101 Dalmatians 1961
I had seen this movie as an adult, but it had been a while. I bought it on Blu-ray after it ranked very well in a list of Disney movies and I was worried Disney might put it in the vault. This is a good movie, taken mostly from the dogs’ perspective. My biggest complaint is Pongo’s owner, Roger, whose British seems horribly artificial and dated (I can’t stand him saying “old boy” and he says it a lot). This gives the movie a very slow start. And Cruella DeVil is pretty far over the top in a movie that mostly has realistic portrayals of people. She comes completely unhinged by the end. Maybe that’s a quibble in a movie where dogs can talk to horses and snow doesn’t fall on frozen creeks, but she seemed a little much. While I’m at it, Pongo seemed a little overly expressive for a dog, mostly at the beginning, which again I just felt like sagged a little.
The rest of the movie is very good, though it is basically a prison escape movie. The puppies are funny, cute, and plentiful. I like the style of the city and backgrounds. The puppies watching TV is a great scene and the way animals cooperate to break the puppies out and get them home was well done. The dogs were done pretty well as lots of them ran through the snow or slipped on the ice. There isn’t much character development and a lot of the performances are very caricatured, like the bumbling cockney thieves, The Colonel, and even some of the puppies (the fat one is very frustrating). So it is more of a movie for kids with not much for adults. It was hard watching them struggle, but it did give some drama without overdoing it. It is legendary how the animators were able to keep up with the different dogs, each with a unique set of spots.
In the extras, I found out that they filmed a model of Cruella’s car to help animate it as it would turn and flip, but the car seemed out of scale with the roadway and the movement didn’t look realistic. They were under very harsh financial pressure to stay within their budget, so they probably just let it go. Disney’s story writer did a good job honing down the original book and keeping things light. It is worth reading either the original book or just reading about the original book to see the differences between the movie and book. They said that the adaptation by Disney’s Bill Peet was almost unchanged from his original storyboards, so that seems like a sign that he knew what he was doing, and again had to be a big help financially after earlier movies went through expensive revisions.
Written: 27 Sep 2016
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital