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With the death of Walt Disney the animation studio was left adrift and quickly churned out this piece of product to keep things afloat. Pieced together from disparate parts of various older films, The Aristocats doesn’t have much going on between the ears. It sure is cute, though.
There’s just not much here to recommend. Everything was done already in Lady and the Tramp, or 101 Dalmatians, or any number of shorts starring adorable talking animals. No character is memorable, and the animation is frequently rough, bordering on ugly more than once. Despite only being about 80 minutes, The Aristocats never quite finds a successful footing.
The story is about a wealthy former opera singer who plans on leaving her vast fortune to her beloved pet cats, much to the chagrin of her long-suffering butler. Her butler plans on removing the cats from the equation, but not with the delicious villainy of, say, Cruella De Vil, but by dropping them off in the farmland outside of Paris. Edgar the butler is not a memorable or engaging villain, in fact, he’s more of a pitiable character of slapstick and middling development.
Only two things about The Aristocats truly stand out, the song “Everybody Wants to be a Cat” and some of the vocal work, mostly the sophisticated tones of Eva Gabor. Granted, even “Everybody Wants to be a Cat” is not without its problems. Disney has long had a complicated history with racial caricatures in its films, and seeing the ensemble of stereotypes on display is unnerving. Aside from these two things, The Aristocats is the sight of Disney spinning its wheels wondering where to take the brand and creativity of the studio without the patriarch.
