The entire movie suffers from Broad Strokes due to Rule of Funny
We can assume that the plot is accurate; a retired opera singer makes a will that demands that her cats inherit all she owns, and her butler tries to get rid of them. We can even assume that there's some form of communication between the cats, and they meet an alleycat who becomes their father figure. However, certain details are different. Napoleon and Lafayette, who do end up stealing Edgar's distinctive hat and umbrella, have far too human-like gestures to go unnoticed. Rather than grabbing the bowler with his paws when Edgar tries to steal it back, Napoleon probably snatches it in his mouth.- There is actual evidence for this, although it may be an animation goof. At the end of Everybody Wants to Be a Cat, the cats pile onto a piano that crashes through the building, and they walk out playing broken instruments. However, the instruments are in no way damaged during the fall, so this seems strange, unless you assume the animation of the piano falling through the floor was just a representation for the actual crash.
Edgar is Disney's version of Chiquito de la Calzada
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. Even if Madame Bonfamille never suspects Edgar, the cops do.
They won't believe it's just a coincidence he'd disappear while the cats were missing. Madame Bonfamille is Anastasia Tremaine's descendant.
She looks like Lady Tremaine and, out of the stepmother's daughters, Anastasia was the one to be given a love interest. There'll be a sequel featuring Edgar trying to kill the cats out of a desire for revenge.
At this point, he no longer has any hopes of inheriting anything through their deaths but he'll want revenge for all the trouble they caused when he tried to get rid of them. Had Madame Bonfamille bequeathed everything directly to Edgar, he'd have tried to get rid of her.
He wasn't an antagonist in any way before the inheritance was first mentioned.- Plausible enough to qualify as Fridge Horror, I think. The cats might very well have saved their owner's life completely unknowingly, and we can add Nice Job Fixing It, Villain to Edgar's "accomplishments".
Madam Adelaide knew the cats were sapient.
In our world of human poverty, we tend to frown on rich people who leave their fortunes to animals. However, in the Disney world, they have the intelligence of humans. Thus, Adelaide leaving them her fortune was, to her, just passing it on to her beloved adopted family members. She probably heard Berlioz playing the piano and started to suspect, or found some of Toulouse's paintings. She seems to sort of share a joke with Duchess over Georges' mistake in kissing her tail, and in the end wants to set up a fund for musical cats. As the kittens suggest meowing to get her attention, she may be a Secret Secret-Keeper or possibly Duchess knows she knows. She probably intended to explain the terms of the will to Edgar (including provision for him so long as the cats were cared for) and could get away with such things as the will and the musical cat foundation by being a rich eccentric old lady.Thomas' Overly Long Name comes from various would-be owners.
Thomas has been cared for by humans over the years, and given the names "Abraham", "de Lacy", "Giuseppe", "Casey", "Thomas", and "O'Malley". Although he never saw fit to stay with the nice people, he kept every name to remember them by.The animals actually can speak human language. They just have an unspoken code not to do so around humans, like the toys from Toy Story.
At one point, Roquefort shouts “QUIET!” and several other characters, including Edgar, oblige by suddenly freezing still. This implies that Edgar, a human, could understand Roquefort, a mouse. Given that the animals that talk to each other are from many different species, they’re clearly not just communicating with their own species-specific sounds (meows, barks, etc.) They obviously have a lingua franca that they use to communicate across species lines, and that’s probably just the human language (French, in this case).That’s why the animals don’t generally talk to each other around humans; there’s a taboo on doing so in order to keep their sapience a secret. Roquefort just got so frustrated while he was trying to pick the lock that he momentarily forgot about the rule.At the end of the film, the jazz cats are seen playing music around Madame, because they recognize that she’s more trustworthy than the other humans, and they’re willing to bend the rules around her now.
The cats in this movie, and the Disney universe in general, literally have nine lives.
At one point, when Duchess told O'Malley that he could have lost his life, he shrugged it off and said "so I got a few to spare". It wasn't a joke, he has actually died several times in the past.