungle Book alumnae Phil Harris lends his easygoing voice to the O'Malley, a roguish but charismatic alley cat who gets the hots for Duchess and gallantly agrees to help her get home, and reluctantly lets the kids tag along. Eventually, he develops a paternal affection for the little cock-blockers. Hmmm… reddish Toulouse looks an awful lot like him. In fact, none of her kids resemble each other in either fur or eye colour. Maybe Duchess was an "actress" too.

Along the way, they meet a psychotic milkman, and in a scene similar to Stand by Me, barely escape getting mowed down by a train. Marie keeps falling into harm's way and constantly needs to be rescued by O'Malley, who in turn needs to be rescued from Adelaide and Abigail Gabble, a pair of giggly geese on a walking tour of France (Monica Evans and Carole Shelley, doing a slight variation of their shtick from their roles in 1967's Robin Hood). Finally, O'Malley finds a Best Western motel or his 'pad' - don't you just dig that beatnik jive in 1910 France? Then, in the film's most enjoyable sequence, introduces the family to Scat Cat (Scatman Crothers, who voiced King Louie in The Jungle Book in 1967) and his band of jammin’ alley cats. The scene looks like it was shot with coloured cellophane and acid, but it's way more exciting than the catnapping subplot. And I love the way the Scat Cats "crashed" the party.

The music is a mixed bag of French café musack and weird “Disney rock” - that strangely generic "mod" sound that hopelessly square producers invented - sort of Lawrence Welk with sped-up wow-wow-wow guitars, drums, and a pulse. Eg: You may have heard Hayley Mills "rocking out" in “Let’s Get Together” in The Parent Trap. Yes, Disney was still trying to be ‘hip’ with the 1960's "swingers" set, even though the story was set in 1910. He did it again in Robin Hood and Jungle Book. Like, groovy, Daddy-O!

There are a couple of sequences where Edgar encounters two country dogs named incongruously dubbed Napoleon (Pat Buttram) and Lafayette (George Lindsey). There's a point to these scenes, but they simply drag on too long for attention spans shorter than the lifespan of fruit fly - namely mine. Though episodic, and with mild racial sterotypes which you might have to explain to the kiddiwinks, The Aristocats is still lively enough to keep the kids' attention without insulting their intelligence (or yours), and a lot of fun, especially when the cats jam in O'Malley's 'pad' with "Everybody Wants to be a Cat". Young children will enjoy it, and it's a worthy addition to their DVD library. And those who grew up treasuring Disney classics will enjoy it too.

The whimsical artwork is charming, and has more of a watercolour medium than the richer tones of other films. The characters are appealing and memorable. The voice actors were mostly veterans from past Disney features, and they all do a terrific job, especially Phil Harris as O'Malley, who seems to channel his "Baloo" persona and infuse it with a pick-up artist on the make who just happens to be a romantic and is genuinely surprised to discover that he's actually good with kids. Eva Gabor (who would voice Miss Bianca in the The Rescuers movies years later), is fine as Duchess, though the character herself is more pretty than interesting. The kittens all have different personalities, although Marie undoubtedly stands out the most. Just check out all the "Marie" merchandise at any Disney store. I'm surprised it's not called "Marie's Place" instead.

Hmmm... sounds like a whorehouse in the Old West, doesn't it?