10 / 10
The Disney Film That Looks Different
One Hundred and One Dalmatians looks like no Disney film before it. The lines are scratchy and visible, the backgrounds are loose and sketchy, and the London it shows is modern: television sets, sports cars, flats and a songwriter who works at a piano in his front room. After decades of fairy tale castles and painted forests, it felt like Disney had walked out of the storybook and into the present day.
Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske and Wolfgang Reitherman directed it, and it came out in January 1961, right when the studio needed a hit. Sleeping Beauty had been enormously expensive and had lost money, and there was serious talk of closing the animation department. Dalmatians made it profitable again.
I give it a 10 without hesitating. If I could keep only one Disney cartoon, I’d keep this one, because it’s quick, sharp, a little mean and funny from the first scene to the last.
It’s also a film for adults as much as for children. The film aims the jokes about marriage, money, television and the English middle class at the parents in the audience, and it pitches the menace of Cruella high enough to frighten anyone. It has aged better than almost any Disney film of its era, because its modern setting and loose style never belonged to a single decade, and it still feels fresh sixty years later.
Dodie Smith’s Book
The film is based on Dodie Smith’s 1956 novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Smith was a playwright, the author of I Capture the Castle, and a Dalmatian owner herself, and the story reportedly came from a friend’s remark that her dogs would make a lovely fur coat. It’s a small, cruel joke, and Smith built a whole story around the horror of someone meaning it.
Bill Peet, one of the studio’s great story artists, adapted the book, and he became the first person to be the sole credited writer on a Disney animated feature. He simplified Smith’s plot, cut some characters and kept her sharp, very English sense of humor, and Smith herself was reportedly delighted with the result.
Peet’s script is tight and fast, and it gives almost every character, human and dog, a clear personality in a few lines. It’s the reason the film moves so well, and why it never stops for a song or a slow patch in its seventy-nine minutes.
Pongo’s Plan
Pongo, a Dalmatian who lives with a bachelor songwriter named Roger Radcliffe in a small London flat, narrates the film. Pongo decides Roger needs a wife, and he needs a mate, so he watches the women and dogs walking past the window until he sees the perfect pair, Anita and her Dalmatian Perdita, and drags Roger across the park to meet them.
The opening is lovely and funny, and it sets up the film’s central joke: the dogs are smarter than the people and are secretly running the household. Rod Taylor voices Pongo with a warm, amused confidence, a few years before he went on to star in The Time Machine and Hotel. Roger and Anita marry, Pongo and Perdita marry, and before long Perdita gives birth to fifteen puppies.
The birth scene is one of the film’s quietest and most affecting. One puppy is born apparently dead, and Roger rubs it in a towel until it breathes. It’s a moment of real tension and real tenderness in the middle of a comedy, and it makes the audience care about those puppies long before Cruella comes for them.
For Writers
Pongo narrates, and the dogs secretly run the household. The film’s point of view makes the humans the comic ones and the animals the clever ones.
When you write, choosing whose eyes the story is seen through can change everything about its tone. An unexpected narrator can make a familiar situation fresh.
Try retelling one scene of your story through the eyes of a minor or unexpected character. Notice what they see that your main character misses. My article on point of view in fiction goes further.
Cruella de Vil
Then Cruella arrives. She’s an old school friend of Anita’s, a skeletal, chain-smoking heiress in a huge fur coat, with hair half black and half white and a green-tinged face, and she wants the puppies. She offers to buy them. Roger refuses. She storms out, promising revenge, and soon after, the puppies are stolen.
Marc Davis animated her, and she’s the finest villain Disney ever drew. Every movement is violent and theatrical: she stubs out cigarettes in cakes, flings her coat around like a cape and drives a huge red car as if she wants to kill someone. Betty Lou Gerson gives her a voice that swoops from sugary charm to screaming fury in a single sentence.
She’s also frightening in a way that most Disney villains aren’t, because her plan is real and horrible. She wants to skin puppies to make a fur coat. There’s no magic and no curse, only greed and vanity, and the film never softens it. Children understand the threat instantly, and adults find it chilling.
Cruella is the reason this film sits where it does for me. Every scene she’s in crackles, and I adore how Davis animates her as if she’s too furious to hold still. She’d be pure nightmare if she weren’t so much fun to watch, and somehow she’s both at once.
For Writers
Cruella’s plan is simple and horrible: she wants to skin puppies for a coat. The threat is real, with no magic involved. That’s why she’s so frightening.
Give your antagonist a goal that’s plain, specific and repulsive, with no fantasy to soften it. Let the reader recoil from it before they understand the villain. If you want to go further, read Writing Heroes and Villains.
For a villain, a grounded, concrete evil is often more frightening than supernatural power, because the reader can imagine it happening.
The Xerox Look
The film’s distinctive look came from a new technical process. Ub Iwerks, Disney’s great technical innovator, adapted xerography, the photocopying process, so that the animators’ pencil drawings could be copied directly onto the transparent cels used for filming, instead of being traced by hand with ink. The inking department had been among the most labor-intensive parts of the studio, and the new process transformed the economics of animation almost overnight.
It saved an enormous amount of time and money, and it made the dots on the Dalmatians possible. Animating ninety-nine puppies with the right number of spots by hand would have been nearly impossible. It also gave the film its scratchy, sketchy, modern line. Art director Ken Anderson matched it in loose, graphic backgrounds. I side with the audience over Walt on this one. The scratchy line gives the film its energy, and I’d take it over the polish of the older features any day. Those visible pencil marks make the dogs feel alive.
Walt Disney reportedly disliked the look. He felt it lost the polish of the studio’s older films. Audiences loved it. It fitted the modern London setting perfectly, and it became the studio’s house style for the next two decades, through The Jungle Book and The Aristocats. It even survived into the seventies, when the studio was making Robin Hood and The Rescuers, and for many people who grew up in those years it’s simply what Disney looks like.
The Twilight Bark
When the puppies are stolen and the police can’t find them, Pongo and Perdita turn to the Twilight Bark, a network of dogs barking messages across London and the countryside at dusk. The news passes from dog to dog until it reaches every corner of England. Dogs in the city relay it to dogs in the suburbs, who relay it to dogs on farms, until an entire country’s worth of animals is working together to find fifteen missing puppies.
The idea is lovely and one of the best things in the film: barks traveling across rooftops, down streets and out into the snowy countryside, with dogs of every kind joining in. The message finally reaches an old sheepdog called the Colonel, his horse Captain and a brave cat called Sergeant Tibbs, at a farm near a gloomy old house called Hell Hall.
Tibbs creeps inside and discovers the stolen puppies, along with dozens more that Cruella has bought from pet shops. There are ninety-nine in all, and Cruella intends to turn every one of them into coats. The discovery raises the stakes enormously. Pongo and Perdita set out to rescue fifteen puppies and find ninety-nine.
For Writers
The Twilight Bark turns the whole country into a network of dogs passing messages. That’s a clever solution that also shows the scale of the world beyond the flat.
Let your characters discover a hidden system or community that helps them. Use it to widen the story’s world at the moment it seems smallest.
Give your characters a problem they can’t solve alone, and the solution can reveal something new about the world they live in.
The Rescue
Pongo and Perdita set off across the country in the snow to rescue their puppies. The rescue at Hell Hall, where they fight Cruella’s bumbling henchmen, Horace and Jasper, while the puppies escape, is funny and exciting, and it’s followed by a long, tense trip home through the winter countryside with ninety-nine puppies and Cruella on their trail.
The dogs disguise themselves by rolling in soot so they look like black Labradors, and they hide in the back of a removal van. Cruella, realizing the trick, chases the van in her car, and the chase ends with her car and her henchmen’s truck crashing into each other and tumbling into a ravine. Cruella, soot-covered and screaming, is left sitting in the wreckage.
I think it’s the best climax Disney animation had produced up to that point, a car chase with real speed and real menace that most animated films of the period couldn’t touch. Cruella’s final meltdown, soot-covered and shrieking in the wreck, is terrifying and hilarious at once, and I can’t picture a better ending for her.
Horace and Jasper
Cruella’s henchmen, Horace and Jasper Badun, are a pair of bickering, dim-witted crooks, one short and round, one tall and thin, who spend most of their time arguing and watching television. Their favorite program is a quiz show called What’s My Crime?, a parody of What’s My Line?, and they miss most of what’s going on because they’re watching it.
They’re a perfect comic double act, and they give the film its lightest moments.
They’re also a small, sharp joke about television. It had only recently arrived in British and American homes. The film is full of television: the puppies watch a cartoon dog hero called Thunderbolt, and a commercial for Kanine Krunchies is one of the funniest scenes.
It also gives the film a small moment I love. The puppies, held prisoner at Hell Hall, sit in front of the same television as their kidnappers watching Thunderbolt, and the henchmen are too absorbed to notice them edging away. The Kanine Krunchies commercial makes me laugh harder than most live-action comedies of its day, and the film’s view of television is affectionate, mocking and oddly modern.
Roger’s Song
Roger is a songwriter, and his big hit comes from Cruella. After her first visit, he sits at his piano and composes a mocking song about her, Cruella de Vil, and it plays over the radio at the end of the film as his first success. This is a jaunty, witty jazz number by Mel Leven, and it’s among the best-known Disney songs.
It’s the only real song in the film. It’s unusual for Disney. There are no characters bursting into song to express their feelings, no ballads, no big production numbers. The film relies on its story, its characters and its jokes, and it’s all the more modern because of it.
The song works because it’s funny. That’s a rude, affectionate portrait of a monster, set to a swinging tune, and it lets the audience laugh at Cruella even while she’s frightening them. It has outlived the film’s other music by a long way, and it’s still one of the first things people think of when they think of the film.
The Remakes
The story has been remade several times. The 1996 live-action version with Glenn Close as Cruella is lively and fun, and Close is terrific in the role, though the dogs don’t talk and much of the charm is lost. Its 2000 sequel is weaker. Cruella in 2021, with Emma Stone, is a stylish origin story about the villain as a young fashion designer. It’s entertaining on its own terms.
None of them matches the original. They all have spectacular costumes and big performances, and none of them has the original’s lightness, speed and wit. The 1961 film is funnier, scarier and more modern than any of its remakes. The remakes spend their money on spectacle, and the original spent its ingenuity on story and style, and the difference shows.
There’s also a 2003 animated sequel, 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure, released straight to video. It’s pleasant and forgettable. The original stands alone.
It’s the one to show children first. Once they’ve met the real Cruella, the remakes become fun variations. The other way round, the original can seem slow, and it deserves better than that.
Craft Note
Craft Note
101 Dalmatians builds a light, funny story around a frightening villain. The comedy of the dogs, the henchmen and the television makes Cruella’s cruelty hit harder when it arrives.
The temptation, in a story for younger readers, is to soften the villain. A real, understandable threat gives the heroes’ courage its meaning. Surround your villain with humor, but never let the humor touch the threat itself. Keep the danger serious and let everything around it be light.
The Verdict on 101 Dalmatians
It’s a 10. It has the studio’s greatest villain, a look unlike anything else Disney made, and a script without a wasted scene. It’s funny, fast and a little frightening, and it beats every one of its remakes because it spent its effort on wit where they spent theirs on money. My one small gripe is Roger, who’s a bit of a blank next to his dog, and I barely notice it.
