Le petit chat voleur

A seemingly asexual anthropomorphic kitten called Ambrose dreams of being a highwayman and skips out on bathtime to loiter by the road and hold-up carriages with a fat bulldog called Dirty Bill. They appear to get on at first but when Ambrose pretends to hold-up a carriage and wins a bag of cookies Dirty Bill turns aggressive.

It's a lame cartoon, to be honest, and with quite an obvious moral. Of the dozens of Silly Symphonies that were made this one right at the bottom of the pile. Even as a random cartoon without the Disney brand name there's nothing memorable about The Robber Kitten and I can't see any kids being entertained by it in the modern era.

I've always preferred Warner Bros. cartoons to Disney ones, and "The Robber Kitten" is an example why. A bland morality parable, it uses a kitten's fantasies to remind us to always tell the truth. I can't even tell which era it's supposed to take place in. In my opinion, "The Old Mill" was the cleverest Silly Symphony, even if its intensity level rivaled that of "American Horror Story" and "Joker".

Disney presents a Silly Symphonies cartoon in Technicolor. Ambrose the kitten plays with toys acting as a bandit called Butch. His mother calls him but hardened criminals don't take baths. He runs away and encounters real criminal bulldog Dirty Bill. Ambrose gets pulled into a world of crime or does he? I do like the characters and I like the premise but I'm not sure about the clarity of the execution. All of it boils down to noticing the cookies spilling out on the ground in a tiny section of the frame. This is an early Disney product. These characters were probably popular at the time but they are not the long-running icons of the company.

For some reason, a cartoon about a robber wannabe with an annoying voice who runs into a real outlaw isn't very appealing. Boring, predictable, and unfunny. All the wannabe wants to do is play robber and not having to take baths. Just didn't find the story captivating.

Grade D---

While I am not normally a fan of the SILLY SYMPHONY series, I like some of them. This one happens to be one of my favorites that I watch often. The title character named Ambrose (Butch as he prefers to be called) is about to receive a bath from his mother. He runs away from home to be a robber. This short appears to take place in the 18th century as Butch wears a Three Musketeers-type costume. When he runs into a bulldog named Dirty Bill (who dresses just like Robin Hood), he points his toy guns at him and says "Your money or your life!" Soon Butch and Bill become friends. Butch tells Bill a fictional story of how he held up a stagecoach and forced the people in it to give him all their valuables. Bill's facial expression turns from friendly to greedy as he orders Butch to bring the bag to him. Butch tells him that they're only cookies. Bill pulls a knife on Butch and it literally scares the pants off of him. The ending was good as Butch runs into his home and voluntarily jumps into the tub. There is a Disney reference to this cartoon. AT the beginning of the short, when Butch is playing with his toys in his room, there is a holdup scene similar to that of the movie TOY STORY. Of course this cartoon was released sixty years before TOY STORY.