10. 101 Dalmatians- 1961

Rating: 🏆 most excellent

Pongo is Roger’s four-legged best friend who is tired of the bachelor life and is ready to settle down with a nice lady. But in order to do so he has to find a suitable partner for Roger. When Pongo spots Anita and her dalmatian Perdita on their evening walk, he knows they’re the ones and he facilitates a meet cute for Roger and Anita and the rest is history. But when Anita’s evil friend Cruella De Vil kidnaps Perdita and Pongo’s puppies, they embark on the adventure of a lifetime to get their puppies back.

I knew immediately that this film was different from the rest of the Disney cannon thus far. The animation style was wildly different. Whereas Sleeping Beauty had a highly detailed, almost romantic animation style, 101 Dalmatians was more raw and edgy. There was no attempt at realism and it felt like watching a picture book that had come to life. In my research to discover why the film looked so different I discovered some very interesting things about 101 Dalmatians. Firstly, the animation looked so unique because it utilized new technology, xerox. Earlier projects, like Sleeping Beauty that almost bankrupt Disney Studios, had to be painstakingly drawn by hand, frame by frame. With the utilization of Xerox, the background could remain the same and the animators would only have to draw the characters and movement in the frame saving precious time and drastically speeding up the process. 101 Dalmatians was also the first Disney movie to be set in modern times. Rather than opting for an older fairytale, 101 Dalmatians has cars, and televisions, and even catchy jingles that allowed the audience to relate to this movie more than any previous Disney works. This is argued to have contributed greatly to the films success which, when adjusted for inflation, is still the 12th highest grossing film of all time.

I remember always loving 101 Dalmatians as a kid and rewatching it as an adult it was easy to see why. I was still sucked in by the lovable characters, fast paced plot, and one of the most iconic villains of all time. Cruella De Vil is truely terrifying. Who wants a chain smoking, fur wearing, gaunt chainsmoker to hire henchmen and steal their puppies??? What a nightmare! She drives like a bat out of hell, she owns any room that she walks into, and she has a catchy theme song that will be stuck in your head for days after you hear it. 101 Dalmatians does so many things well that it’s easy to understand it’s box office success, and you’ll be hard pressed to go out on Halloween and not find someone dressed up as the notoriously evil and fabulous Cruella De Vil. If you haven’t seen this movie in a while, I can’t recommend rewatching it on Disney+ highly enough.  ♬ The world was such a wholesome place until, Cruella, Cruella De Vil  ♬