Disney’s Fifteenth Animated Feature — 1955
The opening theme music to Lady and the Tramp is a full-blooded love song, “Bella Notte.” This love story happens to star dogs in all their simple and joyous honesty. As Josh Billings wrote (quoted at the top of the film), “In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money can not buy … to wit—the wag of a dog’s tail.” To wit and to woo, as upper crusty cocker spaniel Lady is memorably wooed by the Tramp, a mongrel literally from the wrong side of the tracks. We meet him as he wakes up in a refuse heap at a train yard. The story is set in an earlier, quainter era. The opening moments of Lady and the Tramp show a horse-drawn sleigh similar to the “Once Upon A Wintertime” sequence in 1948’s Melody Time.
