Disney Bro: THE ARISTOCATS

 by Patrick Bromley

This movie changed my life.

Ok, maybe The Aristocats didn't change my life directly, but it does represent a moment in which my life changed. I was 10 years old when Disney reissued The Aristocats for the second time, back when they were on their every-seven-year cycle for theatrical re-releases. It became the second movie to ever play the Elk Grove Cinema (Mannequin played the first week, which I was not allowed to see), a two-screen second-run theater down the street from my childhood home that was shuttered for my whole life until it re-opened in 1987. It would become the place that I spent most of my formative weekends and even weeknights once my parents split and going to the movies became the thing my dad and I did, absorbing anything and everything I was allowed to see regardless of quality or whether or not I even wanted to see it. For just a few dollars, I could get admission, a small Cherry Coke and a box of Sprees and lose myself for a few hours doing my favorite thing in the world. It all started with The Aristocats.

My mom took my siblings and I to see The Aristocats the first night it played the EG theater. It was the first and last time I saw the movie until this week when I revisited it for Disney Bro after close to 40 years. The movie is largely fine, the kind of middling programmer that Disney was churning out in the '70s and '80s, seemingly running on fumes at the time even though today we recognize a lot of the films from this period as established classics. That has more to do with Disney branding itself as a purveyor of "classics" and the eventizing of their releases than it does with the overall quality of their output; if Warner Bros. had released The Aristocats in the 1980s, we'd probably be talking about it even less than we already do.

Phil Harris (yes, the same Phil Harris who voiced Baloo the Bear in The Jungle Book) voices O'Malley, a streetwise alley cat helping Duchess, a sophisticated house cat (voiced by Eva Gabor), and her three kittens find their way back home in early 1900s Paris. While O'Malley shows the domesticated cats the underside of the city, he and Duchess begin a romance that's interrupted by the return of the kidnapper who stranded the cats in the first place. Can the mismatched pair find true love? Can they evade the clutches of Edgar, the greedy and evil butler? And what do you call this act? The Aristocats!

Originally planned as a live-action two-parter for the weekly series Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, The Aristocats -- clearly a title which they thought up first and then worked backwards to develop a story to go along with it -- went through nearly a decade of development and eight writers before arriving on screen in 1970. It came during a somewhat fallow period for the animation studio, following an underrated 1960s that included The Sword and the Stone and The Jungle Book and preceding both Robin Hood and The Rescuers in the 1970s. All of these movies are better than The Aristocats, which isn't to say it's bad, just slight and somewhat forgettable. Disney was only making a few animated films per decade in these days, meaning all of them were swinging for Classic status -- and, in most cases, managed to achieve it in the years since thanks to a canny re-release cycle and the "Disney Vault" model that created the illusion of scarcity. That the movie remains imprinted on my brain at all has more to do with the way I saw it -- on the big screen as my first movie at my childhood theater -- than with the movie at all. Again, it's not bad. It's cute! But Disney had set such a high bar for itself at this time that "cute" wasn't going to cut it.

Even as a 10-year old kid, I knew The Aristocats was just ok. Seeing it was one of the most formative moviegoing experiences of my life, and yet all that stands out about that memory is what surrounds the movie and not the movie itself. It's an animated programmer, designed to capture the attention of kids like me for two hours, albeit one that gets automatically elevated to "classic" status by virtue of the fact that it's Disney and it's over 30 years old. There's enough of the old guard still working on the movie -- five legendary animators and the Sherman Brothers contributing songs -- that the effort is more than the "functional" I've been ascribing to it, but we Disney Bros grade on a curve.

Take, for example, the voice work: as good as Phil Harris is in the lead role, the movie cries out for someone even more affable and laid back -- someone like Burt Reynolds -- as the voice of O'Malley. Sadly, we'd have to wait for All Dogs Go To Heaven for Burt to voice a talking animal. (A reminder that between All Dogs Go To Heaven and All Dogs Go To Heaven 2, wherein Burt is replaced vocally by Charlie Sheen, two of my favorite actors are responsible for voicing a German Shepard in the All Dogs Go to Heaven franchise.) It's one of the few Disney movies not to have a legacy codified by merchandise or a theme park presence; a recent trip to Disneyland with my family, JB, and Jan B. displayed no Aristocats presence at all that I could see. It's the rare Disney "classic" that barely seems to exist.

I'll always have affection for The Aristocats for what it means in my evolution as a moviegoer. I only wish the movie itself meant more to me. The fact that this recent viewing was my first since 1987 is telling; I suspect if the movie were better -- maybe a legitimate classic like Pinocchio or Sleeping Beauty -- I would have revisited it more often. The theater at which I first saw the movie still stands -- in a manner of speaking. The building has been leveled and remodeled, converted from a two-screen cinema into a 10-screen multiplex that now shows first-run films instead of second-run (the death of the second-run theater is a tragedy from which I may never recover) and is pretty much my moviegoing home base. In addition to see all of my movies there now that I've broken up with AMC, it's also where I host repertory screenings through the Chicago Film Critics Association and my monthly Smash Cut Cinema series. It means a lot to me that the theater continues to play such a big role in my life as an adult, just as it did when I was a kid. That all starts with The Aristocats.

What should be the next Disney Bro? I'm thinking The Great Mouse Detective.