101 Dalmatians holds up well after all these years and continues to provide some rousing good fun.
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The Disney folks were always good with dogs. Just look at what they did with "Lady and the Tramp" in 1955. So it goes without saying that the studio would do a good job with "101 Dalmatians" in 1961. Indeed, it would be one of the last of the studio's classic animated features for quite some time to come, and the last one that Uncle Walt himself had a direct hand in preparing from start to finish. From 1961 until "The Little Mermaid" in 1989, there was something of a drought for the Disney animation department (with only "The Jungle Book" relieving things), but "101 Dalmatians" is almost as good as anything they had ever done in some time. Moreover, in this newly restored Platinum Edition (with an exception noted below), it looks better than ever, maybe even better than it looked when it was new.
The story is simple and straightforward and follows a route well traveled in Disney cartoons. A pair of animals, Dalmatians in this case, living in London fall in love, persuade their owners (their "pets") to fall in love, and get married. Or mated in the case of the animals, I guess. Before too long, the Dalmatians have puppies, fifteen to be exact. Now, enter the villain, one of Disney's best, Cruella De Vil. She's an old friend of the wife, and she has her eye on the pups. Why? Because she's so evil she wants to turn them into dog-fur coats! Naturally, the humans won't give them up, at which point Cruella hires a pair of thugs to kidnap the animals. The bulk of the story concerns the pups' parents trying to rescue them by calling up their fellow critters throughout the city and throughout the countryside, utilizing "the twilight bark."
The humans in the story are Roger and Anita Radcliffe, voiced by Ben Wright and Lisa Davis. He is a struggling songwriter and she is, well, a proper English housewife. Interestingly, although the film suggests that they are practically penniless, they appear to live in a fashionable section of London, and they can afford a full-time maid. It's nice to be poor in a Disney film. The adult dogs are Pongo and Perdita, voiced by Rod Taylor and Cate Bauer. Although the movie introduces these characters first, they all tend to fade into the background once the real star shows up, the fiendish Cruella De Vil, voiced by Betty Lou Gerson. The Disney artists, I've read, modeled Cruella after the showy Hollywood actress Tallulah Bankhead. Cruella is a truly horrible person, and one wonders how the reticent and reserved Perdita could ever be friends with her. But Cruella does steal the show, and without her I'm afraid we'd have something a lot more ordinary. So, she's quite the obnoxious delight.
Three separate Disney directors helmed the movie--two old hands, Clyde Geromini and Hamilton Luske, and one relative newcomer who would soon become an old hand, Wolfgang Reitherman. Screenwriter Bill Peet based his script on a popular novel by English writer Dodie Smith.
The first thing one notices about the picture is the rather stark animation style, more resembling pen-and-ink drawings than the lush watercolor pastels Disney used in prior cartoons. You see, the studio's most-recent prior full-length animated feature, "Sleeping Beauty," had not done well at the box office, and Disney was looking to save a little money on this production. Also, as the documentary explains, the studio wanted to try out a new, more modern style of art, as opposed to the old-fashioned Romantic style of previous Disney animations. It was so successful, and it saved Disney so much money, that the studio continued using the technique for many years to come. In any case, while it doesn't match the older style for sheer beauty and grace, it's still quite attractive.
Accompanying the new style is a jazzy soundtrack that fits the occasion both thematically and artistically. However, unlike most previous Disney animated features, this one has only one big musical number, the song "Cruella De Vil," and a very brief snippet of a song at the end, "A Dalmatian Plantation." Now, I know that not everyone appreciates songs in movies, but the fact is that Disney almost single-handedly maintained the movie musical long after the genre had fallen out of favor with the public. So, I wish "101 Dalmatians" had a few more songs involved.
I also wish the movie had a stronger central character. While "101 Dalmatians" has a great baddie, there is really no hero or heroine to root for. The humans drop out of the picture early on. The puppies are almost indistinguishable from one another. The various other critters come and go. Leaving only the Dalmatian mom and dad as possible main characters, particularly Pongo. But even they are absent from the story for long stretches at a time, and neither is ever in any serious personal danger. So, basically, what we're left with is not so much rooting for the hero or heroine as rooting against the villainess. This is a marked departure from the clear-cut heroes and heroines named in the very titles of Disney's best cartoons, like "Snow White," "Pinocchio," "Cinderella," "Lady and the Tramp," "The Little Mermaid," "Aladdin," and "The Lion King." In those cases, we knew who was the object of our affections. Nevertheless, I quibble. Pongo and Perdita's attempts to rescue their kids is good enough.
The film moves along at a reasonably brisk pace, and given its relatively brief running time, seventy-nine minutes, it needs to. There is a bit more action in the movie's second half than one finds in many of Disney's animated features, and some of it is perhaps a little scarier than is usual with Disney. But it works out well and keeps the thing bouncing along with vigor.
The "101," by the way, derives from the number of Dalmatian pups De Vil has accumulated for her dog-fur scheme. And a cute bit has the two thugs watching their favorite television show, "What's My Crime?" (If you're too young to remember TV's "What's My Line?," the joke will go straight over your head.)
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[release]22498[/release]