This was my dad’s favourite Disney movie. I don’t know why; I never got to talk to him about it in any kind of substantive way, since he died when I was six. I’m not sure I actually know firsthand that it was, just from what Mom told us. But ever since then, even though I personally don’t really like it all that much, it’s been exceedingly important to me. I got a stuffed Lady at Disneyland once when I was a kid, and then when I went to Disneyland when my firstborn was very young, I bought her one there as well. The movie means a lot to me and kind of makes me wish it were better?

Jim Dear (Lee Millar) and Darling (Peggy Lee) are a young, well-off couple living at the turn of the last century. For Christmas, he gets her a cocker spaniel puppy, whom they name Lady (Barbara Luddy). She befriends the two dogs living in the houses on either side, Jock the Scottish Terrier (Bill Thompson) and Trusty the bloodhound (Bill Baucom). Things are happy until both Jim Dear and Darling seem distracted; it turns out that Darling is going to have a baby. Local stray Tramp (Larry Roberts) informs Lady that her troubles are just beginning, and also that humans aren’t worth it for dogs.

Actually, once the baby is born and things settle, life goes back to being pretty good for Lady. Until Jim Dear and Darling go away for a couple of days and leave Aunt Sarah (Disney perennial Verna Felton) to take care of the baby. Bad enough that she hates dogs, but she’s also brought her troublemaking Siamese cats, Si and Am (also Peggy Lee), who convince her that Lady is destructive. She takes Lady to get a muzzle, but Lady escapes and goes wandering with the Tramp. However, she is caught by the dogcatcher (also Lee Millar) and encounters a dog named Peg (still Peggy Lee) at the pound who tells her of the Tramp’s roguish ways.

It isn’t just that cats get a raw deal in this movie, though goodness knows that happens all too often for my tastes. Cats and people who don’t like dogs are frequent animated villains. But so are dogcatchers. Never mind that we have no reason to believe the Tramp when he tells Lady that they don’t hurt the chickens he encourages her to chase. Never mind that Disney doesn’t touch on issues of, say, rabies. Or dog sex—how many litters of puppies do we assume can be attributed to the Tramp aside from the cute ones that are a spoiler that nevertheless appear on a ton of the merchandising and in the trailers? Cartoons tend to show us a token Dog Who Is Not An Important Character going off to be euthanized, but they don’t show a dog injured in the streets suffering because it doesn’t have a loving owner to take it to the vet.

I get that the cartoon is from the dogs’ perspective. I also get that there’s a moment where the dogcatcher expresses sympathy that Lady is in the pound—but it’s only Lady, who is “too good” to be in “this place.” People who actually work for animal control tend to think all animals are too good to be in shelters, and they wish they could all be no-kill shelters, but humans have kind of screwed that one up in part because of their preference for pure-breds. Never mind that some of the pound dogs in this are clearly pure-breds themselves.

Which does rather segue into the racism, since two of those dogs are a chihuahua and a borzoi. There’s also a bulldog. (Also a trio of cocker spaniel puppies who surely would be adopted in a heartbeat?) The movie operates under the curious animation convention wherein all animals of a foreign breed are of that ethnicity. And specifically recent. There’s no “Well, I’m an English bulldog, but my family has been in Scenic Small American Town for generations.” There’s “I’m an English bulldog and therefore have an English accent.” It’s not just Lady and the Tramp; it’s all cartoons so far as I can tell.

The most worrying of these recent immigrants are of course the chihuahua and the cats. The chihuahua gets basically one line, to tell us that the Tramp fooled around with his sister with the long and stereotypical name. It’s frankly a joke that wouldn’t seem entirely out-of-place in a modern cartoon, which is its own kind of worrying. Maybe “I theenk” wouldn’t be tagged at the end, but there we are.

Worse, of course, are the Siamese cats. My dad actually owned a cel of them, not to mention an actual cat that was a Siamese-Burmese mix. What’s frustrating to me about this and actually no small amount of cinematic racism of the era is that I don’t think it was intended to be offensive. More, it was almost intended to be representation? Like, the figures in these things were stereotypes, but how often do Thai people show up in things that aren’t The King and I? Or, let’s be real, even in things that are?

It took me many years to even realize that the crows in Dumbo were supposed to be caricatured black people, because to me, they were just people. Smart and funny people who helped. The Siamese cats were villains, of course, but cats are always villains in cartoons, and that was just how these things happen. And of course Dad did have Coco, so I knew Siamese cats were a thing. I don’t know; my feelings are so vague on this that I’m having a hard time articulating them. I guess my thoughts on the cats is that they could be so much worse. Yes, if you see the making-of bit about the song, it’s clearly standard Hollywood exoticism at work, but it still feels better than Mr. Yunioshi?

Beyond all that, there are interesting bits and pieces about this film. Peggy Lee’s lawsuit for breach of contract wasn’t resolved until 1991. Walt didn’t like the “Bella Notte” sequence and wanted it cut. An early script called the Tramp Bozo and the rat Herman; the movie is vaguely based on a short story called “Happy Dan the Whistling Dog,” which is a considerably worse title. Walt had once presented Lillian with a chow in a hat box. The film is generally drawn to have a dog’s-eye view. And it’s apparently set in 1909 and 1910, though I’m not sure how we know that.

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