Edgar Balthazar

Edgar Balthazar is the main antagonist in Disney's 1970 feature film The Aristocats. He was voiced by Roddy Maude-Roxby.

Background
Edgar is portrayed as a polite and sophisticated butler, yet underneath his exterior belies a scheming, greedy, impatient man (though this attitude only ignites because Madame Bonfamille's fortune is mentioned; otherwise, he would have willingly remained loyal to his mistress, thus eliminating his antagonist role). While greedy, he does not seem to be cruel. It would have been easy for him to just kill Duchess and her kittens, but instead, he chose to kidnap them and release them into the wild; and when that didn't work, he decided to send them to Timbuktu. He clearly has some better sense of morality than villains like Cruella De Vil and is more clumsy than he is villainous, as evidenced from his bumbling antics, from riding his motorcycle into the subway by mistake to stumbling over a trash can, getting in comical situations involving Napoleon and Lafayette (two farm dogs) to mistaking a tree branch for a gun. He is also not very intelligent, not seeming to understand that even if Duchess and her kittens outlive him, he will still have control over their inherited wealth even while they are alive, since they can't use most of the assets. He also seems to take the expression that cats have nine lives literally, explaining his belief that he'd be dead by the time the cats pass away.

Role in the film
Edgar starts off as Madame Adelaide's faithful butler, yet upon overhearing that she plans to leave her entire estate and fortune to her cats and then to Edgar himself after they die, he begins scheming to get rid of them, erroneously calculating that by the time the cats pass away (as he believed that the cats literally possess nine lives), he will already have died of old age (unaware that he, of course, will be kept in charge of the fortune). He mixes sleeping pills with the cats' milk that afternoon. Once the cats are all asleep, Edgar sneaks them out the mansion and drives out into the countryside to get rid of them. His plan is foiled by the farm dogs, Napoleon and Lafayette, when they spot the butler and begin their pastime of chasing. Desperate to escape alive, Edgar is forced to leave his umbrella, bowler hat, basket and sidecar behind at the farm. He also loses the basket holding the kittens by the riverside, but does not notice the loss until he returns to the mansion.

The next morning, everyone in the mansion is distraught at the cats' disappearance. Edgar is the only resident of the mansion feeling pleased, much to the surprise of Roquefort and Frou-Frou. Unaware that Frou-Frou is an intelligent horse, Edgar enters the stable and in his overconfidence, reveals his wrongdoings through the newspaper detailing the kidnapping. His happiness is cut short when he realizes that the hat, basket, umbrella and the motorcycle sidecar left at the farm would implicate him in the crime, and hurries to retrieve them before the police do. That night, after another fight with Napoleon and Lafayette, who had made beds and other things out of the stuff, Edgar escapes with his things with the use of a fishing rod, thereby eliminating all evidence of his crimes.

Edgar is once again feeling pleased with himself until the cats return home with help from an alley cat, Thomas O'Malley. Shocked but determined, Edgar traps them again and plans to send them to Timbuktu to ensure they will never return. Thomas and his alley cat friends intervene and engage Edgar in a brutal battle which culminates in Edgar ending up thrown and locked in the trunk himself and getting sent to Timbuktu. Adelaide apparently never learns of Edgar's treachery, believing that he simply left on his own accord, and so she excludes him from her will (a possible implication that she had decided to split the fortune between the cats and Edgar, which Edgar never found out).

Trivia
When the Nostalgia Critic reviewed The AristoCats in his "Disneycember", he wrongfully stated that Edgar wanted to get rid of the cats because "he hates cats, he's allergic to them and can't stand them.", but he was actually bothered by the fact that Edgar would abandon them in the wild. He said "What the f**** was wrong with people in those days?"

Despite being the main antagonist Edgar does not interact with Thomas O'Malley once during the film their true meeting occurring near the end

Despite singing "Rock-a-Bye, Baby" while drugging the cats' milk  with Madame's sleeping pills, Edgar is one of the few Disney villains that does not have his own song.