They did it to The Lion King. They did it to Aladdin. They’re doing it to Snow White. And now… Disney is making The Aristocats into a live-action film.
If you just had visions of Cats, you’re not alone.
Disney already made Lady and the Tramp into a live-action film that bypassed theaters and went straight to Disney+, and it’s not yet known whether The Aristocats will do the same. The screenplay will be written by Peter Rabbit 2 director Will Gluck and Keith Bunin (Onward, Horns).
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When the original Aristocats was released in 1970, Roger Ebert called it “light and pleasant and funny.” The story follows a pampered cat and her three kittens, who live a fancy-cat Parisian lifestyle with their owner, Madame Adelaide Bonfamille, and her butler, Edgar. When Madame decides to leave her fortune to the cats, Edgar—who will get the money anyway after the cats die!—decides he needs to get rid of the cats in hopes of inheriting directly.
Wacky hijinks ensue and the cats are left in the countryside, where they meet an alley cat who leads them back to Paris, eventually to make friends with some other strays who aid in their reunion with Madame. What this all says about poor cats versus poor humans seems iffy at best—though to be fair, Madame’s decision is also rather questionable—but perhaps Edgar is more sympathetic than I remember him being. It’s been a while. (Should you wish to refresh your memory, Mari Ness revisited the film in 2016.)
It remains to be seen how Gluck and Bunin might update this tale to make it a little less… let’s just say dated, though there are a lot of other words that could go here. Will they use real cats? Will this be a Lion King thing where they call it “live action” even though it’s all CGI? Is everyone too scarred to want to see another movie about cats? Maybe by the time this comes out, we’ll all have forgotten. No release date has been announced.
Is it wrong that I first read that as “Aristocrats”, and wondered how they planned on distributing an XXX comedy?
Only one question here.
Why?
In all honesty this is one of the first Live Action remakes in a while that makes me nod my head rather than shiver – while THE ARISTOCATS is amusing light entertainment, it’s also the sort of film that Disney could reasonably expect to improve on with a remake (I would be especially interested in seeing a Live Action remake tackle events from Edgar the Butler’s perspective, making him the villain protagonist of a slightly acid screwball comedy – perhaps one playing out in the rather fevered imagination of Edgar as he tries to work out HOW THE HELL those cats came back?).
@Sonofthunder
Because it remains a barrel yet to be scraped clean.
Ugh. I hope Disney preemptively realizes that nothing good comes of CGI cat movies and cans this project before we have to watch more dead-faced CGI animals sing about being felines.
@1,
No, it’s not just you. I thought of the joke/documentary first thing, too.
You do realize that the last live-action movie about cats heralded the pandemic, right?
(I can’t take credit for this – stolen from twitte
Well, if you don’t want to wait for the TV live action version, MTI did release a stage musical version: “Disney’s The Aristocats KIDS”. It’s a fun show – just buy a license, round up whole lot of actors, and away you go!
I’ve been reliably skipping the live-action remakes because most of my interest in Disney comes from my interest in animation in-and-of-itself. But here, yeah, I’m also thinking it makes sense. I remember seeing The Aristocats a couple of times as a kid, and the fact that I remember a) recycled music from One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and b) at least one set of awful ethnic stereotypes means that this one could stand to be reworked.
I kind of want a Milo and Otis style movie, if such a thing can be done humanely. I was obsessed with that movie as a kid.
If they try to mess with the characterizations of Abraham de Lacy Giuseppe Casey Thomas O’Malley and Duchess, I am out. He should be a rambler with a heart of gold (and the nicest guy in Disney–seriously, he’s truly a gentleman) and she should be a naive but kind and determined lady. In fact, the whole thing should remain a delightful period piece. It is, after all, among other things, a love note to pre-war Paris and its environs.
The characterization of the jazz cats needs a serious update, but I can already see a montage backstory: hire somebody who’s good at Parisian jazz to write a song about Paris and show Scat Cat, Shun Gon (do not know enough Chinese or Thai to know whether that needs an update), Hit Cat, Peppo (ditto, for Italian), and Billy Boss getting off various forms of transport and responding differently to finding themselves in Paris.
And for HEAVEN’S sakes hire animators and PAY THEM. Live schmive–bring together the crew that made Tangled so gorgeous.