Uncle Walt-a-thon: Lady and the Tramp
<- Uncle Walt-a-thon: Peter Pan
Maybe I should’ve saved that “still better than Cinderella” line for _Lady and the Tramp _instead of using it with Peter Pan. After all, Peter Pan is a different kind of story; it’s an adventure story, whereas Cinderella and Lady are “watch the characters not do much of anything except [in Lady’s case] eat spaghetti and chase a rat” stories.
Now, I’ll willingly grant that perhaps I’m not being entirely fair; perhaps it is largely my fault for being bored because there’s not enough action. As I’ve said before, my main interest in animation is animation, and with a few exceptions I don’t have much patience for works that don’t play to the strength of their medium. Besides, I’m outside the target audience for these films, and I did like Lady and the Tramp alright as a child. I certainly can’t fault the quality of the animation, and there’s nothing major wrong with the plot, it’s just not interesting to me as an adult.
If I am going to fault the film for something, though, it would be the climax. The tramp gets caught by the pound, and the two upper-class dogs have to track and chase down the coach. That’s cool, except that the whole chase is pointless because Jim is going to the pound in his car, so even if they’d just stayed home he would’ve got to the pound and got him out anyway. That rather negates the sacrifice the hound makes - or would have made, but I suppose killing off a main character would’ve been too dark for a children’s film, since we see him visiting Lady once the tramp sells out to The Man (well, sells out to Man) and is adopted by Lady’s family.
Well, I did find it a bit funny how this film was apparently voiced by people grabbed from meetings at the United Nations, with its Siamese cats, Italian restaurateurs, dogs with accents from Russia, Mexico, the US, Scotland, and England. Where is this film supposed to be taking place? Actually, do I dare ask what happened to the dogs Lady met at the pound? Nothing is said of them once Lady leaves; I guess the answer was, again, a little to dark for a children’s film… Except, this is the studio that made Bambi, so I don’t know what the problem was.
On that note, see you next time for Sleeping Beauty.