Somehow, I had never seen the 1961 Disney animated movie One Hundred and One Dalmations. Heck, I didn’t realize I had to write out the number before to get the title right, or that the movie was set in England. Still, I do like dogs, and the fact Disney went with Dalmatians shows some ambition in the animation department since everything was hand-drawn in those days and many of those dogs have very distinctive spot patterns.
Then again, the character of Nanny looks a like Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, so there may have been a bit of animated recycling going on.
Do I need to recount the plot set-up for this one? I think it’s fairly well-known even if it wasn’t taken from a public domain fairy tale like a lot of Disney’s best remembered animated features. Dalmation parents Pongo and Perdita take it upon themselves to find their 15 stolen puppies, taken by the aptly named Cruella de Vil, an emaciated scarecrow of a woman who apparently does something with high fashion. She loves furs and wants to turn the puppies into fur coats, and if that isn’t an effective anti-fur message, I don’t know what is.
Of course, Disney isn’t going to let a bunch of puppies (the 15 originals plus 74 more) get turned into a coat for an obviously evil woman, but the movie only runs for about an hour and 19 minutes, so we don’t necessarily have time for a convoluted plot. Instead, we get a movie that is mostly a piece of pure slapstick comedy, starting from how Pongo, sensing his “pet” human, songwriter Roger, needs a mate or something and goes about not only spotting and selecting such a woman by observing various women walking their dogs outside (choosing a woman walking a female Dalmation, namely Perdita) and ends up knocking both humans into a pond.
And that could, more or less, sum up the rest of the movie. It is light on original songs, odd considering Roger’s profession, but heavy on comedy bits, perhaps to fill in the running time for a fairly simple story. It never felt like wasted time, but at the same time, it also seemed to be padded out if that makes any sense.
Of special note, there is of course Cruella. Drawn in the most angular manner possible aside from her impossibly padded fur coats, she’s an emaciated witch who clearly doesn’t know how to hire the best or even how to threaten them right. Seriously, she threatens to call the police on her own henchmen, and if they weren’t themselves idiots, they might have seen what a dumb idea that is when they know who they work for. Granted, this is a story where apparently Scotland Yard will look into puppy theft, so there’s that as well.
And I do want to add, this may be the rare animated anything with an unambiguously heroic cat in Sgt. Tibbs.
But really, this is a dog story, and even with the recycling of animation in places, there’s a lot of work giving many of these dogs individual looks and personality. The barking chain Pongo starts to get other dogs on the case finding his lost children is a nice bit of animation, showing different dogs with different looks, barks, and when applicable, personalities. It’s emblematic of a movie that is basically a fun family flick.
Grade: A-
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