One thing that's certainly a relief is Pongo and Perdita's simple, uncomplicated relationship. After the shallow nonsense we endured with Cinderella, of Cinderella fame, and Aurora, of Sleeping Beautynon-fame, as well as the constant misunderstandings of Lady and the Tramp, it's kind of a relief that these two crazy kids are allowed to be together without silly manufactured 1950s Disney drama. And their dalmatian wedding is genuinely cute! (Somehow, the idea that marriage means settling down right away and having a boatload of offspring seems a little less offensive when dogs are involved. 'Cause that's just what dogs do, after all!) It helps that Pongo himself is a rather likeable guy, too - combined with Tramp, you get the idea that they were just oddly comfortable working with male canine characters, which is sort of an oddly specific speciality, but whatever. If the entirety of the dalmatian representation in this film consisted of P&P, we'd have some nicely charming central characters to build a film around; but, alas, we still have ninety-nine other dalmatians to account for.
It's sort of odd that, for being NAMED after the preponderance of dalmatians it contains, this film actually has very few prominent dalmatian characters. There's Pongo and Perdita, who are nice and charming, though perhaps a bit less so after having kids, like most real-life couples who opt to do so. There's a few of their puppies that sort of get personalities, too. Rolly, for instance, is fat and, as such, incapable of saying anything other than "Mother, I'm hungry". Lucky, meanwhile, spends most of his time on the verge of dying, as though this is some sort of cruel cosmic joke on his owner for having the audacity to name him Lucky after the first time he almost died. Penny is female, and that's about it. And you can't forget about Patch, whose primary character quirk is that, um....he'd eventually be the main character of the direct-to-DVD sequel. None of the other puppies even have dialogue, as far as I can recall, so Disney could've easily just called this Six Dalmatians and had Cruella de Vil make a charming hat for any and all social functions, or perhaps some soft snuggly puppy slippers.
But, yeah, Cruella's an odd duck. Her quest to make an outfit of soft, luxurious puppy fur is surely the most bonkers scheme enacted by a Disney villain so far during this project, and yes, I'm including the scheme to murder Donald Duck with a firework bull. I'm still not sure exactly how she's supposed to be aware of Anita's impending puppies in the first place. Do those two still hang out regularly? Does Cruella have some sort of Satanic puppy telepathy? The live action remake made lots of terrible changes for terrible reasons, but giving Cruella and Anita a work-based connection might've been an okay change for an okay reason, even if it presumably kind of implicates her in the murder of all sorts of fuzzy non-puppy critters. Anyway, Cruella's someone who would've made an excellent background villain, ruthless and bossy enough to do a very effective job of barking orders at her lower-class henchmen; she definitely loses a bit of effectiveness when the movie expects us to buy her trying to track down the puppies herself, because she's a frail rich girl who obviously wouldn't be able to do a whole lot. Now, by the time she's completely lost it and is just out to run them down, hellfire in her eyes....yeah, she manages to roll back into pretty damn scary territory again. It's too little too late to redeem her as a truly great Disney villain, but still.
(Just so we're clear: The running tally of edits officially made to these films indicates that Pecos Bill and Goofy aren't allowed to smoke cigarettes, but Cruella de Vil and Walt Disney are. So, I guess it's something that only monstrous villains can do on screen.)
Looking at the still shallow story and the characters that aren't used to their potential, it sounds like it should've been every bit as competent but middling and ultimately forgettable as just about anything from the 1950s. And yet, like I said, it manages to stand out after all, because it's the rough, sketchy, inexpensive-looking art style that steals the show, oddly enough. The background are geometric blobs of colour with he details literally just xeroxed on! The guidelines from the sketches are still visible on the puppies on a few frames here and there! It all sounds like a bad thing, but really it's not - as an isolated example in the Disney canon, it's a genuinely charming reminder that the basic concept of fluidly moving drawings is really more impressive than we ever seem to give it credit for, thankless asshats that we all are. Though, Disney himself wasn't terribly fond of the art style, it seems - for as mighty as his entertainment empire was, he sure had a lot of terribly wrong-headed ideas, too!
Also contributing to a different vibe here than in previous Disney animated features is the near-complete lack of lyrical songs. Yeah, there's the Kanine Krunchies jingle, and the one and a half songs Roger writes, but that's pretty much it. (In a place like real-life London, Cruella very well could've won a hefty libel suit against Mr. Radcliffe; that is, if the thought had occurred to her, which it probably wouldn't, because she's so awfully busy being perilously insane and all.) Clearly, a musical, this is not. It doesn't even include the Mellomen singing a rendition of "Dalmatian Plantation" over the title sequence! That, more than anything, helps to qualify 101 Dalmatians as a nice palette cleanser after the 1950s, and a more-than-welcome indicator that the future will, with any luck, be a bit less homogenized from now on. Its many shortcomings are hidden quite adequately by all the charming charm it's oozing all over the place, so in this circumstance, I'm inclined to recommend this li'l charm-oozing mess.
(It's disgusting, yeah, but you forgive it, because, hey - they're just puppies, after all.)
TERRIBLE AND UNNECESSARY AND TERRIBLE DIRECT-TO-DVD DISNEY SEQUEL CONCEPT OF THE WEEK: In 101 Dalmatians III: 1,001 Dalmatian Nights, Cruella has escaped from her mental institution, and has managed to corner the adorable puppies at Dalmatian Plantation! With Roger and Anita out for the evening, all hope seems lost for our heroes.....but, one by one, the puppies step up and stall for time, distracting her with vignettes about an assortment of other characters. Patch tells of how Horace and Jasper's ladies' boutique was failing badly until they learned the important moral of sexual equality and hired some lady employees, too. Lucky tells of how Roger was savaged in the savage British media for pretty much exclusively writing songs about dalmatians and nothing else, which made him really quite terribly depressed until he learned the important moral of being true to oneself, which allowed him to easily shrug off constructive criticism from that point on. Rolly tells of how Li'l Lightning, before he fell apart during the events of Patch's London Adventure, once embarrassed himself by eating an éclair out of the garbage, right in front of his girlfriend; he actually didn't learn any important morals from that, and we all know how well his life turned out from there! Ultimately, their stories stall long enough for Roger and Anita to get back and have Cruella arrested for loitering.
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