Man, I want this movie to be better than it is. I’m a cat person, and there simply aren’t enough movies where the cats aren’t the villains. I also had a stuffed Duchess as a child and adored her. (I had a stuffed Lady, too, and liked her more than I like actual dogs. But anyway.) The two dogs aren’t villains, either; they’re buffoons, but they’re more sort of forces of nature making things difficult for the villain. Now that I think about it, cats are seldom the villains in Disney dog movies, either. Except in Lady and the Tramp, which this movie resembles in at least one way, and it isn’t a good one.

Madame (Hermione Baddeley) has a much beloved Persian cat named Duchess (Eva Gabor). Duchess, in turn, has three kittens—Toulouse (Gary Dubin), Berlioz (Dean Clark), and Marie (Liz English). Madame is making out her will and tells her lawyer, Georges Hautecourt (Charles Lane, who died eleven years ago at the age of 102), that she plans to leave her estate to the cats—and, when they die, to her butler Edgar (Roddy Maude-Roxby). So Edgar, naturally, decides to bump them off. This doesn’t work as he’d intended, and the cats end up in the country alive and determined to get back to Madame. They meet Thomas O’Malley (Phil Harris), who agrees to help them get back to Paris.

This is definitely not the worst of the Disney animated features, even leaving aside the ones I’ve never seen. But it is slight. It’s not even just that it’s a mere 78 minutes; Dumbo, after all, is fourteen minutes shorter. (And we’ll get to what it shares with Dumbo and Lady and the Tramp in a minute, I promise.) It’s that there’s barely enough movie to even fill those minutes. Its most famous song, “Ev’rybody Wants To Be a Cat,” is an introduction to characters who I suppose are technically relevant but just barely, and mostly what the song does is fill a couple of minutes. There are two scenes wherein a man tries to outsmart a pair of not-very-bright dogs. The taking of a picture takes about a solid five minutes.

Okay, the racism, which is what it shares with Dumbo and Lady and the Tramp. (Actually, I can draw several parallels between this and Lady and the Tramp, but let’s stick with the racism for a minute.) I suppose there’s something to showing the fact that 1910 Paris was a bit of a melting pot. So the alley cats are Russian and Italian and English and presumably American and by name Irish but by everything else also American. And Chinese. Now, at best, you can go with “they are using lazy stereotypes for all those countries,” but oh, my, the Chinese cat. And honestly, I find the portrayal of the Chinese cat far less excusable than the crows in Dumbo and the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First is that, as I said, the alley cats barely have anything to do with the movie, so it’s like a minute of hardcore stereotyping that drives the story not at all. And you could argue that the crows don’t need to code as black men and the cats don’t need to be Siamese, and you’d be right. But at least you need them for the story to go on. You don’t have Dumbo without someone teaching him to fly, and you don’t have Lady and the Tramp without someone driving her out of her home. It’s very easy to not have these cats.

There’s also the undeniable fact that this movie was made in 1970, and which point surely someone in LA thought, “Maybe this won’t go over well.” It wasn’t the ’40s or ’50s. To be perfectly blunt, it was well past the time when someone in a position to comment on the character in the studio should have been Asian-American and therefore been able to say, “Um, guys . . . .” And if there wasn’t, in the Greater Los Angeles Area, that says pretty unfortunate things about the studio in general.

The animation is also honestly not very good. I read that there’s some reason the lines are so bloody thick and visible in Disney animation of this era, but I can’t remember it and don’t care enough to look it up. The point is that it frankly looks bad. It’s some of the worst animation in Disney history. The character design isn’t bad, though generic enough, but the lines are heavy, and there are often lines that are necessary while you’re drawing but should be erased well before you even get to the inking stage. I’m not an expert artist, mind, but I do live with one and know what he does before he gets to the stage where someone is actually paying money for his work. I think he’d be less than pleased to send his work out looking like this.

Someone on IMDb has pointed out in the Goofs section that Edgar, as the human, would be in control of the money even if the cats lived, and that’s certainly true. But it’s also true that it’s theoretically possible that Madame could just get more cats and leave a fortune to them, and she’d likely be fairly suspicious if her cats died off or disappeared all the time. Really, that aspect of the plot doesn’t much hold together at all.

I did read a bit of a review from its 1987 rerelease that pointed out that its animation and story were better than the cash-grab toy-tie-in animated features that had come out around that time, and of course that’s quite true. That’s not a lot of credit, I grant you. But for all the slightness and the anachronisms and the bad animation—and, yes, the racism—I’d rather sit through it any number of times instead of watching that awful Care Bears movie my younger sister was so fond of.

Nobody’s planning to leave me a fortune; consider supporting my Patreon!