Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Professor Popinjay

Most everyone has seen it. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t love it. Classic Disney animation is so much a part of people’s childhood it’s virtually impossible to be critical. Said films generally have immunity from toxic fandom and nitpicky criticism.

I read one reviewer of the 1996 re-release criticize the plot. “Making coats out of puppies? Who does that!?!” But interesting stories center around unique sets of circumstances. If we’d heard of some weirdo doing this in reality we’d be horrified. Cruella DeVille is a monster; something to fear and detest, an exaggerated lesson of what arrogance, privilege, and vanity could lead to. You could draw parallels between her and these Karens who run amuck, rampaging through the service industry leaving a jettison of disgruntled clerks and cashiers in their wake. Is there any difference between dehumanizing a person who is trying their best to make a living and turning an actual puppy into an inanimate fashion item? I say nay.

Dalmatians has a legacy now, spawning a myriad of other films and spinoffs. I could list them here but if you’re interested in that, it would be easy enough to view the Wikipedia page.

I don’t want to criticize the film. It’s a fine film. And I don’t want to just regurgitate facts about it. Again, Wikipedia is right there.

Instead, I’d just like to focus on why I find 101 Dalmatians a fascinating achievement.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t first draw attention to Cate Bauer, voice of Perdita. There’s some discrepancy about her birthday but if the majority of sources are reliable, at the time of writing this, Cate is 102 and still kickin’! Amazing!

Also amazing, some crazy fan counted all the spots on every dog in every frame of this film and came to the sum of 6,469,952 spots. Everyone needs a hobby, I guess.

My wife used to babysit for a family who owned only this vhs tape for kids’ entertainment so she has the whole film memorized verbatim. This led to her singing the “Cruella DeVille” song for an audition.

Probably for the 1996 re-release (I don’t care to look it up) McDonald’s saw fit (or was encouraged by Disney) to offer 101 different Dalmatian Happy Meal toys. Collecting each one was an occupation to say the least but one could purchase a complete set all at once. A complete boxed set goes for around 175 to 250 dollars on Ebay right now.

I found many of the animation processes fascinating for this film. Cruella’s car features heavily and this was before cgi so it had to be hand drawn. I’ve been drawing my own vehicles lately and I can tell you, drawing cars is like the math of art. The angles and perspectives are so precise and if a line is just a little off, the whole thing can look wonky.

So how did they make animating Creulla’s car a bit easier on themselves? They made a hard-lined three-dimensional model of the cars, filmed them moving live-action and then traced over the footage, frame by frame, in a process called rotoscope. It’s often easy to tell when they’re using this technique because the animation almost becomes too good. It’s effective though, especially where cars are involved. It’s a bit too obvious when Cruella’s car plows through the snow but what are ya going to do? This isn’t the Himalayas in Monsters Inc. where we could count individual snowflakes in Sully’s fur. It’s 1961! Limitation fosters creativity and rotoscope was pretty dang innovative if you ask me.

The background art is unique for a Disney film. While some aspects are very detailed with black lines, frequently the colors do not coincide with those lines. It’s a style reflective of the era but I wouldn’t call it psychedelic. Rumor has it Walt himself hated the design choices but I find them an interesting deviation from everything perfect and pristine. Not everything has to be Miyazaki grandiose in an animated film. The simplistic backgrounds brought attention to, and did not overshadow, a plethora of black and white characters. I mean the dogs. Black and white dogs might have been lost amongst more ornate and overly colorful backgrounds.

Anyway. Cute movie. Haven’t seen one iota of the sequels and spinoffs except the Glenn Close live-action version but that one sucked fatty. The dogs didn’t even talk in that one. Boring! They had a scene where a cocker spaniel did charades. Stupid. Although Close was pretty great as Cruella and Hugh Laurie and Mark Williams as Jasper and Horace was spot on casting.