Wolfgang Reitherman
Gli aristogatti

Come on, raise your hand if you've never seen it. It's one of Disney's most famous and beloved cartoons of all time, despite being born under prohibitive production conditions.

Disney, Mr. Walt himself, died in 1967 during the making of "The Jungle Book," the last classic under his supervision. Not a masterpiece, a good film, entertaining enough and a tad overrated. But how to proceed without the founder and without the person who had reviewed and given the final approval to all the works until then? So, in Disney's house, they took up an old project from the founder, remaking a sort of "101 Dalmatians" but with cats instead of dogs, shifting the setting from contemporary London to early 1900s Paris.

Initially, at least in Walt's intentions, the film was conceived as a live-action documentary, but the endeavor, thought up at the end of the '50s, immediately appeared daunting. Moreover, live action was still quite rudimentary at the time and "Mary Poppins" would only arrive in 1964. Thus, taking advantage of an unprecedented richness of backdrops (900!, it is probably the most elegant Disney film from a scenographic point of view) and using a jazz soundtrack quite innovative for the time (jazz wasn't heard so easily in animated products!) curated, among others, by Maurice Chevalier, Disney created "The Aristocats" over three years.

Of course, the genius of "101 Dalmatians" isn't there, nor are the technical inventions of that film (the famous Xerox process that reduced the production costs of the work), and the villain, the butler Edgar, is floppy and too comical, and certainly light-years away from the semi-horror villainy of Cruella de Vil. Yet, the cat characters work great: Duchess, Toulouse, and Berlioz, the three kitten pups, are exceptionally endearing, and Thomas, yes, "er mejo der Colosseo" himself, is as entertaining and unforgettable as needed. A small note, which I think is necessary: I hate dubbing, in my opinion, films should be seen in their original language with subtitles; however, sometimes a dubbing turns out better than the original (to give an example, Laurel and Hardy work better in Italian), and here, our Thomas is much more entertaining in Roman dialect rather than the original, and a bit bland, Irish with the name Thomas O'Malley. Magnificently dubbed by the great Renzo Montagnani.

Fast-paced, funny lines, secondary characters worthy of framing (the centenarian lawyer, who appears at the beginning of the film, is a blast) and a soundtrack that made history, starting with the booming finale to the sound of "Everybody wants to be a cat" (in the original "Everybody wants to be a cat"). And, if the songs in Disney products often tend to interrupt action or are simply too many, here they are perfectly integrated into the context and never feel out of place.

1900s Paris is a marvel, and, as often happens with Disney, if the rich/poor relationship always leans in favor of the former (the cats live in a mansion in the city center in the company of a very rich, and elderly, lady, while Edgar is forced to hide in the lower parts of the building), the redemption of the less fortunate (in this case Thomas) seems inevitable. In this regard, it's worth comparing to the equally excellent "Lady and the Tramp" (1955).