The Aristocats opened on 11 December 1970, four years after the man who approved it had died. It was the twentieth animated feature from Walt Disney Productions, the first one released without Walt Disney looking over anybody’s shoulder, and the last one he personally greenlit. It is also the only Disney feature where cats are unambiguously the heroes, which turns out to be a strange thing to be able to say about a studio that spent thirty years using cats as the shorthand for menace.
Underneath the pastel Paris and the sing-along, this film is a document of a studio in trouble: cheaper animation technology, a jazz number written by accident, a voice cast recycled from the previous hit, and one character that Disney now puts a content warning in front of. Here is what actually happened.
Contents
- What The Aristocats Actually Is
- The Last Film Walt Disney Approved
- Xerography: Why The Aristocats Looks Scratchy
- The Jazz Number That Happened by Accident
- Disney’s Feline Problem: Cats as the Bad Guys
- Shun Gon and the Content Advisory
- Marie, Japan, and the Long Merchandising Afterlife
- The Remake That Never Happened
- FAQ
What The Aristocats Actually Is
Paris, 1910. A retired opera singer named Madame Adelaide Bonfamille writes a will leaving her fortune to her cats, with her butler Edgar named as the beneficiary only after the cats die. Edgar does the arithmetic, drugs the cats, and dumps them in the French countryside. Duchess and her three kittens, Marie, Berlioz and Toulouse, then walk home with the help of an alley cat called Thomas O’Malley.
The film runs 79 minutes. Wolfgang Reitherman directed and co-produced it with Winston Hibler. The story was credited to a room of seven people: Larry Clemmons, Vance Gerry, Ken Anderson, Frank Thomas, Eric Cleworth, Julius Svendsen and Ralph Wright. The directing animators were Milt Kahl, Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas and John Lounsbery, four of the men later known as Disney’s Nine Old Men. Buena Vista put it in wide release on 24 December 1970.
It started as a live-action TV episode
The project began in 1962 as a story idea by Tom McGowan and Tom Rowe, pitched as a two-part live-action episode for Disney’s television anthology. It was converted into an animated feature in 1963. Ken Anderson, the production designer, then spent roughly eighteen months working out what the characters should look like. That is a long development runway for a film whose plot is, structurally, four cats walking home.
The Last Film Walt Disney Approved
Walt Disney signed off on The Aristocats in 1966. He died on 15 December of that year. The Jungle Book, released in 1967, was the last feature he actively supervised. The Aristocats is the one that came after, made entirely by people working from memory of what he would have wanted.
You can hear the anxiety in the casting. Phil Harris had voiced Baloo in The Jungle Book and was brought straight back as Thomas O’Malley, playing essentially the same character with a French address. He would return again in 1973 as Little John in Robin Hood. Sterling Holloway, the voice of Kaa and later Winnie the Pooh, plays Roquefort the mouse. Thurl Ravenscroft, the bass voice behind Tony the Tiger, is in the crowd scene. Reitherman’s studio had a formula and no Walt to argue with it.
The formula also extended to reused animation. Sequences of the cats dancing in The Aristocats were re-timed and redrawn as the dance scene in Robin Hood three years later, a cost-saving habit that became one of the defining criticisms of the studio’s 1970s output.
Xerography: Why The Aristocats Looks Scratchy
If you have ever noticed that The Aristocats has visible pencil lines, wobbly black outlines and none of the glassy smoothness of Sleeping Beauty, that is not sloppiness. It is xerography, and it is the reason Disney animation survived the 1960s at all.
Traditional cel animation required a department of inkers to trace every animator’s pencil drawing onto clear celluloid by hand. It was slow and it was expensive. By 1959, Ub Iwerks had modified a Xerox camera to photocopy the animators’ drawings directly onto cels, deleting the entire inking step. The process was tested on Sleeping Beauty and used across a full feature for the first time on One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which opened on 25 January 1961.
Walt Disney reportedly hated the look. The clean, controlled line he had spent decades refining did not survive the photocopier, and everything came out rougher. He kept the system anyway, because it was cheaper, and because the alternative was not making animated features. The Aristocats sits in the middle of that xerographic run, alongside The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book and Robin Hood.
The one character who benefits
Edgar the butler is the argument for the technique. Animated largely by Milt Kahl and John Lounsbery, he is all elastic limbs and scratchy contour lines, and the roughness of the xerographic outline makes his panic legible in a way a clean line would have flattened. The same visual logic that made the Dalmatians’ spots economically possible gave Edgar his nervous, twitching silhouette. It is a good reminder that the look of a film is usually an accounting decision first and an aesthetic one second, the same way film color grading started as a chemical constraint before it became a style.
The Jazz Number That Happened by Accident
The most famous thing in The Aristocats is a song that was never supposed to exist in its current form.
The alley cat bandleader was written for Louis Armstrong. The character was called Satchmo Cat, after Armstrong’s nickname, and the whole sequence was built around getting Armstrong into a Disney feature. Armstrong’s health did not cooperate. He was ill and unavailable, and the studio scrambled. The character was renamed Scat Cat, Scatman Crothers was hired, and by Crothers’ own account he was directed to do an Armstrong impression. Armstrong died in July 1971, seven months after the film opened.
“Le Jazz Hot” lost the job
Robert and Richard Sherman, the brothers behind Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book, wrote a pile of songs for The Aristocats. Only two made the final cut. Their intended showstopper, “Le Jazz Hot”, was dropped. The number that replaced it, “Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat”, was written by Floyd Huddleston and Al Rinker, and it is now the only song from the film that anyone can hum. The Shermans did keep the title track, which Maurice Chevalier came out of retirement to sing at the age of 82.
The score is by George Bruns, who had played in jazz bands in the 1940s and used that vocabulary throughout, with a musette accordion sound doing the heavy lifting on the Paris atmosphere. The result is one of the few Disney scores built on American jazz idiom rather than Broadway pastiche, which is part of why the film still gets covered by jazz musicians. If you want the science of why that particular groove sticks in your head, we went into it in our piece on how music affects the brain.
Disney’s Feline Problem: Cats as the Bad Guys
Here is the pattern that makes The Aristocats unusual. Before 1970, a Disney cat with a speaking part was almost always the antagonist or the comic obstacle.
- Figaro (Pinocchio, 1940), the first cat in a Disney animated feature, is a sidekick, not a lead. Walt Disney liked him enough to push for extra screen time and later recycled him as Minnie Mouse’s pet.
- Lucifer (Cinderella, 1950) is the household villain, a black cat whose entire function is to persecute mice and sabotage the heroine.
- The Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland, 1951) is not evil, exactly, but he is designed as an unsettling presence who gives Alice bad directions and vanishes.
- Si and Am (Lady and the Tramp, 1955) are Siamese cats introduced as a threat, with a musical number that has aged badly for reasons we will get to.
- Shere Khan (The Jungle Book, 1967) is a tiger, technically, and still the most frightening thing in the picture.
The Aristocats inverts all of it. The cats are the protagonists, the humans are either absent or criminal, and the dogs are dim country hounds who exist to be outsmarted. Given that Western culture spent several centuries treating cats as omens and suspects, and that the last time a civilization put cats at the centre of its cosmology was ancient Egypt, a 1970 Disney feature siding with the cats is a bigger swing than it looks.
Shun Gon and the Content Advisory
The alley cat band includes a Siamese cat named Shun Gon, voiced by Paul Winchell, a white American actor. The character is drawn with slanted eyes and buck teeth, speaks in a heavily accented parody of English, and plays the piano with a pair of chopsticks.
In October 2020, Disney flagged The Aristocats under its Stories Matter initiative, alongside Peter Pan, Dumbo, The Jungle Book, Lady and the Tramp and Swiss Family Robinson. Disney’s own published explanation of the character reads: “The cat is depicted as a racist caricature of East Asian peoples with exaggerated stereotypical traits such as slanted eyes and buck teeth. He sings in poorly accented English voiced by a white actor and plays the piano with chopsticks.”
Every affected title now opens with a 12-second unskippable card: “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.” In January 2021, Disney went further and removed the flagged films from children’s profiles on Disney+ entirely. They remain watchable on adult profiles.
It is worth being precise about what this is. Disney did not edit the scene, did not recut the film, and did not pull it from the service. The company chose the harder option of leaving the material visible with an explanation attached, which is a genuinely unusual corporate position and a much better one than quietly deleting the frames.
Marie, Japan, and the Long Merchandising Afterlife
The Aristocats made money. On a budget of about $4 million it took roughly $55.7 million domestically across its lifetime and around $191 million worldwide including re-releases. In France it drew 12.7 million admissions in 1971 and in Germany 11.3 million, numbers that dwarf its American performance. A film about Parisian cats did its best business in Europe, which is not a coincidence.
The strangest part of its second life is Marie. The white kitten with the pink bow has almost no plot function, and she is now the film’s most commercially valuable character, driven overwhelmingly by the Japanese market. Marie merchandise is a standing product line at Disney Store Japan and Tokyo Disney Resort, refreshed with new seasonal collections year after year, covering everything from luggage to homeware. She spent much of the mid-2000s appearing as a walkaround character at Tokyo Disneyland before showing up in Florida parks.
A character invented as set dressing became a merchandising engine because a specific market found her cute. That is the same mechanism that turns an ordinary house cat into an internet phenomenon, and if you want the long version of how that works, our complete history of cat memes covers a century of it.
The Remake That Never Happened
Disney has tried twice to go back. In 2005, Disneytoon Studios developed an animated sequel centred on Marie aboard a cruise ship. It was cancelled when John Lasseter took over and redirected the studio away from direct-to-video follow-ups.
The second attempt was a live-action and CG hybrid. Will Gluck was producing, Keith Bunin was writing, and in March 2023 Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson was attached to direct and handle the music, an inspired match for a film whose spine is a jazz number. Questlove confirmed on the 20 August 2025 episode of Score: The Podcast that the project had been shelved, attributing it to executive turnover rather than any creative failure. Trade press confirmed the cancellation later that month.
So the 1970 film is still the only version. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 64% from 33 critics and Metacritic at 66 out of 100. Roger Ebert gave it three stars out of four and singled out the voice performances as “charming in their absolute rightness”, which is a fair description of a film that gets by almost entirely on casting and rhythm. The vocal work carries it the way Foley work carries scenes that would otherwise feel weightless.
FAQ
Was The Aristocats really the last film Walt Disney approved?
Yes, in the sense that matters. Walt Disney approved the project in 1966 and died that December. The Jungle Book, released in 1967, was the last feature he actively supervised in production. The Aristocats was the first Disney animated feature made and released without him.
Why does The Aristocats have a warning on Disney+?
Because of Shun Gon, the Siamese cat in the alley band, who is drawn and voiced as an East Asian caricature. Disney added the advisory in October 2020 under its Stories Matter initiative and removed the film from children’s Disney+ profiles in January 2021.
Who was supposed to sing “Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat”?
Louis Armstrong. The character was originally named Satchmo Cat and written for him. Illness kept Armstrong out, Scatman Crothers replaced him and was directed to imitate Armstrong’s delivery. The song itself was written by Floyd Huddleston and Al Rinker after the Sherman Brothers’ “Le Jazz Hot” was dropped.
Why does the animation look rough compared to older Disney films?
Xerography. From 1961 onward, Disney photocopied animators’ pencil drawings straight onto cels instead of hand-inking them. It cut costs enormously and left visible sketch lines. The Aristocats is one of the films made under that system.
Is there an Aristocats remake coming?
Not currently. A Questlove-directed live-action and CG hybrid was in development from 2023 and was scrapped in August 2025. An animated sequel about Marie was also cancelled back in 2005.
The Verdict on The Aristocats
The Aristocats is not Disney’s best film and it never pretended to be. It is a transitional object: a story approved by a dead man, drawn with a photocopier because the studio could not afford inkers, carried by a jazz song written in an emergency, and starring the first cats Disney ever bothered to make the good guys. That mix of accident and constraint is exactly what makes it worth watching now. The advisory card at the front is part of the record too. A film can be charming and dated at once, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
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