Psycho's Movie Reviews #375: 101 Dalmatians (1961)

101 Dalmatians is a 1961 American animated adventure comedy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and based on the 1956 novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith. The 17th Disney animated feature film, it was directed by Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wolfgang Reitherman from a story written by Bill Peet, and features the voices of Rod Taylor, Cate Bauer, Betty Lou Gerson, Ben Wright, Lisa Davis, and Martha Wentworth. The film's plot follows a litter of Dalmatian puppies who are kidnapped by the villainous Cruella de Vil ("deVille"), who wants to make their fur into coats. Their parents, Pongo and Perdita, set out to save their puppies from Cruella, in the process of rescuing 84 additional ones that were bought in pet shops, bringing the total of Dalmatians to 101.

The film was originally released in theaters on January 25, 1961, and was a box office success, pulling the studio out of the financial slump caused by Sleeping Beauty, a costlier production released two years prior, and became the eighth highest-grossing film of the year in the North American box-office. Aside from its box office revenue, the employment of inexpensive animation techniques—such as using xerography during the process of inking and painting traditional animation cels—kept production costs down. Disney later released a live-action remake titled 101 Dalmatians in 1996 and its sequel 102 Dalmatians in 2000. A direct to video animated sequel to the 1961 film titled 101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure was released in 2003. A live-action reboot titled Cruella directed by Craig Gillespie was released on May 28, 2021 in theaters and on Disney+ with Premier Access simultaneously.

Plot

Roger Radcliffe is an aspiring songwriter who lives in London, England in a squalid bachelor flat. His Dalmatian dog, Pongo, decides he needs a female companion and turns to spying out the window for a suitor. Spotting a woman named Anita and her Dalmatian Perdita, Pongo drags Roger to the park to arrange a meeting. Roger and Anita fall in love and marry, as do Pongo and Perdita.

The family acquires a nanny and moves to a small townhouse near Regent's Park. Perdita becomes pregnant with a litter of 15 puppies. Anita's spoiled, fur-obsessed former schoolmate, Cruella de Vil, stops by and inquires about the arrival of the puppies, causing fear and distrust in the family. In response, Roger writes a jazzy song to make fun of her. When the puppies are born, one puppy appears to be stillborn, but Roger manages to save his life. Cruella barges in again and demands to buy the puppies. Roger finally stands up to her and tells her the puppies are not for sale; furious, Cruella vows revenge.

Some months later, Nanny puts the puppies to bed after an evening of watching television, while Pongo and Perdita go for a walk with Roger and Anita. Horace and Jasper Baddun, two burglars secretly hired by Cruella, pose as men from an electric company and steal the puppies. In response, the Radcliffes enlist Scotland Yard and put advertisements in all the papers. Roger immediately suspects Cruella, but a police investigation offers no evidence against her.

The Dalmatians contact Danny the Great Dane at Hampstead, who uses the Twilight Bark gossip chain to forward their request for help to dogs all over England. In Withermarsh, Suffolk, Old Towser the bloodhound passes the word on to the Colonel, a Sheepdog, and his cat friend Sgt. Tibbs. They investigate the nearby "Old De Vil Place," where puppies had been heard barking two nights earlier. Tibbs sneaks inside and is nearly killed by Jasper, but escapes. The Colonel sends word back to London that the puppies are found. Pongo and Perdita leave through a back window and begin a long cross-country journey, crossing a flooded and icy river and running through the snow towards Suffolk.

Meanwhile, Cruella tells the Badduns the police are on their trail. She orders them to kill and skin all the dogs by daybreak. After she leaves, Tibbs helps the puppies escape through a hole in the wall, but the Badduns notice and pursue. The Colonel meets up with Pongo and Perdita and tells them of the trouble. The two Dalmatians attack Jasper and Horace, destroying part of the house and giving the puppies time to flee. Pongo and Perdita reunite with their litter of 15 at Colonel and Tibbs' home farm, only to discover there are 84 more puppies with them. Upon learning from Tibbs that Cruella intends to make coats out of them, Pongo and Perdita decide to take all 99 pups home with them.

The Dalmatians start their homeward trek, pursued by the Badduns. All water has turned to ice, so the dogs use the creeks to avoid leaving tracks. They shelter from a blizzard in a dairy farm with a friendly collie and some cows, then make their way to Dinsford, where they meet a Black Labrador, who is waiting for them in a blacksmith's shop. Cruella and the Badduns catch up, so Pongo has his whole family roll in a sooty fireplace to disguise themselves as other Labradors. The Labrador helps them board a moving van bound for London, but melting snow falls on Lucky and exposes his spots. Cruella pursues and tries to ram the moving van off the road. The Badduns, in their truck, attempt the same thing and accidentally smash into Cruella's car instead, which sends both their vehicles into a ditch. The moving van continues to London as Cruella throws a tantrum; Jasper, having had enough, tells her to shut up.

Back in London, a sad Nanny and the Radcliffes try to enjoy Christmas, and the wealth they have acquired from the song about Cruella, which has become a big radio hit. The soot-covered Dalmatians suddenly flood the house. Upon removing the soot and counting the massive family of dogs, Roger decides to use the money from his song to buy a big house in the country, forming a "Dalmatian Plantation." All the dogs of London begin barking, celebrating the return of the Dalmatian puppies and their parents.

Production

Story Development

Dodie Smith wrote the book The Hundred and One Dalmatians in 1956. When Walt Disney read it in 1957, it immediately grabbed his attention, and he promptly obtained the rights. Smith had always secretly hoped that Disney would make it into a film. Disney assigned Bill Peet to write the story, which he did, marking the first time that the story for a Disney animated film was written by a single person. Writing in his autobiography, Peet was tasked by Disney to write a detailed screenplay first before storyboarding. Because Peet never learned to use a typewriter, he wrote the initial draft by hand on legal paper.

He condensed elements of the original book while enlarging others, some of which included eliminating Cruella's husband and cat, as well merging the two mother Dalmatians, birth mother Missis and adopted mother Perdita, into one character. Another notable character loss was Cadpig, the female runt of Pongo and Missis' puppies, whose traits were transferred between Lucky and the newly-established Penny in the film (although it is never indicated outright that Cadpig was dropped); the Colonel's cat assistant was re-gendered from being a female by the name of Lieutenant Willow in the book, and Horace Baddun was renamed from Saul to presumably make him sound more akin in tone to Jasper. Bill Peet did retain a scene in which Pongo and Perdita exchange wedding vows in unison with their owners, by which the censor board warned that it might offend certain religious audiences if the animals repeated the exact words of a solemn religious ceremony. The scene was reworked to be less religious with Roger and Anita dressed in formal clothes.

Two months later, Peet completed the manuscript and had it typed up. Walt said the script was "great stuff" and commissioned Peet to begin storyboarding. Additionally, Peet was charged with recording the voice-over process. Although Disney had not been as involved in the production of the animated films as frequently as in previous years nevertheless, he was always present at story meetings. When Peet sent Dodie Smith some drawings of the characters, she wrote back saying that he had improved her story and that the designs looked better than the illustrations in the book.

Animation

After Sleeping Beauty (1959) disappointed at the box-office, there was some talk of closing down the animation department at the Disney studio. During the production of it, Disney told animator Eric Larson: "I don't think we can continue; it's too expensive." Despite this, he still had deep feelings towards animation because he had built the company upon it.

Ub Iwerks, in charge of special processes at the studio, had been experimenting with Xerox photography to aid in animation. By 1959, he had modified a Xerox camera to transfer drawings by animators directly to animation cels, eliminating the inking process, thus saving time and money while preserving the spontaneity of the pencilled elements. However, because of its limitations, the camera was unable to deviate from a black scratchy outline and lacked the fine lavish quality of hand inking. Disney would first use the Xerox process for a thorn forest in Sleeping Beauty, and the first production to make full use of the process was Goliath II. For One Hundred and One Dalmatians, one of the benefits of the process was that it was a great help towards animating the spotted dogs. According to Chuck Jones, Disney was able to complete the film for about half of what it would have cost if they had had to animate all the dogs and spots.

Ken Anderson proposed the use of the Xerox on Dalmatians to Walt, who was disenchanted with animation by then, and replied "Ah, yeah, yeah, you can fool around all you want to". For the stylized art direction, Anderson took inspiration from British cartoonist Ronald Searle, who once advised him to use a Mont Blanc pen and India ink for his artwork. In addition to the character animation, Anderson also sought to use Xerography on "the background painting because I was going to apply the same technique to the whole picture." Along with colour stylist Walt Peregoy, the two had the line drawings be printed on a separate animation cel before being laid over the background, which gave the appearance similar to the Xeroxed animation. Disney disliked the artistic look of the film and felt he was losing the "fantasy" element of his animated films. In a meeting with Anderson and the animation staff concerning future films, Walt said, "We're never gonna have one of those goddamned things" referring to Dalmatians and its technique, and stated, "Ken's never going to be an art director again."

Live-Action Reference

As with the previous Disney films, actors provided live-action reference in order to determine what would work before the animation process begun. Actress Helene Stanley performed the live-action reference for the character of Anita. She did the same work for the characters of Cinderella and Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. Meanwhile, Mary Wickes provided the live-action reference for Cruella de Vil.

Character Animation

Marc Davis was the sole animator on Cruella De Vil. During production, Davis claimed her character was partly inspired by Bette Davis (no relation), Rosalind Russell, and Tallulah Bankhead. He took further influence from her voice actress, Betty Lou Gerson, whose cheekbones he added to the character. He later complimented, "that her voice was the greatest thing I've ever had a chance to work with. A voice like Betty Lou's gives you something to do. You get a performance going there, and if you don't take advantage of it, you're off your rocker". While her hair colouring originated from the illustrations in the novel, Davis found its dishevelled style by looking "through old magazines for hairdos from 1940 till now". Her coat was exaggerated to match her oversized personality, and the lining was red because "there's a devil image involved".

Casting

Before starring in high-profile roles such as The Birds and The Time Machine, Australian actor Rod Taylor had extensive radio experience and was cast as Pongo. The filmmakers deliberately cast dogs with deeper voices than their human owners, so they had more power. Walt Disney originally had Lisa Davis read for the role of Cruella De Vil, but she did not think that she was right for the part, and wanted to try reading the role of Anita. Disney agreed with her after the two of them read the script for a second time.

Betty Lou Gerson, who was previously the narrator for Cinderella, auditioned for the role of Cruella De Vil in front of Marc Davis and sequence director Wolfgang Reitherman, and landed it. While searching for the right accent of the character, Gerson landed on a "phony theatrical voice, someone who's set sail from New York but hasn't quite reached England". During the recording process, she was thought to be imitating Tallulah Bankhead. However, Gerson disputed, "Well, I didn't intentionally imitate her...I was raised in Birmingham, Ala., and Tallulah was from Jasper, Ala. We both had phony English accents on top of our Southern accents and a great deal of flair. So our voices came out that way". In addition to voicing Mrs. Birdwell, Gerson finished recording in fourteen days.

Music

To have music involved in the narrative, Peet used an old theatre trick by which the protagonist is a down-and-out songwriter. However, unlike the previous animated Disney films at the time, the songs were not composed by a team, but by Mel Leven who composed both lyrics and music. Previously, Leven had composed songs for the UPA animation studio in which animators, who transferred to work at Disney, had recommended him to Walt. His first assignment was to compose "Cruella de Vil," of which Leven composed three versions. The final version used in the film was composed as a "bluesy number" before a meeting with Walt in forty-five minutes.

The other two songs included in the film are "Kanine Krunchies Jingle" (sung by Lucille Bliss, who voiced Anastasia Tremaine in Disney's 1950 film Cinderella), and "Dalmatian Plantation" in which Roger sings only two lines at its closure. Leven had also written additional songs that were not included in the film. The first song, "Don't Buy a Parrot from a Sailor," a cockney chant, was meant to be sung by Jasper and Horace at the De Vil Mansion. A second song, "Cheerio, Good-Bye, Toodle-oo, Hip Hip!" was to be sung by the Dalmatian puppies as they make their way into London. A third song titled "March of the One Hundred and One" was meant for the dogs to sing after escaping Cruella by van. Different, longer versions of "Kanine Krunchies Jingle" and "Dalmatian Plantation" appear on the Disneyland Records read-along album based on the film.

The Sherman Brothers wrote a title song, "One Hundred and One Dalmatians", but it was not used in the film. The song has been released on other Disney recordings, however.

Release/Reception/Box Office

One Hundred and One Dalmatians was first released in theaters on January 25, 1961. The film was re-released theatrically in 1969, 1979, 1985, and 1991. The 1991 reissue was the 20th highest-grossing film of the year for domestic earnings.

In its initial release, the film received critical acclaim from critics, many of whom hailed it as the studio's best release since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and the closest to a real "Disney" film in many years. Howard Thompson of The New York Times wrote, "While the story moves steadily toward a stark, melodramatic "chase" climax, it remains enclosed in a typical Disney frame of warm family love, human and canine". However, he later opined that the "songs are scarce, too. A few more would have braced the final starkness". Variety claimed that "While not as indelibly enchanting or inspired as some of the studio's most unforgettable animated endeavours, this is nonetheless a painstaking creative effort". Time praised the film as "the wittiest, most charming, least pretentious cartoon feature Walt Disney has ever made". Harrison's Reports felt all children and adults will be "highly entertained by Walt Disney's latest, a semi-sophisticated, laugh-provoking, all cartoon, feature-lengthier in Technicolor." Dodie Smith also enjoyed the film where she particularly praised the animation and backgrounds of the film.

Contemporary reviews have remained positive. Reviewing the film during its 1991 re-release, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, while giving the film three stars out of four, asserted that "it's an uneven film, with moments of inspiration in a fairly conventional tale of kidnapping and rescue. This is not one of the great Disney classics - it's not in the same league with Snow White or Pinocchio - but it's passable fun, and will entertain its target family audiences." Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel, in his 1991 review, also gave the film three stars out of four. Ralph Novak of People wrote "What it lacks in romantic extravagance and plush spectacle, this 1961 Disney film makes up for in quiet charm and subtlety. In fact, if any movie with dogs, cats, and horses who talk can be said to belong in the realm of realistic drama, this is it". However, the film did receive a few negative reviews. In 2011, Craig Berman of MSNBC ranked it and its 1996 remake as two of the worst children's films of all time, saying that, "The plot itself is a bit nutty. Making a coat out of dogs? Who does that? But worse than Cruella de Vil's fashion sense is the fact that your children will definitely start asking for a Dalmatian of their own for their next birthday".

The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported the film received an approval rating of 98% based on 49 reviews with an average score of 8.1/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "With plenty of pooches and a memorable villain (Cruella De Vil), this is one of Disney's most enduring, entertaining animated films."

Cruella de Vil ranked 39th on AFI's list of "100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains".

During its initial theatrical run, the film grossed $14 million in the United States and Canada, which generated $6.2 million in distributor rentals. It was also the most popular film of the year in France, with admissions of 14.7 million ranking tenth on their all-time list.

The film was re-released in 1969, where it earned $15 million. In its 1979 theatrical re-release, it grossed $19 million, and in 1985, the film grossed $32 million. During its fourth re-release in 1991, it grossed $60.8 million.

Prior to 1995, the film had grossed $86 million overseas. In 1995, it grossed $71 million overseas bringing its international total to $157 million. The film's total domestic lifetime gross is $145 million, and its total worldwide gross is $303 million. Adjusted for inflation, and incorporating subsequent releases, the film has a lifetime gross of $900.3 million.

Budget $3.6 million

Box office $303 million

My Review

I won't set the plot of "101 Dalmatians" out in any detail, as it is already well-known from this film, the nineties remake and Dodie Smith's original book (a great childhood favourite of mine). Briefly, however, it deals with the theft of a litter of Dalmatian puppies by a woman named Cruella De Vil (an obvious pun on "cruel devil") who wants to turn them into fur coats. The human authorities are baffled, so it falls to the kidnapped puppies' parents, Pongo and Perdita, to track them down and rescue them- along with a lot more Dalmatian puppies acquired by Cruella for the same nefarious purpose.

The film is rather different in look from a lot of earlier Disney cartoons, which were characterised by bright, even garish, colours. Here, by contrast, the colour scheme is surprisingly restrained for a film aimed at children. Much of the action takes place either at night or in the depths of a snowy English winter, and the palette reflects this. Black and white are much in evidence (as one might expect in a film about black-and-white dogs), and the other predominant colours are blues, greys and purples. Unusually for a Disney cartoon, the action takes place in a modern-day Britain, and this restrained look may also reflect American ideas of the British as a nation of quiet, restrained, phlegmatic people, qualities exemplified by the human protagonists, Roger and Anita Radcliffe. (In Smith's novel their surname was Dearly, and Roger was an economist or financier by profession, not a musician as he is here). Actually, these qualities are also exemplified by the animal protagonists as well; Pongo and Perdita are essentially Roger and Anita transmuted into canine form, and the various animals they meet in the course of their adventures generally represent recognisable British "types", such as The Colonel, an Old English Sheepdog with a distinctly military bearing. (His friends, or should I say subordinates, are a horse named Captain and a cat named Sergeant Tibbs).

One person, however, who is neither quiet nor restrained is the villainess Cruella de Vil. She is perhaps Disney's most memorable villain, a monstrously hyperactive woman with an obsession with fur; she is always seen wearing a fur coat. (In the novel her husband was a furrier, but he does not appear in the film). Her main distinguishing feature is her hair, half-black and half-white. The subsidiary villains are the comically incompetent Badun brothers, Jasper and Horace, whom she employs to steal the puppies.

This was one of my favourite films as a child. I was a great animal- lover and generally found that Disney cartoons involving animals, like this one and "The Jungle Book", were a lot funnier and less sentimental than all those boring girly fairy-tales like "Snow White" and "The Sleeping Beauty". I also liked the fact that the action took place not in some fantastic never-never land but in the real England in which I was growing up. My one complaint was that the music (in comparison with something like "The Jungle Book") was a bit forgettable; even though Roger is a songwriter there are only three songs. I recently saw it again for the first time in many years, and I can say that the animals- especially the spotty dogs themselves- are just as endearing, and their adventures just as amusing- as they were in my childhood.

Some goofs. Although the Disney organisation seem to have gone to some lengths to make the film as British as possible, one or two errors have crept in. British television programmes were not directly sponsored in the early sixties. A "creek" in British English means a saltwater inlet, not a freshwater stream. The Suffolk landscape is not as hilly as it is depicted here. I will, however, let them off over that girder bridge- they are not common in Britain, but not completely unknown. I will also let them off over the name "Perdita"- strictly speaking, Latin grammar demands that it be stressed on the first syllable, but the actual pronunciation in Britain tends to vary.

This film is beautiful, and superior to the 1996 live action version (the only good thing about that version is Glenn Close as Cruella - the rest of it is pretty much a Home Alone for Dogs). The animation is just beautiful, and I delighted in seeing those puppies's tails wagging. Those puppies were very cute, and a lack of any voice overs in the 1996 version was sorely missed. The scenes like the Twilight Bark added a sense of poignancy to the well-written story. I also want to say, I absolutely love the book by Dodie Smith, and I am 17. Another high point was the villain Cruella De Vil (voiced to perfection by Betty Lou Gerson), who was truly diabolical in every sense. The dogs, Pongo and Perdy were very lovable, and their scenes with the puppies were often very touching. Supporting characters like Tibbs, Captain, Colonel, and of course Jasper and Horace were very well done. The songs, were not as memorable as the ones in the Jungle Book, but at least they were tuneful. In conclusion, a beautiful and entertaining animated film, that is underrated in my opinion. 9/10