If you are like me, you were horrified when you first watched Disney's "The Aristocats." If you aren't like me, I guess I'll have to explain why the Aristocats are evil. This is a movie about a rich, elderly British woman's cats who are quite pampered. When the woman lets her butler know that she will be giving her cats her large inheritance, he freaks out and tries to make the cats disappear. The movie makes you think that they are just cute cats that do kind things for each other and their friends, but there is a deeper, scarier truth. The Aristocats are cat supremacists! The entire movie is pure cat supremacist propaganda. The most disturbing part of the movie is not when the butler sends the cats down the river, though we will get to the butler in a minute, but instead the ending. Let me explain. When the wealthy woman's cats run into some alley cats, the alley cats sing a song which states that, "Everybody wants to be a cat, because a cat’s the only cat who knows where it is at..." This song clearly shows that they believe they are better than every other species. This is problematic in itself, but what is even worse is that at the end of the movie, all the other species are singing the same song! This shows that the other species have been brainwashed to believe that cats are the superior species. The cats are not only wealthy, but also spoiled, and yet we are supposed to root for them over every other species in the movie. The movie clearly portrays this cat supremacy as positive and fun.
The butler is supposed to be the villain that we root against, but why? Can any of us really hate this man when we think about what he is going through? This is a man who has worked with this wealthy woman for quite some time and has been extremely loving to her cats for years, even fixing their every meal. Then, all of a sudden, she decides to give all of her inheritance to her cats when she dies. I don't know about you, but if I cared for someone for years and I was their only human interaction, I would be pretty upset if she gave her cats all of her money. Furthermore, what would the cats even do with this money? They can’t spend it. The money would be spent on nothing and the cats would simply starve to death. So when you think about it, the butler is actually doing the cats a service by sending them out, because at least out in the wild they may learn how to hunt. In the house, they won't even eat the mouse that lives with them. The cats would die with or without the money, so why shouldn't the butler, who has worked hard his whole life, get the money? Yet, the butler, even though he is completely justified in hating these cats, shows kindness to them by not killing them but instead gently putting them in a basket on a river.
Despite the cats being the focus of the movie, none of these cats are actually the main character. Instead, the mouse is the protagonist of this movie. The mouse is the only character who has a legitimate character arch. Duchess, the mother cat, always remains kind, loving and ditsy throughout the entire movie. Even though the movie tries to pretend that O'Malley the alley cat goes from being selfish to selfless, this is obviously not true. O'Malley only questions for a second whether he should be with the mother and her children, but after this very short time, immediately becomes completely attached to them for the rest of the movie and shows no other character development, if one could even describe his minor change of thought as "development." The mouse, on the other hand, has a real problem with fear until he must muster bravery to warn the other alley cats that Duchess and children are in danger. This is a real character arch which progresses the way most stories would have characters progress. Yet, even this character arch has a sinister side to it. Let's think about how cats and mice relate to each other. Usually not well. In fact, cats usually eat mice. That means this movie is trying to trick us into believing that cats are so amazing that their natural prey actually adore them and would do anything to protect them.
When a movie does everything it can to prove that a species is superior to every other species by showing the other species adoring them and singing about how much better they are, one must ask if it isn't biased. When the movie then shows the superior species' reasonable detractors, such as the butler, being vilified and made into a fool who we are to laugh at, we ask if it does not have manipulative aspects. But when the movie shows a species' prey as actually loving their oppressors, it is completely obvious that the movie is pure propaganda meant to trick us all into adoring our cat overlords.
