The new Lady and the Tramp is ... good?

The Disney+ feature might have broken the live-action remake curse

Lady and the Tramp.
(Image credit: Disney)

It's difficult being a cat person in a world full of dog people. When Disney+ launches on Tuesday, it will include canine classics such as Old Yeller, The Shaggy Dog, The Ugly Dachshund, The Shaggy D.A., White Fang, You Lucky Dog, Fox and the Hound, Snow Dogs, 101 Dalmatians, Life Is Ruff, Eight Below, Santa Paws, and Santa Paws 2: The Santa Pups. One has to seriously wonder if, on top of everything else, the inclusion of a Lady and the Tramp remake was absolutely necessary. At the very least, if we're going to go through this exercise of waving the live-action wand at every animated classic, couldn't the studio have done an Aristocats reboot first?

But it was more than just Disney's dog favoritism that made me apprehensive about the forthcoming movie. The live-action Lady and the Tramp follows up Disney's disastrous remake of The Lion King, a movie that somehow managed to render a perfectly good story soulless and terrifying with its photorealistic digital animals. The straight-to-streaming release plan for Lady didn't seem to bode well either, nor did anything I saw in its trailer, which featured a whole lot of creepy CGI "talking" dog mouths. Taken all together, Lady and the Tramp was the rare movie I'd confidently written off before I even watched it.

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Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.