For nearly 70 years, this film has delighted and warmed the hearts of all generations – and we can only say that about a few animated musicals. As everyone knows, it’s the story of Lady, a lovingly pampered cocker spaniel, and Tramp, a roguish mutt from the other side of the tracks.

But it’s time you took a new look at what Walt Disney’s team achieved in 1955 in a film that runs only 76 minutes: Lady and the Tramp brilliantly combines adventure and romance with characters that are surprisingly well developed in animation, dialogue and song.

This was Walt’s first movie released in gorgeous Cinemascope – a process the visionary producer had dreamed of employing as early as the 1940 Fantasia – and Lady and the Tramp marked his 15th animated cartoon, although that term hardly does justice to what we have here, which is a masterpiece.

The film’s star power is the great singer Peggy Lee, who wrote the songs with Sonny Burke and supplied the voices of four of the characters: the two Siamese cats, Si and Am, the human mother, Darling, and most memorably, an ex-showgirl dog named (of course!) Peg. As Lee told me, “That dog sure had a personality!”