Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske
Lilli e il vagabondo

In 1955, the year "Lady and the Tramp" was released (October 19th, to be exact), films interested Walt Disney less than usual. In fact, for some time (it is estimated after the release of "Alice in Wonderland," 1951), Walt had delegated much to his most trusted collaborators, as he was more interested in the creation of Disneyland, his craziest objective, to create that amusement park that would ensure, as it indeed did, his immortality.

Disneyland officially opened on July 17, 1955, with a series of technical problems that did not bode well (a sweltering heat; drinking fountains without water; rides that did not work) and an influx of people decidedly above the estimated average. Already Walt was preparing the park's opening, witnessed by some television specials, simply titled "Disneyland," shown on TV with Walt as the grand master of ceremonies, at the end of 1954 (the first episode on October 27). Furthermore, Walt was plagued by significant artistic doubts. Michael Barrier reminds us of this in his book "The Life of Walt Disney - Man, Dreamer, Genius" (Tunué, 2007):

"In the mid-1950s, Disney realized that, unlike his animated feature films, many of his live-action films appeared, after just a few years, as already dated. [...] However, they could still round off the studio's revenue stream, as they could be recycled into series and weekly television programs."

Well then, in this context, despite the remarkable success of the previous animated film "Peter Pan" (1953), coming up with new ideas appeared, at Disney, to be extraordinarily difficult. Thus, the invaluable memory comes to the rescue: in the early 1940s, Walt read a story, "Happy Dan, The Whistling Dog," by one Ward Greene, but the project was shelved since both "Dumbo" and "Bambi" were already in production, and especially because Walt didn’t like the character of Lady, finding her too sweet and the little story, well yes, it was good, but lacking in action. Fifteen years later, the Studios revisited the idea, and with more free rein, thanks to Uncle Walt's extra-film activities, reworked the plot by adding some characters and a sense of action, movement, pathos, almost absent in Ward Greene's little operetta.

Apart from many curiosities, including a very similar script proposed to Disney in 1949 by the Spanish writer Maria Lejárraga, which Walt rejected only to incorporate many elements from it a few years later, as well as the opening sequence wanted and written by Walt himself (one of the few ideas he inserted into the film), the work, which was notably successful, is one of the most harmonious and accomplished in Disney's artistic path.

The action takes place in London, in the upper districts, and the events are well-known (Lady is an aristocratic little dog who crosses paths with the wild Tramp, leading to a series of adventures that have much in common with what would later be "The Aristocats" (1970). Fast-paced, action-packed scenes, some segments (like the mouse in the finale) to savor, but the novelties lie elsewhere. There is a use of Cinemascope that no other animated film had dared before (the images appear "total" on the full screen, so much so that the TV format mortifies their very essence) and a total stroke of genius is the idea to frame humans only from the knees down (including Lady's owners, Jim Dear and Darling). It is true that the idea was borrowed from "Bambi" (1942) where humans did not appear, but here the basic concept is even more extreme: impossible not to make humans appear, and so better to let them appear like phantasmagorical puppets controlled by hypothetical strings, granted the modest privilege of being sentient individuals only in legs and feet (an extremely daring idea). An exception is made for the Italian cook who plays the accordion in the famous scene of the spaghetti split in two, to the sound of "Bella Notte," but that, in the authors' intentions, was not a human, but rather an extension of the two dogs engaged in flirting at dinner.

Various attempts were made to depict dogs as realistically as possible. Several dogs and their reactions were studied, thousands of sketches were made, and the result met expectations, despite Uncle Walt, in the few moments he was interested in the work, seemed almost to want to "sabotage" the film, as he intended to eliminate the aforementioned spaghetti scene.

Problems also arose during distribution. American cinemas, and not only, were not equipped (or rather, some were) for Cinemascope, and this forced the Studios, at great cost, to produce two versions, one in Cinemascope and one in the traditional format. Today, on DVD, the Cinemascope version prevails.