![]() This even extends to the actions of the humans. These constant acts of generosity and compassion contrast with the greed and heartlessness of Cruella and her cronies. While Pongo and Perdita lead the children on the long and arduous march home, various dogs offer them shelter from the freezing cold. Tibbs, work to locate and then liberate every single puppy. The animals at the farm, particularly an intrepid cat named Sgt. The long chain spreads for miles until it reaches a countryside farm near Cruella’s home (literally called Hell Hall). Perdita initially dismisses it as a “gossip chain,” but every dog in London and its outer reaches treats their cry for help with great severity and spread it at any cost. Their helplessness forces Pongo and Perdita to use the Twilight Bark, a communication system where every dog within hearing distance relays a message by howling. After her henchmen kidnap the puppies, Roger and Anita call the police, who quickly write her off as a suspect despite everything. In fact, Cruella De Vil is so monstrous that the heroes can’t even hope to stop her plan alone. The Dalmatians may be the heroes, but Cruella is certainly the star. Marc Davis animated Cruella all by himself, and his passion for the character shows in every exaggerated expression and hammy mannerism. Even when she’s not acting larger than life, she’s hilarious: note how she stubs her pipe on one of Anita’s offered cupcakes, and how she later deftly uses that same pipe to dial a number on a rotary phone. Many people watch the movie today just to see her fly into rages, cackle at Anita’s unglamorous life and drive like she’s in a Fast and the Furious movie. ![]() While that alone is great, what truly propels her to Disney villain greatness is her titanic personality. Cruella may not command armies of darkness or plot the takeover of a kingdom, but she definitely earns her name (and her supremely funny theme song.) Her only motivation is her firm belief that they’d make a rather nice fur coat. All she needed was a goal so shocking that even Maleficent might balk: she kidnaps almost a hundred puppies so she can skin them. Like Lady Tremaine from Cinderella, she doesn’t need any unusual powers to be a great antagonist (the movie’s contemporary setting wouldn’t allow for it anyway). Despite Walt Disney’s initial discomfort with the change in style, it stuck for a couple of decades.Įven though we have gushed over Cruella De Vil in her own spotlight blog, we can’t not talk about her here. The artists also applied that aesthetic to their backgrounds, and it all fits with the movie’s urban environments and modern tone. Thankfully, this did not hinder the animation, which excellently highlights the distinct mannerisms of each character. The look of the characters was much sketchier, and they had pronounced black outlines. Xerography saved the studio a significant amount of time and effort - especially in animating all those spots on all those dogs ( 6,469,952 in all!).Ī side effect of this process is that it gave the film a much less polished visual style than previous Disney films. This technique allowed them to use Xerox cameras to print their drawings directly onto animation cells instead of inking them on there. ![]() On a technical level, it’s the first in which the animators used the xerography process. As a result, it’s also the first to feature cars and television. It’s the first to clearly be set in the modern day ( Lady and the Tramp take place around 1910). One Hundred and One Dalmatians represents quite a few firsts for the Disney animated canon. Thanks to a large network of watchful dogs and Pongo and Perdita’s own bravery, every puppy comes home with them, and the family is even larger and happier. The minions of Anita’s former schoolmate, the phenomenally villainous Cruella De Vil, kidnap the whole litter and add them to a collection of 84 others. Perdita soon becomes the mother of fifteen puppies. They soon meet their soulmates - Perdita and Anita, respectively - and eventually live together with a nanny. At first, Pongo the Dalmatian lives alone with “his pet,” a human songwriter named Roger. The movie focuses on the growth of a family. Besides being responsible for keeping the now ridiculously lucrative studio open, this movie remains highly entertaining for the whole family. The result, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, made more money than any of Disney’s animated films yet. Thankfully, he was persuaded to greenlight one more movie that looked promising (and inexpensive). After so many financial losses, he started to wonder if it was time to close the studio and stick with live-action films, television, and Disneyland. Its failure to make back its budget at the box office caused a crisis of confidence for Walt Disney. Sleeping Beauty was a monumental effort for Disney’s animation studio, costing six years and six million dollars.
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