IslandGuru Who payed the critics

Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

utgard14 Fun Chuck Jones short that introduced minor Looney Tunes characters Hubie and Bertie. If you aren't familiar with them, they're two mice (one brown, one gray) who act as the antagonist for some other character, in this case a pampered cat who lives in a wealthy household where he never has to catch mice or anything. So he's lazy and spoiled. He also plays pranks which ticks off the butler so much he quits, leaving the cat alone to fend for himself. Enter Hubie and Bertie to screw with him. The music is quite nice and matches the action well. The animation is lovely. There's one brilliant scene in particular where the cat is freaking out because he's alone. Really good stuff. It's a fun cartoon with some nice Jones touches. As other reviewers have noted, the second half isn't as strong as the first. But it's never bad.

TheLittleSongbird On the most part, The Aristo-Cat is very good and entertaining. Sadly it is rather let down by the second half, the pace starts to lag here, while the outcome is predictable and gives the sense that the cartoon had run out of ideas. The bulldog is a decent enough character but the least memorable and funny character of The Aristo-Cat, kind of too much of a plot device for some sort of conflict for Pussy. Pussy however is a very strong character, for one whose screen time is relatively short, he is highly amusing but you feel sorry for him at the same time. The mice Hubie and Bertie are very funny and interesting too, though they are in the part of the cartoon that doesn't quite do their talents justice. The animation is wonderful though, bright, colourful, fluid and detailed. The highlight is Pussy's breakdown, a startling and brilliantly strange sequence, it's been said that it is one of the best breakdowns/mental collapses in cartoon history and personally there is no dispute there. The music has nearly always been a large part of any animated short(Looney Tunes and Disney are especially true to this), that's true with The Aristo-Cat as well. It sounds beautiful and full of energy and character, the use of pre-existing classical pieces are enough to delight any fans of classical music(raising a very proud hand here). The dialogue and gags in the first half are hugely entertaining, and while the story is very thin structurally the first half is paced well, second half not so much, and has its charm. The voice work is terrific, you can never go wrong with Mel Blanc, one of the gods of voice acting. On the whole, definitely recommended though the second half doesn't quite live up to what was so good about the first. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Lee Eisenberg As always, Chuck Jones's wise-guy mice Hubie and Bertie (making their debut) play tricks on an unsuspecting feline. While "The Aristo-Cat" has a fairly routine plot, the background catches my attention. The slanted angles look more like what I would expect in a Salvador Dali painting (Bob Clampett used Daliesque angles to a great degree in "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery"). But it's not just the angles. The colors - resembling those in Jones's "The Case of the Missing Hare" - obscure all perspective. This has to be the least pleasant place for a cat to attack a dog, believing the dog to be a mouse! So this is far from a masterpiece, but the background should draw interest. Even more than the fact that it's Hubie and Bertie's debut. Jones branched out their personalities in "Mouse Wreckers", "Cheese Chasers" and "The Hypo-Chondri-Cat".

msa-3 THE ARISTOCATS is a brilliant film by Chuck Jones which utilizes ingenious backgrounds and dynamic cutting, via John McGrew's extraordinary layout, to create a new kind of animation. The Jones and McGrew partnership in design extablished a new rhythm of stylization that certainly led to the modern UPA work.