A Life Through Film #041: 101 Dalmatians
The Girl Bossification of famous puppy murderer Cruella de Vil, to mixed results
Release Date: 11/29/1996
Weeks at Number One: 2
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
The year is 1961, and if you can believe it, Walt Disney is on the edge of shutting down his animation studio.
The entertainment magnate’s lifelong dream had always been a successful amusement park, and with the successful launch of Disneyland in 1955, that boyhood fantasy had been achieved. As iconic as the cartoons and animated films he produced were, Disney no longer had to rely on them as a way to make money.
In fact, they weren’t even all that good at that anymore either. Lady and the Tramp and Peter Pan [2.5/5] had done decent box office business earlier in the ‘50s, but those were halcyon days now. Walt Disney Animation Studios had just dropped a major box office bomb called Sleeping Beauty.
This is all so insane to think about now. The animated features put out by Disney in the mid 20th century are still regarded as some of the most iconic movies of all time. Multiple generations have been raised on these films, their characters, and their moments, with Sleeping Beauty in particular remaining a cultural touchstone to this day.
And yet Walt had to be realistic: his high standards for the fairy tale quality of these movies meant they took forever to make. If they consistently failed to make their budget back in ticket sales, it simply wasn’t worth the time and effort to make them. Investing further in Disneyland and an increased swath of live action films seemed more prudent, financially.
Disney Animation as we know it was saved by a groundbreaking piece of technology called the Xerox copier.
In the before-times, animators had to draw character movements frame by frame on paper before manually copying them on top of the backgrounds of animation cels. Now, artists could place their drawings directly onto those cels via Xerox, cutting the animation time literally in half and allowing for the team to adjust character art much more easily, since they could see the final combination of character and background much sooner. The only downside was that more subtle linework was lost during the scanning process, forcing artists to use a bolder, more striking art style than the more lush and subtle Sleeping Beauty.
Disney Animation used the Xerox method to make a short film called Goliath II in 1960, but animator Ken Anderson knew the tech held the potential to make full features. He used his position as the production designer on the studio’s newest animated project to successfully lobby for the technology to be fully integrated into production. Anderson believed in Xerox’s potential to radically change the way Disney made their animations, but it couldn’t have hurt that the tech would save a lot of time on drawing all those dogs.
One Hundred and One Dalmatians was a film of many firsts for Disney. It was their first feature film written by only one person, screenwriter Bill Peet adapting Dodie Smith’s 1956 similarly titled children’s book The Hundred and One Dalmatians. It was their first animated feature with a contemporary setting, a depiction of London filled with beatnik artists falling in love despite the ire of old money bourgeoisie. And since Anderson got his way, it was Disney’s first feature film to be made with the assistance of Xerox, seriously cutting down on production time and budget.
As a result of that production, One Hundred and One Dalmatians also features a first-time art style change for Disney as well. Gone are the careful, delicate, detailed characters and backgrounds of yesteryear, replaced with striking lines, bold outlines, and textured, occasionally abstract backdrops. A modern style to match the modern setting.1 I’ve long related One Hundred and One Dalmatians to jazz in my mind because of this art style, even though there’s not really any of that genre in the film. In fact, there’s hardly any pronounced music at all, since the movie is a rare non-musical from this era of the studio.
The notable exception is, of course, a wee ditty about a certain Cruella de Vil.
She was always going to be iconic. Cruella is just too boldly bad, a standard bearer for villainy who’s diabolically committed to the role of antagonist. It’s one thing to have an evil witch in a fairy tale where things can be magical and exaggerated, so sure, Maleficent can turn into a big dragon, why not. Meanwhile, the only observable difference between our own reality and the world of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, is that the dogs are a bit smarter and there’s an evil millionaire heiress running around who has zero qualms about kidnapping and killing puppies in order to create a spotted coat.
Cruella de Vil is insane to the max, unpredictably violent, surrounded by goons, and mysteriously wealthy. She’s basically the Joker if he was focused on high fashion. In fact, an AFI Ranking in 2003 named Cruella the 39th greatest movie villain of all time, ahead of both the Joker and child-murderer Freddy Krueger. She has a legacy that would almost outstrip the movie she comes from, if this were any other movie.
Instead, One Hundred and One Dalmatians was an even more massive hit than you may realize. Its initial release in 1961 was met with rave reviews and mass commercial appeal. The year ended with Dalmatians as the 8th highest grossing film of the year, but the spotted miracle didn’t stop there. Further re-releases in the decades after proved even more successful, as more and more children grew up watching the adventures of Pongo, Perdita, and a frankly impractical number of puppies.
Almost 100 million tickets sold across 5 major releases means a whole lot of love for these animated pups. When adjusted for inflation, One Hundred and One Dalmatians is the 12th highest grossing movie of all time, above smash hits like The Lion King [4/5] and The Empire Strikes Back (more on that in a couple of months). When the movie was finally released on VHS in the early ‘90s, that home release was one of the most successful of the decade.
I must have watched that tape a hundred times as a kid. I was never a massive Disney fan when I was young, but Toy Story and Dalmatians were two of my favorite films to rewind and rewatch, over and over and over again. To this day, its wonderful presentation and charming writing make One Hundred and One Dalmatians one of my favorite animated movies the studio’s ever done [4.5/5].
That familiarity with the source material must have helped me pick up on the fact that the 1996 remake wasn’t going to cut the mustard.
The Disney that released 101 Dalmatians in 1996 was a far cry from the company that had nearly shelved animation entirely 35 years earlier.
Walt Disney Animation Studios was in the middle of a generational run of quality, popular movies that we know today as the Disney Renaissance. Starting with The Little Mermaid [3.5/5] in 1989, the return to a fairy tale inspired oeuvre took the company to new heights of critical and commercial success. Aladdin [3.5/5], The Lion King, Pocahontas, and what may be the crown jewel of the entire era, Beauty and the Beast [4.5/5], rewrote the company’s entire legacy, showing that it was more than princess movies from the 1950s. A partnership with a still-nascent Pixar kept the conglomerate on top technologically too, creating a brief monopoly on feature films animated entirely in CG.
This resurgence of animated films after two decades of diminishing returns and weak hits reshaped the entire narrative around the company. Disney was not just a general media group with cool theme parks. It was now an entertainment juggernaut, a source of true magic for both children and adults.
Meanwhile, the live action branch of the company was releasing major hits under its Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, and Buena Vista Pictures labels. The House of Mouse has already appeared multiple times in this column because of hits like Ransom, Jack, and The Rock.
These live action ventures were often even more successful than Disney’s animated fare. Their only major cartoon film of the year, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, actually stalled out in second place behind Eraser, though it did still make a boatload of cash.
Walt Disney chairman Joe Roth wanted to combine these pillars of animation and live action into a new concept. Today, we’ve been collectively beaten down by mediocre live action remakes of classic animated Disney movies for years, but in 1996, it was an entirely fresh concept. The studio had only technically done it once when it acted as the distributor for a live action Jungle Book adaptation that was otherwise independently made. Now, Roth wanted to take things in house, and Dalmatians still making bank on home video decades after its release was proof enough of its continuing appeal. It was time to get some real dogs on screen, and Roth knew just the guys to help.
After dominating the 1980s with teen comedies like The Breakfast Club [4/5] and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off [4.5/5], John Hughes transitioned away from writing/directing at the start of the ‘90s to focus on chilling in Chicago and writing the screenplays to family comedies. He started that phase of his career with Home Alone [4.5/5] in 1990, so clearly Hughes knew what he was doing.
In order to manage the business side of his career while he stayed in the midwest with this family, the writer teamed up with former Hollywood Pictures president Ricardo Mestres in 1995 to form Great Oaks Entertainment. In its short existence, this production group would partner with Disney to focus on live action, family friendly comedies, most of which were written by Hughes. We’ve already seen their work in this column already; Great Oaks is partly to blame for the existence of Jack.
Disney partnered with Hughes and Mestres to get this new version of Dalmatians, now titled with the numeric 101, made. The team enlisted Stephen Herek, previously in this column for the closest thing he’s ever had to a financially successful passion project, Mister Holland’s Opus. Herek, by his own admission, is a pretty anonymous filmmaker stylistically, and he had a track record of coming in to helm live action Disney movies with what I can only describe as perfect adequacy.
This journeyman pick for the director put the onus on the right star for Dalmatians to stand out. Hughes, in an increasingly rare move of doing something for a film’s production beyond writing a script, personally met with the producer’s pick to bring Cruella De Vil to life, Glenn Close.
Close, who was starring on Broadway in Sunset Boulevard when Hughes approached her, had played a terrifying female villain before to great success in 1987’s Fatal Attraction, but she initially had no interest in taking part in the adaptation. However, she was convinced by the costume designer she was working with on Broadway, Oscar winner Anthony Powell, to take on the gig. When she did, Powell came on board as well to dress her in increasingly insane outfits. Good networking on his part!
This new version of Cruella would no longer be a weird heiress who was a scary peer to the central human characters of Roger and Anita. Instead, Close would portray De Vil as a girlboss in everything but name: an eccentric, confirmed bachelorette at the head of her own fashion empire, as well as a tyrannical, terrifying boss to designer Anita.
I’m not a fan of most of Hughes’s story changes in 101 Dalmatians from the original, but this is an exception. In One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Cruella being an old school friend to the young human couple that own our central dog characters is so strange that I never encoded it as a kid, despite my many rewatches of the movie. I always just thought she was a crazy aunt, or an inexplicable malevolent force.
Close’s take on Cruella De Vil is literally the only thing I knew about this movie as a kid, though I was too young to be aware of 101 Dalmatians when it came out. Its eventual sequel got a massive marketing push that I remember strangely vividly, centered around the return of the villain in an entirely new way. Despite my adoration of One Hundred and One Dalmatians at home, I never had any interest in seeing a modern, live action take on it. Even then, I could hear how hollow 101 Dalmatians rang compared to the artistry of the original.
The biggest change that Hughes makes to the story is muting the dogs. The bulk of the dialogue in the original Dalmatians is primarily voiced by canines talking amongst themselves (and an occasional cat or horse). The spoken lines not only helps to distinguish the many Dalmatians on screen audibly, but gives each more of an individual character. By contrast, the real, silent dogs in the 1996 remake are all essentially the same character: brave, smart, and able to silently come up with elaborate plans to undo the evil of men (or women, in Cruella’s case).
To make up for this, the trained animals in the film perform some genuinely impressive non-human acting. I’m sure many of the meaningful looks and barks of joy were found in the editing room rather than on-set, but the final result is strangely effective at conveying plot and mood. The sacrifice is a reduced sense of individual character for each dog beyond one visually obvious joke-trait (Fidget clumsily scratches himself a lot, for example), but I’d be lying if I wasn’t impressed with these canine performances. Good dogs!
If the dogs carried half the story in the original Dalmatians, then Cruella and her goons handled nearly the rest of the weight. In the ‘96 version, the trio of De Vil, Horace, and Jasper (played by Hugh Laurie, Dr. House himself) remain prominent parts of the story, but don’t get much more screentime than in the ‘61 film. This leads to a natural storytelling imbalance of three humans and a bunch of silent dogs needing to carry the bulk of 101 Dalmatians, which ultimately collapses by the end of the film. It’s a shame, because the movie becomes actually quite entertaining when Cruella is around.
Close is far and away the best part of this movie. It’s not just that she’s excellent as a performer, though that’s a big part of it. She eschews any sense of normalcy or pathos in Cruella, instead maximizing the evil cackling and insane outbursts to otherwise normal people. Close has spoken highly of the character in interviews, framing her as a monstrous witch who makes it easy to elicit sympathy for those who stand against her. In wrestling terms, Cruella is a source of nuclear heel heat because of her unhinged adoration of fur and the grotesque ends it takes her. We love her because it’s just so fun and easy to boo her.
Cruella De Vil is a ludicrous character inside and out, so the movie does a good job surrounding her with a tangible field of wackiness. The villainess’s personal and professional spaces are far stranger architecturally than anything else in the film, dominated by elegant monochromatic abstraction. Anthony Powell creates dozens of unique looks for Close that highlight an absurdity to Cruella that’s only matched by her love of wearing furs and other animal products. Hell Hall, her dilapidated manor in the north of England, leans closer to Scooby-Doo setting than dangerously condemned hovel, while the design of her iconic coupe de ville has made the transition from animation to tangibility basically unscathed.
Anytime Cruella is on screen, 101 Dalmatians briefly becomes a fun movie.
Unfortunately, Glenn Close isn’t in every scene of this movie, a blunder which ultimately lets the overall product down. When its iconic villain isn’t onscreen or immediately out of frame, 101 Dalmatians plays it far too straight. Roger and Anita, portrayed here by Jeff Daniels and Joely Richardson respectively, occasionally get to do funny things early on, but as the plot progresses they instead have to pick up the storytelling slack from the decision to mute the dogs. I normally like Daniels, but he and Richardson are just not up to that task here.
Everything about Roger and Anita is actively more boring than their animated counterparts from three decades earlier. He is no longer a beatnik songwriter but a clueless game designer in a movie that has no clue what real game dev even resembles, while she now works as a talented yet aimless fashion designer under Cruella, her character stripped of all sensitivity or resemblance of intelligence. The couple is asked to do more narratively with less character. Roger and Anita are straight up worse parts of 101 Dalmatians than they were in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and they aren’t alone.
Drab shots of modern London replace the original film’s distinct, iconic art style. Dull slapstick stands in for moments of legitimate tension, Hughes plagiarising himself when a big chunk of the second act basically becomes Home Alone but with dogs instead of Macaulay Culkin. Pongo and Perdita lose almost all of their character, and in the end get upstaged when the human police, rendered impotent offscreen in the original, swoop in to save the day without much canine input at all.
Hughes said in an interview that he thought that his script was far funnier than the original movie, but he mostly just fills the pages with low-hanging fruit: fart and pee jokes, people pratfalling onto their ass, and comical misunderstandings of how electricity works, none of which got me to chuckle.
All those comedic whiffs aren’t the only issues with Hughes’s script. It would be pedantic of me to get lost in the weeds over the screenplay for a 1996 movie for children2, but the otherwise legendary screenwriter makes choices with the story that make following along with it less fulfilling.
Our protagonist dogs don’t even do anything to stop Cruella in the end, Pongo and Perdita relying on a random barn full of animals to enact justice instead. This general alliance of animals going against a human villain totally ruins the focused topic of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, an unforced narrative error that makes me wonder if Disney didn’t just wish that they could just be doing a Babe movie instead.
Almost everything good about the animated classic that inspired 101 Dalmatians is gone, replaced with elements that are more often mediocre than they are inspired. Aside from everything caught in the Cruella zone of influence and a few legitimately charming moments of animal acting, there’s nothing about this movie that makes it appointment viewing over its source material. I don’t think it ever slips down into being outright bad, but its dismal adequacy might be worse.
I had to take an overnight break from 101 Dalmatians as I was watching it. When I came back to the movie the next morning, I realized I hadn’t thought about it one iota. There’s just not enough there to care.
101 Dalmatians used over 300 Dalmatian puppies, plus trained adult animals for the many other non-human roles. Producer Edward S. Feldman publicly guaranteed that not only were all of these dogs treated royally behind the scenes, but that each young pup had been already pre-adopted by the time filming took place. His goal was to assuage the fears of animal rights activists, but those folks were right to be concerned with the movie’s influence.
In 2000, as 102 Dalmatians loomed, activist groups picketed outside Disney, claiming that 101 Dalmatians had led to a massive wave of purchase, abandonment, and eventual euthanasia for many Dalmatians. Groups like Media Partners for Pets wanted the sequel to include a disclaimer discouraging people from going out and buying a Dalmatian just because they saw it in the movie. Disney declined to comment on all this.
Animal advocates weren’t the only ones who disliked the movie. 101 Dalmatians sits at 39% on Rotten Tomatoes, a dip of about 60 points from the acclaimed original. Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly gave it a mediocre grade and called it “Disney strip-mining its past for profit,” a prophetic complaint that continues to be echoed to this day. Roger Ebert also saw through the movie’s shallow attempts at recapturing the magic of the original, critiquing its overreliance on bad slapstick and a weakness in characterizing the dogs we’re supposed to care so much about.
He did acknowledge that this new Dalmatians would likely be a hit among kids who just want to see cute dogs.
Disney saw that same potential from its young audience, lining 101 Dalmatians up to release the Friday after Thanksgiving. With so many kids out of school, many primed by VHS copies of the original movie, all Disney had to do was give families an outlet for that collective youth energy. By pulling in $33 million that weekend (a strong one that saw Star Trek: First Contact slip to second with a gross of $25 million), 101 Dalmatians set a record for highest Thanksgiving debut of all time.
It only stayed atop the box office for another weekend afterwards, but these spotted pups loitered on the box office charts for ages afterwards. The movie stayed in the Top 10 until nearly February, and didn’t leave theaters entirely until May of 1997, ending its mammoth run at the multiplex with a domestic gross of $136 million. That was good enough for sixth place for 1996 movies domestically, ahead of The Rock but behind Ransom. A live action Disney sandwich!
An international release was even stronger, leading to 101 Dalmatians bringing in $304 million all told. Maybe the silence of the dogs and over the top slapstick helped cross language barriers, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
A sequel was inevitable, but 102 Dalmatians in 2000 failed to live up to financial expectations. It never topped the box office, and only ended up with a domestic gross of $66 million, less than half that of its predecessor. I’m curious to watch it and see if it was really that much worse than 101, but it has even worse reviews than today’s movie and I don’t want to do that to myself right now. Maybe another time.
The lingering effect of 101 Dalmatians has been a canonization of Cruella De Vil as one of the most iconic Disney villains. She was already flirting with that tier of infamy before 1996, but Glenn Close’s performance modernized the character in a way that didn’t strip her of her total evil, resulting in a whole generation that associates the legendary actress with Cruella and only Cruella.
Close said in an interview with Vanity Fair that she once went to a university for a screening of Fatal Attraction (based on the timing of the interview, this probably would have been in the late 2000s). The college students had never heard of the thriller, but were pumped to ask her questions about 101 Dalmatians. Personally I’d be frustrated by this, but Close comes off as very fond of the character, standing by Cruella as the greatest Disney villain of all time.
The studio, which has grown increasingly willing to mine its old content for a quick buck, hoped to capitalize on nostalgia for 101 Dalmatians in 2021 with Cruella, a Emma Stone-led origin story of sorts for the character that attempts to cast her as a sort of femme fashion Joker in 1970s London. The result is one of the worst movies I’ve watched in recent memory, a total bastardization of the original film that drips with ugliness and is written like a The Devil Wears Prada [4/5] x Annie fanfiction from 2007. Cruella was a hit, but a simultaneous release on Disney+ kept it from topping the box office. I absolutely hate it [1/5].
Cultural fascination with Cruella De Vil is warranted, given she’s such a fun villain, but unfortunately it comes at the cost of almost everything else from One Hundred and One Dalmatians being forgotten. It’s a movie with a brilliant art style, an industry-shifting production, and a genuinely sweet message of love and family over money and greed. In 1996, 101 Dalmatians further separated Cruella from this context by making her the most memorable part in an otherwise dull, mediocre film.
I’m reminded of the Xeroxing process that the 1961 movie used to get made in the first place. It’s effective at quickly getting what Disney needs done, but the finer details and delicate brush strokes are lost during the transition.
Rating: 2.5/5
Next Week: Show me the money! Help me help you! You had me at hello!
All these quotables and more when the column looks back at the cinematic crashout known as Jerry Maguire.
See you then!
Walt Disney himself HATED the art style, but Anderson insists that Walt eventually came around to it before his passing in ‘66
More pedantic than usual, I mean