Lady and the Tramp (1955)
Look, if you aren’t charmed by dogs eating spaghetti, we’re not sure you can be charmed. Lady and the Tramp tells a simple, always delightful story of a proper lady falling for a dog from the wrong side of the tracks who becomes a better man — um, we mean dog — in the process.
It’s painterly animation is far superior to most of the cheap-looking computer animation of today — this is a true feast for the eyes.
And it inspired our favorite bit of film criticism within a movie, the roundtable debate of the meaning of Lady and the Tramp that serves as the unlikely climax of Whit Stillman’s 1998 Last Days of Disco, another film that is a total delight. It’s from four decades after these movies of the 1950s, but don’t hold that against it.
This is our favorite of all the Disney movies of the 1950s.