For the film The Aristocats individual assignments were given to each of the supervising animators. Milt Kahl developed the relationship between the movie's human characters like Madame Bonfamille, her lawyer George Hautecourt and Edgar, the butler. Ollie Johnston drew key scenes with Duchess and her three kittens, and Frank Thomas animated O'Malley's song as well as the two dogs in the countryside, Napoleon and Lafayette.
John Lounsbery was put in charge of designing and animating most scenes featuring O'Malley's jazzy musician friends. It was Ken Anderson's idea that the five of them would be from different ethnic backgrounds and speak with individual accents like Russian, British, Italian etc.
Here are a few of Lounsbery's character doodle sheets, in which he explores a variety of shapes and proportions for the cats, as well as props that might link them to their respective country.
http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2011/06/john-lounsbery.html
