In the morning, Duchess meets an alley cat named Thomas O'Malley, who offers to guide her and the kittens to Paris. The cats are left alone and afraid in the countryside, while Madame Adelaide, Roquefort the Mouse and Frou Frou the horse discover their absence. After the conflict, Edgar escapes, leaving behind his umbrella, hat, the cats' bed basket and the sidecar of his motorcycle in the process. However, two hound dogs named Napoleon and Lafayette attack him. Edgar hears this from his own room and believes he will be dead before he inherits Madame Adelaide's fortune, and so plots to remove the cats from a position of inheritance (clearly not thinking about how he would be essentially in control of the fortune, despite having to take good care of them).Įdgar sedates the cats by putting an entire bottle of sleeping pills into their food and then heads out into the French countryside to dispose of them. Only then will he inherit the fortune himself. She early on settles her will with her lawyer, Georges Hautcourt - an aged, eccentric old friend of hers - stating that she wishes the "faithful" Edgar to look after her beloved cats until they die. On an autumn day in Paris, a mother cat named Duchess and her three kittens ― Marie, Berlioz and Toulouse ― live in the mansion of retired opera singer Madame Adelaide Bonfamille, along with her English butler, Edgar Balthazar. Today, while the film is very iconic, it is seen as a modest success by the Disney company. While the film gained overall favorable reviews and a solid box office performance, it did not match the earlier success of 101 Dalmatians or The Jungle Book. The film is noted for being along with The Jungle Book ( 1967) the last film project to be approved by Walt Disney himself, as he died in late 1966, ten months before the film was released.
The film's basic idea - an animated romantic musical comedy about talking cats in France - had previously been used in the UPA animated feature Gay Purr-ee.ĭisney began production of a sequel, The Aristocats II, in December 2005, set to release in 2007, but production was cancelled in early 2006. The title is a pun on the word aristocrats. The 20th animated feature in the Disney Animated Canon, the film is based on a story by Tom McGowan and Tom Rowe, and revolves around a family of aristocratic cats, and how an alley cat acquaintance helps them after the butler Edgar catnaps them to gain his mistress' fortune, which was meant to go to them. Robin Hood Source The Aristocats (also stylized as The AristoCats) is a 1970 animated film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released on December 24, 1970.