The dogs move on: “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” (1961)

By Scott Ross

“Like many other much-loved humans, they believed that they owned their dogs, instead of realizing that their dogs owned them.” — Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians

A nearly perfect Disney feature, released in the year of my birth, One Hundred and One Dalmatians was at the time the most modern full-length cartoon the studio had ever released and remains among the six or seven best hand-drawn movies Walt’s animators produced in his lifetime.* It was based on the beguiling 1956 novel by Dodie Smith and while hipper and less cozily “English” in tone, the movie respects the book, hewing more closely to the author’s plot and characters than any other Disney adaptation; P.L. Travers, who loathed the movie Disney made of Mary Poppins, would have envied Bill Peet’s fealty to Smith’s book. Smith was so delighted with Peet’s work she felt his story was an improvement on hers and his sketches of her characters superior to Janet and Anne Grahame-Johnstone’s original illustrations. I think she was being over-generous on that score, as the Grahame-Johnstone pen-and-ink drawings are inextricably linked to my love for that book, a favorite since I first read it after the movie was reissued when I was eight.†

Reading Smith’s novel (called The Hundred and One Dalmatians) again recently, many decades on from my first exposure to it, I was struck by how wittily she limns her balanced canine/human world, each with its own (and to the inhabitants of the other, at least somewhat incomprehensible) language and practices, much of which Peet managed to slip into his screenplay without ostentation. Smith’s most ingenious device — the Twilight Barking — is wonderfully replicated in the movie, as are most of her splendid characters. Peet combined Pongo’s slightly dim but courageous spouse Missis and the fortuitous wet-nurse for their 15 puppies, Perdita, into a single figure; renamed the Dalmatians’ human pets Mr. and Mrs. Dearly as Roger and Anita Radcliffe and changed Saul Baddun to Horace; rechristened the litter’s runt Cadpig as “Lucky” (an existing pup in Smith’s literary litter); brought the amusingly masculine/feminine servant “couple” Nanny Cook and Nanny Butler together into a single Nanny; and altered the sex of the female tabby cat Tibs, who became the take-charge, male Sergeant Tibbs in the picture. Aside from compressing some of its events, Peet left the narrative largely alone, although Smith’s dread collector of furs Cruella DeVil is in the movie both more comic (she sometimes seems like a caricature of Tallulah Bankhead) and at times more terrifying. In the novel there is a strong hint that Cruella has actual devils in her family tree, and Peet eliminated the dinner party scene in which every victual on the DeVil menu somehow tastes of pepper including the ice-cream, how she habitually overheats her home and the way, while searching for the Dalmatians in the English countryside she stops to warm herself at a building fire. (He also eliminated the timid furrier Mr. DeVil, who is no great loss, and the couple’s perpetually abused Persian cat, who is… although I can understand why she was dropped, if only for the purposes of streamlining the story; a 79-minute movie is not a 200-page novel, after all.) There is as well more slapstick-type humor in the movie, of a kind we now associate with Disney features but which up to 1961 was prevalent mostly in the studio’s cartoon shorts. A couple of Smith’s wittiest lines made it into the picture, however, and I was surprised on reading it again to discover that the “What’s My Crime?” television quiz program, which feels amusingly exaggerated and thus original to the movie, was hers as well. (A wonderful line that didn’t make it into the movie: When a group of gypsies attempts to trap the dogs and their 96 pups on the trek back to London and one of its caravan horses thwarts the move as the gypsies’ dogs, penned up in the wagons, raise a ruckus, Pongo sagely observes, “The caravans bark but the dogs move on.” I suppose my old-fashioned delight at the way Smith turned that maxim on its head, accompanied as it is by her, and my, citing of the “racist” word gypsy, puts me beyond the pale.) My favorite chapter in the book, in which before a warming fireside Pongo and Missis appear to an elderly country gentleman as the ghosts of his beloved past pets, has a wistfulness and a gentle, sad sweetness whose tone would be all wrong for a comic animated feature of the early ’60s; like the moment in The Wind in the Willows when Mole, after his and Rat’s long travels, smells his home, it’s unforgettable for a sensitive child (or at least it was for this sensitive former child) but its mood is perhaps too contemplative for fast-paced, fantastic moviemaking, and ultimately too literary.

^{That’s the director Wolfgang “Woolie” Reitherman pushing a mock-up of Cruella’s car through prop-snow.}

One Hundred and One Dalmatians was made possible by Ub Iwerks’ experiments with Xerox photography (all those spots to draw, ink and paint…) He was able to transfer the animators’ drawings directly to cels, which not only eliminated the inking process but retained the quality of the original penciled art. The animators were delighted; they’d long felt a lot of soul was lost between their drawings and the finished, painted cels. Others were less enchanted. Walt Disney for one disliked the look of the picture, although it’s notable that he didn’t put a stop to the process; anything that saved animation money was difficult to dismiss. As a child I was struck by the look of Cruella’s red roadster, particularly when the driver ran into a snowbank and backed out to extricate herself and the dirty snow seemed to move and drift in a way that didn’t look to me like hand-drawn animation. Only decades later did I discover that, to save costs, the DeVil car was constructed out of cardboard and filmed separately before being added to the drawings, another innovation the Xerox process made possible. (As I write these words I hear the shade of Richard Williams growling, “If you want to save work, what on earth are you doing in animation?” Ah, but, Richard: I said “costs,” not “work.”) While Peet sketched out the characters, it was Ken Anderson, taking inspiration from the cartoonist Ronald Searle, who designed the look of the picture, in particular its strikingly modern, UPA-esque backgrounds, so at odds with traditional Disney layouts that Walt despaired of them, fearing the “fantasy element” of his movies was being lost. He had a point, although Anderson’s work perfectly matches the “unfinished” Xerox quality of the drawings.

Speaking of those drawings: Marc Davis was solely responsible for Cruella, taking great inspiration from her voice, that of the marvelous Betty Lou Gerson. (He also used Gerson’s cheekbones.) Davis later said Gerson’s 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.” No one could say Davis didn’t take that advantage; with her voice like a diamond cutting glass and her outré movements and mannerisms (Mary Wickes was her live-action model) Cruella was arguably the most memorable Disney villain since Lady Tremaine in Cinderella. Children could laugh at her even while enjoying the chill that ran down their backs at the ghastly close-up of her maddened skull during the climactic chase. Rod Taylor was an appropriately loveable and stalwart Pongo; Ben Wright (26 years later the voice of Grimsby in The Little Mermaid) was his pet Roger, a struggling songwriter here instead of Smith’s accounting wizard; J. Pat O’Malley gave voice to both Jaspar Badun and Colonel, the charmingly Blimp-y old sheepdog; George Worlock was the dim-witted Horace; and Martha Wentworth the cuddlesome Nanny (she was later, in a complete contrast, Mad Madam Mim in The Sword and the Stone). Other voices included Dave Frankham (Tibbs and the Skye terrier), Tom Conway (the Collie, who looks just like him), George Pelling (Danny, the Great Dane at Hampstead), and Thurl Ravenscroft (as Captain, the horse who gives the Badduns a memorable exit from his barn.) Bill Lee, who would later vocalize for Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music, gave Roger his singing voice.

Eight of the Nine Old Men worked on the picture, whose direction was credited to Wolfgang Reitherman, Hamilton Luske and Clyde Geronimi. (Only Ward Kimball was absent, presumably at work on his ill-advised live-action Babes in Toyland.) Eric Larson directed the animation on Tibbs, John Lounsbery did the Badduns, Ollie Johnson animated Perdita and Frank Thomas, perhaps the most gifted of the Nine, was responsible for Pongo, that most appealing of all Disney heroes. (At eight I already knew that real Dalmatians aren’t as handsome as he was.) This is one of those rare pictures in which everything works, from the charmingly designed, witty main titles to the smile-inducing finale. George Bruns provided the apposite, and surprisingly plangent, score largely based around Mel Levin’s spritely melody for the un-used “Playful Melody,” and Levin wrote the movie’s occasional songs, including of course that perennial favorite “Cruella DeVil.” Trivia note: The first time I heard Charles Strouse’s melody for the Annie song “A New Deal for Christmas” I was struck by how closely it resembled Levin’s “Dalmatian Plantation.” One of those curious mysteries of compositional coincidence, like the relationship of Henry Mancini’s “Charade” to “Silent Night,” or Sondheim’s “No One is Alone” in Into the Woods to, of all things, Leslie Bricusse’s “The Candy Man” in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Speaking of dogs, the alert viewer will note incongruous but enjoyable cameos in One Hundred and One Dalmatians by Jock, Peg, Bull and the silhouettes of Tramp and Lady from that other Disney picture centered around canines.

Text copyright 2024 by Scott Ross

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*The others, in the order of my preference: Pinocchio, Dumbo, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Lady and the Tramp and The Jungle Book. Although it has never been a favorite, in look, if not in total achievement, I should also add Bambi.

†I also loved, when I discovered it a few years later, Smith’s sequel. The wholly fantastic The Starlight Barking introduced me, at 12, to the concept of metaphysics.