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Duchess and her three kittens are enjoying the high life with their devoted human mistress until the wicked butler Edgar, with his eyes on a big inheritance, decides to dope them and get them out of the picture. How can these fragile creatures cope in the unfamiliar countryside and the meaner streets of Paris? Only by meeting the irrepressible alley cat O'Malley, a rough diamond with romance in his heart. After they get a taste of the wide dangerous world, he guides them home, and Edgar gets his just desserts at the wrong end of a horse. As always, it's really the voices rather than the animation that are the heart of the Disney magic: Phil Harris is brilliant as O'Malley, Eva Gabor as Duchess is... well... Eva Gabor; but perhaps the most memorable turns are by Pat Buttram and George Lindsay, who turn the old hounds Napoleon and Lafayette into a couple of bumbling Southern-fried rednecks. Their scenes with Edgar, and the musical numbers with Scat Cat and his cool-dude band, are classic. Most striking about seeing
The Aristocats now is how deeply Disney's style of animation has changed since this was at the cutting edge in 1970. Perhaps the nostalgic, dated feel are just a result of being plonked down in Belle Epoque Paris, but the illustrations are fussier (a pity) and the animation and overall pace much less frenetic (sometimes a relief) than in more recent efforts such as Aladdin.
--Richard Farr
On the DVD
This 2008 special edition DVD boasts a host of new special features including a great deleted song featurette with composer Richard Sherman in which he presents Madame Bonfamille's melody "Porquois" and Duchess's deleted song "She Never Felt Alone" complete with a recorded temp-track featuring the vocals of Robie Lester accompanied by piano and set against a variety of storyboard sketches. Major songs "The Aristocats," "Scales and Arpeggios," "Thomas O'Malley," and "Ev'rybody Wants To Be A Cat" are presented with or without on-screen lyrics, a virtual kitten game with television and DVD-ROM options allows viewers to care for their very own kitten, and a second game teaches kids the names of five major musical instruments. One "Backstage Disney" presentation features Robert Sherman and Richard Sherman detailing the process of composing music for film and relating the story of how they convinced the retired Maurice Chevalier to make one last Disney recording and a second consists of an Aristocats scrapbook filled with Ken Anderson's concept art, storyboards, color and character development sketches, and behind-the-scenes photographs. A twelve-minute excerpt from the 1956
Wonderful World of Make Believe television program "The Great Cat Family" features Walt Disney narrating an animated and completely captivating history of the domestic cat and a bonus Figaro and Minnie Mouse short "Bath Day" rounds out the DVD special features.
--Tami Horiuchi
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