MOVIES: Gay Purr-ee (1962, Abe Levitow)

One of only two feature films released by the animation studio United Productions of America (UPA), a major player in American animation in the 1940s and 1950s. UPA is best remembered today for the Mr. Magoo shorts, and for The Gerald McBoing-Boing Show, a TV series based on a character created by Dr. Seuss.

The house style at UPA was defined in sharp contrast to the lush and relatively realistic style of Walt Disney films. UPA's backgrounds were often simplified and more abstract, and they made liberal use of limited animation.

The script for this movie was written by Chuck and Dorothy Jones; Chuck was one of the principal animators behind the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, and he also designed the characters for Gay Purr-ee, who are very recognizably in the Looney Tunes style. The backdrops are lusher than UPA's normal look, but still very much not in the Disney style; they're semi-abstract evocations of French art at the end of the 19th century.

We begin in 1895 in the French countryside, where Meowsette (voiced by Judy Garland), a fluffy Angora cat, has grown bored with country life, and decides to run away to the glamorous life in Paris. Fearing that she will be in danger, her beau, Jeune Tom (Robert Goulet) chases after her, accompanied by his kitten sidekick, Robespierre (Red Buttons).  In Pairs, Meowsette falls into the clutches of the villainous Meowrice (Paul Frees), who in collaboration with his "sister," Mme. Rubens-Chatte (Hermione Gingold), plots to ship Meowsette off to America as the mail-order bride of a rich American cat.

Yes, that's right, the plot of this animated movie for the tiny tots is built around sex trafficking.

There are songs, written by Harold Arlen, some of them in collaboration with E. Y. Harburg. If anyone was hoping that re-teaming Garland with the songwriters from The Wizard of Oz would lead to the same magic, they were, I'm afraid, disappointed. "Paris Is a Lonely Town" and "Little Drops of Rain" are pleasant enough ballads for Garland, and "The Money Cat," for Frees and his quartet of hench-cats, is a marvelously animated number, but "pleasant" is the best these songs can do.

Those hench-cats, by the way, are the most interesting characters in the movie. They're all sharp angles and glowing eyes, and are often positioned so that they're only a silhouette of a cat that seems to have four heads. The other interesting sequence is the "Portraits of Meowsette," in which Meowrice narrates as we see the portraits he has commissioned of Meowsette by all of the Parisian artists of the day -- Picasso, Degas, Seurat, and so on. They're beautifully animated imitations of those artistic styles.

It's a nice movie, of historical interest as one of the first animated films to cast movie stars instead of voice actors, and to build the publicity campaign around those movie stars. (At the top of the poster: "Vive la fun! ... Vive la joy! ... Vive la Judy!")  Frees and Gingold are entertaining villains, and Goulet is charming. But it never fully takes off. The Chuck Jones-designed characters clash with the artsy backdrops, and the UPA animators can't quite get the comic precision that his style of writing requires; facial expressions and punchlines always come just a bit too late. Worth a look for animation devotees or Garland completists, but skippable for most.