Lady and the Tramp

Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi and Wilfred Jackson’s 1955 animation puts a pampered house dog and a street dog on one road. It was the first feature length animation made in CinemaScope. The decision came mid production, and the studio finished two pictures: most 1955 cinemas could not project it, so the Academy ratio version made for them is not a crop but a separate layout, restaged wherever characters sat near the frame edge. The wide frame shows: the camera holds still and it is the dogs crossing the composition, not the cutting, that carries the action; viewers used to brisk animation cutting will find the first half slow. Peggy Lee voiced four characters and wrote the songs with Sonny Burke; she sued Disney over the 1987 videocassette release and a California appeals court upheld the judgment in her favour in 1992. Walt Disney had the spaghetti scene pulled at one point; Frank Thomas’s animation put it back. A good fit if you take the dinner for two as the summit of the film and want to know it was once dropped. Not for anyone unwilling to sit through the Siamese cat number: the Disney+ copy opens with a content advisory about negative depictions and leaves the scene in, while the 2019 remake swapped it for a new Janelle Monáe song.