One Hundred and One Dalmatians Review: Disney Marathon

Spoilers

One Hundred and One Dalmatians (which isn’t spelled “101 Dalmatians” which I’m confident Walt Disney did to spite me) is so close to being good. The first act is great and there is a lot of great moments in the later acts but some major problems make One Hundred and One Dalmatians hard to recommend. If my Lady and the Tramp review didn’t make it obvious enough, I love dogs. Because of this it’s pretty hard to make me dislike a movie centred around them. There is a lot to love though so let’s stop delaying and get on with that plot.

Our protagonist Pongo (a loser virgin) is a Dalmatian who lives with his human Roger Radcliffe. Roger is a failing songwriter and also a loser virgin. Pongo is sick of not getting any so he decides to hook him and his owner up with a nice human dog combo. When looking out for a match Pongo notices a young woman called Anita and her Dalmatian, Perdita. Pongo tricks Roger into going out and meeting Anita. This scene is super charming. Pongo knocks Roger and Anita into a pond where they quickly bond over the absurdity of the situation. Both couples eventually marry one another. This is all great, it’s cute and charming but unfortunately is the best part of the whole movie. Peaked a bit early there didn’t you Disney.

Perdita gets pregnant and the evil Cruella De Vil seems unusually interested in the future puppies.

Cruella De Vil is a great villain. The Disney villains before this were mostly just evil because they either loved being evil or if we were really lucky, they would just hate attractive people. What an interesting motivation. Cruella De Vil is evil in a more realistic way. She wants to skin 99 Dalmatians and turn them into a fur coat. The fact that her motive is a fashion statement is great, it’s something you could actually see happening and that’s what makes it so vile.

Anyway, Perdita gives birth to 15 puppies but one is stillborn. Roger revives the puppy and they name him Lucky. This isn’t really brought up again so I don’t know what the point of it was.

After an attempt to get the puppies the legal way Cruella sends her two henchmen to steal them whilst the humans, Pongo, and Perdita are on a walk. One little detail here is the use of colours or more accurately the lack thereof. In the majority of scenes, the colours are vibrant and varied, in this and a few other of the depressing scenes they use little to no colour. In this specific scene none of the backgrounds even contain colour. It’s great and really gets across the direness of the situation.

So, all the puppies get dognapped. Now if you were to make this film what would you do here? A) Have the dogs look for their children themselves? Or B) Just have some random characters who we don’t know be the ones to rescue them? If you answered A then sorry bucko but you ain’t working for Disney anytime soon.

Pongo and Perdita bark out the message that their puppies are missing which triggers a chain reaction of dogs barking the message to one another till eventually some random ass dog named Colonel and a cat called Sergeant Tibbs end up breaking the puppies out of captivity. The two parents do show up at the end for about five seconds but the majority of the breakout is done with characters that have no stakes in the situation. Also, the whole barking chain reaction goes on for like ten minutes including some random conversations with some really insignificant characters. This whole section I did skim over a bit but does involve a couple of different breakout scenes and takes for ever, it really bogs the film down.

Anyway, it turns out that the 15 puppies weren’t the only ones to be captured, we have 84 others. So, the two adult Dalmatians decide to adopt them all and take them back to their humans. On the way there there’s a couple of tense scenes between Cruella and the puppies but other than that, not much happens until they meet a Labrador. They decide to black up to look like a Labrador, I know it sounds bad but they are dogs and Labrador’s aren’t a stand in for black people in the movie. It really isn’t an issue in my opinion. They all sneak past Cruella and her henchmen before a chase ensues.

The Dalmatians get on some poor guys truck which Cruella chases and rams. The truck driver complains about women drivers and Cruella’s henchmen crash into her allowing the Dalmatians to escape.

They all arrive home and Roger and Anita decide to buy a bigger house with all the money he made from his song “Cruella De Vil” so they can keep all 101 Dalmatians. The end.

The film has an interesting art style. As mentioned in my last review, Sleeping Beauty drained the company of money so Walt moved onto using a new animation technique, Xerography. Yes, it was first used in Sleeping Beauty but not to the extent that later movies would use it. Xerography allowed drawings to be scanned onto the cell, so no more hand inking. Because of this a lot of time and money was saved. Early Xerox technology could only use black ink so all these early Xerography films have a lot of black lines in them. This ruins later films, The Aristocats looks like shit because of Xerox technology but the technology looks good here. That’s because of the art style. The backgrounds have a rough feel to them, colours are out of the lines, and are heavily stylised giving it a purposeful fake look. Another reason it looks good here is that they didn’t try and use black lines where they didn’t make sense. The Aristocats tries to use Xerox technology on faces and it looks like shit, here black lines are used on backgrounds and items that are scattered throughout the environment but as far as I can tell, not the humans. The black lines also contribute to the cluttered feel of Rogers apartment, it really works here more than future Disney movies.

I know I usually talk about the songs in the plot summary but these ones are so inconsequential I might as well talk about them here. The song “Cruella De Vil” is great. You rarely get a song that is just them mocking the villain and it’s a lot of fun. The sequence it is a part of does a good job at portraying Roger and Anita’s different perspectives on Cruella. This is the only real song in the movie, it’s one of the few early Disney films that isn’t a musical. A couple more songs technically exist, they sing the song “Dalmatian Plantation” at the end of the movie but its only about ten seconds long. There’s a jingle on one of the adverts played in the movie called “Kanine Krunchies” and it sure sounds like an advert jingle.

I really want to like One Hundred and One Dalmatians. The first act is great and great moments do appear in the second and third act but the rest of the contents of those acts are dreadful. It’s got great characters, and the best Disney villain at this point but none of that is enough to save it from the pure amount of trash scenes. Next up we will review the last Disney Classic Walt Disney himself survived to see, The Sword in the Stone.

4 / 10