Gay Purr-ee (United Producers of America, Warner Bros., 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, September 23) I bypassed Jeopardy! and instead put on Turner Classic Movies to watch an all-time favorite film of mine, Gay Purr-ee (1962). This was an animated feature-length film made by United Producers of America (UPA) in association with Warner Bros., which co-produced and distributed the film. UPA had been founded in 1941 by refugees from the Walt Disney Studios, who had lost their jobs there as fallout from the bitter animators’ strike that broke up the team that had made Disney’s first animated features (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Bambi, Dumbo, Fantasia) and transformed Disney from a relatively apolitical man to a major funder and supporter of the American Right. Walt Disney would derisively refer to UPA’s staff as “those Commies down the river,” and indeed many of the UPA animators, including John Hubley, were decidedly Left in their political orientations. (Hubley did some stunning set designs for the 1951 film noir The Prowler, but he was blacklisted and denied the credit he deserved. Later The Prowler’s director, Joseph Losey, was also blacklisted and spent the rest of his career in Britain.) UPA also departed from Disney’s example in pursuing so-called “limited animation,” in which fewer drawings were used to create the illusion of motion. While Disney and their principal competitors in the animation business, Warner Bros. and MGM, stuck to “full animation” (using one drawing per frame of finished film), “limited animation” used the same drawing for two or three frames, creating a much jerkier style of movement. The great advantage of limited animation was it was much cheaper; it also lent itself to a more stylized type of cartoon. UPA created classic characters like Mr. Magoo (an irascible little man whose main characteristic was extreme nearsightedness) and Gerald McBoing-Boing (a boy who “spoke” with the sound of a Jew’s harp).

In 1962 they decided to branch out into features and produced Gay Purr-ee, a rather awkwardly titled love story about cats in turn-of-the-last-century Paris. One innovation of UPA’s on Gay Purr-ee was to use voice actors who were celebrities in their own rights instead of the anonymous drones who’d voiced previous cartoons. The central character in Gay Purr-ee, a blandly designed white female farm cat named Mewsette, was voiced by Judy Garland, while her boyfriend, an orange cat named Jaune-Tom who’s a champion mouse-catcher, was voiced by Robert Goulet. Fortunately, in addition to the major stars (along with Red Buttons as Jaune-Tom’s comic-relief sidekick Robespierre), UPA used veteran voice actor Paul Frees (who among other assignments dubbed for Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune in Grand Prix and Tora, Tora, Tora, films that required Mifune to speak English, which he couldn’t do) as the principal villain, Meowrice Percy Beaucoup. The other big gimmick in Gay Purr-ee was that the settings and backgrounds were largely (though not consistently) designed in the artistic styles of turn-of-the-last-century Paris, particularly Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism and whatever you call Vincent Van Gogh’s almost bas-relief style. There’s a great sequence in which Meowrice is describing the various portraits of Mewsette he’s commissioned the leading artists of Paris, including Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, Pierre Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso, to make of her. (Actually there are some glitches in the chronology here; Van Gogh died in 1890 while Picasso didn’t evolve his Cubist style until 1909. But who cares?)

Basically Gay Purr-ee is a knock-off of Gigi, with at least one cast member (Hermione Gingold) in common, playing a similar role: an elderly woman (or feline) who trains the heroine in the social graces to make her a fitting companion for a male. When the film opens Mewsette is bored with her life in the farm region of Provence and decides, on the basis of a conversation she overhears between two human characters singing the praises of Paris, to run away there. She stows away in the humans’ carriage and Jaune-Tom, hearing she’s run off, determines to chase after her even though he has no way to get to Paris except by foot. On the way there’s a quite exciting thrill-comedy sequence as Jaune-Tom and Robespierre hide under a bridge to avoid getting run over by an oncoming train, only the bridge is over a ravine and it’s touch and go for a while whether Our Hero Cats will survive. Once Mewsette arrives in Paris she falls for a scoundrel, Meowrice Percy Beaucoup, who turns her over to his “sister,” Madame Rubens-Chatte (Hermione Gingold), for training to be a suitable mail-order bride for a Mr. Henry Phtt of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Of course Mewsette has no idea what dire fate Meowrice has in store for her. When Jaune-Tom and Robespierre show up in Paris they stumble on Madame Rubens-Chatte’s establishment and knock on the door, but before they get an answer they’re abducted by Meowrice’s henchcats, the Money-Cats (Bill Cole, Bill Lee, Thurl Ravenscroft, Max Smith) and sold into slavery as ship cats on a vessel bound for Alaska to participate in the Klondike Gold Rush. Fortunately the (human) captain of the ship befriends them, and the three of them go out prospecting. Thinking he’s only hunting down another mouse, Jaune-Tom discovers a large cache of gold nuggets and the trio return to Paris, as one of the headlines says in the montage, “trés loaded.” Meanwhile Meowrice has paid off Madame Rubens-Chatte for her services with Mewsette, only he wrote her a check and used disappearing ink.

Irate at having been swindled, she thunders, “If I had the opportunity to do him a disservice … ,” and said opportunity arises in the persons (or cats) of Jaune-Tom and Robespierre, who ask Madame Rubens-Chatte for Meowrice’s address and get it. Unfortunately, by the time they arrive Mewsette has scrawled a note on the floor stating she’s been taken to a train, and there’s an exciting climax on board the train in which Jaune-Tom and Robespierre ultimately overpower Meowrice, pack him into the box for Mr. Henry Phtt, and rescue Mewsette. I first ran across Gay Purr-ee in the late 1960’s on the old NBC-TV Saturday Night at the Movies program, which like a lot of TV showings of films then had an annoying habit of lopping off the opening credits and either not showing them to the end of the movie or not showing them at all. So I had no idea what the film was or what it was titled; it was just a charming animated story with the voices of Judy Garland and Robert Goulet clearly recognizable on the soundtrack. What’s more, I was watching it on an old black-and-white TV, thereby denying myself one of the key points of appeal for this film – its dazzling color design. The aspect of the film that got to me then still gets to me now: the riveting contrast between the namby-pamby design of the character of Mewsette and the throbbing intensity of the 40-something Judy Garland at the peak of her later powers. This was the Judy of the Carnegie Hall live double album recorded April 23, 1961 and the subsequent unfinished attempt at a follow-up at the Manhattan Music Center on April 25, 1962 (the idea was that Judy would do a full album of songs from Broadway musicals, though her voice went after just nine songs; I have this on a bootleg LP and it was finally released officially in 1989): occasionally ragged vocally but still throbbing with emotion.

At Judy’s insistence, the producers hired Harold Arlen to write the music for the film’s songs with E. Y. “Yip” Harburg providing the lyrics. Arlen and Harburg had collaborated on Judy’s (and everybody else’s) songs for her star-making movie, The Wizard of Oz, 23 years earlier, though in the meantime Harburg had been blacklisted for his Left-wing politics (which is how Ira Gershwin ended up writing the lyrics to Arlen’s songs for the 1954 film A Star Is Born). It was a great return for Harburg, who filled Judy’s numbers in particular with marvelous bits of wordplay like the lament in “Paris Is a Lonely Town”: “The chestnut, the willow/The colors of Utrillo/Turn to grey, grey hues” (though the Genius Web site garbles the next line badly: it’s really “The band playing Bizet/Along the Champs-Élysées” but the site has “The band playing vyse,” whatever that’s supposed to mean). He also wrote a surprisingly good vocal feature for Paul Frees, “The Horse Won’t Talk,” and a great ensemble number for the Money-Cats. I’m not as fond of Gay Purr-ee as I used to be, but it’s still a quite charming movie even though in some respects it’s dated badly (while in other respects, notably Judy Garland’s ferociously emotional singing, it hasn’t dated at all!) and Newsweek magazine, reviewing it when it was new, said, “The visual style is Van Gogh out of Magoo. There are songs with lines like ‘The chestnut, the willow/The colors of Utrillo,” voiced with varying competence by Judy Garland and Robert Goulet. There seems to be an effort to reach a hitherto undiscovered audience: the fey four-year-old with recherché taste.” Incidentally TCM showed this as part of an all-night tribute to animation director Chuck Jones, who with his wife Dorothy wrote the script while longtime UPA hand Abe Levitow directed. Unfortunately, though Warner Bros. distributed and co-produced the film, the “suits” at Warners had a huge hissy-fit when they learned their contractee Chuck Jones had been involved with it. They fired not only Jones himself but his entire unit, which moved en masse to MGM.