A response to seeing The Aristocats (1970) - a few years on...
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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4 May
A response to seeing The Aristocats (1970) - a few years on...
It must have been in around 1968* that I was taken by my parents, almost certainly with my sister, to see The Aristocats. I have just watched it again, with no acquaintance in between, in the Cinema Tent at Cheltenham Jazz Festival – and, yes, I had forgotten that jam-session, when the alley-cat musicians, led by Scat Cat, have let themselves into Thomas O’Malley’s pad, and so, despite the jazzy tone to some of the earlier musical numbers, I had begun not to figure why this was being shown at a jazz festival.
As it is, it is a great little film, and, although animation techniques are considerably different now for much of what is produced (so there would not necessarily have been the need to make scenes such as that jam-session at the expense of the budget for such clear and focused images throughout the film), it does not feel dated – and, yes, it was Walt Disney. No doubt it has been restored, but, as this is not a film festival, I am unsure whether I need to look in the festival handout that I picked up for more details.
What was probably lost on me as a boy is that the cats need not be cats and that this is not really a film about cats (or cats and humans) at all…
23 May - Now continued, with some thoughts penned in a station waiting-room earlier
The cats are, of course, cats in the swinging, jazz sense, and there is the fable of the much-loved and attractive Duchess (Eva Gabor's voice) being Lady to Thomas’ Tramp** (Phil Harris' voice), by putting aside her wisdom and prejudice about ‘alley-cats’ after they have played and bantered together, and he has – after his fanciful promises – assumed care for her and her kittens.
Duchess' home-life, the epitome of the idea of self-improvement through music and the other arts, resembles that of a grande dame, wanting her children to acquire taste and poise, and not hiss and scratch, as Berlioz wishes to do with his sister. Of course, it is, on another level, charming fantasy that a kitten can play the piano by bounding back and forth on the keys, but it is there for the contrast between the sedate family sing-song and the raucously lively – and beautifully put-together – jam-session.
Duchess, being the best kind of Duchess, appreciates the musicianship and sees all that is good in Thomas and his friends Scat Cat and the others (and, maybe, we wonder what her past was, and who was father to her kittens for her to suppose so badly of the alley-cats) : this is, after all, not plumbing the depths of Shakespearean characterization, but good fun, but with a bit of a message about not taking Edgar - or any of the others - at face-value.
(In fact, the only ones who can be taken in those terms are Abigail and Amelia, the waddling, unflappable British geese, and, once they have served their purpose of route-marching the party to Paris to rescue their sozzled uncle, they are given no further part.)
The Old Lady is given a portrayal consistent with her remaining in the background, worrying about what has happened, and generally being benign, along with her amiable lawyer-friend (who seems to have the geniality of the goose-uncle to a T). As already mentioned, the care and attention to high-quality imagery is in the jazz scene, whereas she is sketchily drawn, roaming the mansion, so that we are distanced from her grief, and can rest it instead in Roquefort, the mouse, whose quivering voice is so brilliantly done by Sterling Holloway.
The tussle at the end is about Edgar fighting for what he wants, and the animals showing that, by working together, they can overpower and defeat him. A wholesome account of the nature of good and evil, which leaves little room, except at a comic level, to understand Edgar’s desire not to have his life dominated after his mistress’ death by her menagerie – again, this is not Corneille, and, beyond understanding his motivation, we are not invited to enter into such things.
At heart, setting aside the misery and self-destructiveness in the genius of many a twentieth-century jazz musician, the wish to be ‘in’ and play a horn so that people want to listen :
Ev'rybody wants to be a cat,
Because a cat is where it’s at
End-notes
* Actual date 1970.
** Another Disney, from 1955.
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