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Plot for the Original One
Hundred and One Dalmatians
Pongo (Rod Taylor) is a Dalmatian who lives in a London bachelor flat
with his owner ("pet" in Pongo's mind), Roger Radcliffe (Ben Wright),
a professional songwriter. Unlike Roger who spends his days writing
music, Pongo is bored with bachelor life and decides to find a wife
for his pet and a mate for himself. He sees a beautiful female
Dalmatian, Perdita (or Perdy for short) (Cate Bauer), and her "pet",
Anita heading to Regent's Park and later leads Roger to the park to
meet up with them. After an awkward and unusual meeting that almost
goes awry, Pongo's efforts pay off as Roger and Anita fall in love
along with him and Perdita.
Once Roger and Anita (and Pongo and Perdita) get married, Perdita
gives birth to 15 Dalmatian puppies. One of the puppies appears to
die, but Roger is able to revive it by vigorously rubbing it in a
towel.Cruella De Vil (Betty Lou Gerson), an eccentric and wealthy
social parasite known to Anita from their school years, offers the
human couple a large sum of money in return for the puppies so that
she can make a dog-skin coat out of them. The human couple refuses,
but Cruella, who will not take no for an answer, secretly hires Jasper
(J. Pat O'Malley) and Horace (Frederick Worlock) Badun to kidnap the
puppies. The humans try every effort to locate the stolen puppies but
to no avail.
Heartbroken and desperate, Pongo and Perdita use the "Twilight Bark",
a dog gossip chain, to alert the other dogs in England and locate
their puppies. Once the puppies are located, it is up to Pongo and
Perdita, along with the help of some animal friends they meet along
the way, to rescue their 15 puppies. Pongo and Perdita attack Horace
and Jasper at Hell Hall, with Perdita tripping Horace into the
fireplace and Pongo biting Jasper on the rear end. Colonal (J. Pat
O'Malley) The Dog and Sergeant Tibbs The Cat (David Frankham) guide
the puppies to safety, at they're barn where Captian the Horse was
waiting for them. When the parents were reunited with their children,
they discovered 84 other puppies in Cruella's possession at the old De
Vil mansion, Hell Hall, and soon learn of Cruella's diabolical scheme
to skin them for a coat. Pongo and Perdita decide to bring the other
puppies home with them, and raise them along with their own 15.
However, Cruella and the Baduns are in hot pursuit of the dogs and
will stop at nothing to catch them. With help from various animal
friends, the dogs make their way back to London all the while trying
to avoid their pursuers. In order to try and fool Cruella and the
Baduns, the Dalmatians smother their coats in black soot, covering up
their spots making them appear like Black Labradors. They hitch a ride
back to London in a moving van but not before Cruella and her partners
see through the dog's masquerade. Jasper and Horace in their truck and
Cruella in her car race after the van with the Dalmatians inside.
Cruella rams the van repeatedly trying to force it off the road
(promptly damaging her car in the process) while the Baduns try to cut
it off from a different direction. They almost succeed but a panicked
Horace accidentally tears the steering wheel from the truck's dash
board, causing the vehicle to skid out of control. The Badun's truck
collides with Cruella's car and both vehicles crash into a deep ravine
while the dogs go to safety. Comically, the villains are shown alive
and well among the wreckage of their demolished vehicles, with Cruella
berating the Baduns before starting to cry.
Roger and Anita, meanwhile have continued the search, using the money
Roger has made from selling his catchy tune, "Cruella de Vil". At home
alone on Christmas Eve, the couple are overjoyed when the Dalmatian
clan make it back home. They count the puppies and come to a total of
84 stray dogs and their own 15 dogs, thus making 101 Dalmatians
(although at one point, their nanny miscounts, stating that 1 + 2 + 3
+ 4 = 7). Roger and Anita decide use the money from Roger's song to
buy an estate in the country to raise the 101 dogs. As the film
closes, we see Roger working on his new song ("Dalmatian Plantation
Home").
Production
The production of the film signaled a change in the graphic style of
Disney's animation. This occurred with the introduction of xerography
which eased graphic reproduction requirements, but at the price of
being unable to deviate from a scratchy outline style because of the
new (and time and money saving) technology's limitations, recognizable
by its thick black lines. Since the line would not have fit the
"round" Disney drawing style used until then (with the exception of
Sleeping Beauty), a more graphic, angular style was chosen for this
and subsequent films. Rotoscoping, a technique formerly used for
tracing live action human characters into animated drawings, became
less important.
Another reason for its look was that the animators themselves were
used to producing drawings which were very sketchy, as the clean-up
was taken care of by those who transferred the drawings to the cels.
With the hand inkers gone, the animation ended up the way the
animators drew them on paper. Later it became common to do clean-up on
paper before the animation was copied, and with time and more
experience, the process improved also in this area.
The technology change also happened when Disney cut its animation
department after the economical failure of the very expensive Sleeping
Beauty, resulting in a reduction of staff from well over 500 to less
than 100 and fewer resources put into the movies. Walt Disney, who at
this point had started to direct his attention more towards television
and his Disneyland amusement park and less on his animated features,
disliked this development. The "sketchy" graphic style would, however,
remain the norm at Disney for years until the technology improved
prior to the release of The Rescuers to allow a softer look. In later
animated features the Xeroxed lines could be printed in different
colors. Unlike many other Walt Disney animated features, One Hundred
and One Dalmatians features very few songs, only three, with just one,
"Cruella De Vil", playing a big part in the film. Even this song isn't
sung in one setting (a scene between Cruella and Anita splits it into
two parts). The other two songs are "Kanine Krunchies Jingle" (sung by
Lucille Bliss, who voiced Anastasia in Disney's 1950 film Cinderella),
and "Dalmatian Plantation" in which only two lines are sung at the
film's closure. The MPAA was close to re-rating this movie due to the
new criteria about smoking.
To achieve the spotted Dalmatians, the animators used to think of the
spot pattern as a constellation. Once they had one "anchor spot", the
next was placed in relation to that one spot, and so on and so on
until the full pattern was achieved. All total, 101 Dalmatians
featured 6,469,952 spots, with Pongo sporting 72 spots, Perdita 68,
and each puppy having 32.
Box Office
One Hundred and One Dalmatians was the highest grossing film of 1961
and one of the studio's most popular films of the decade. The film was
re-issued to theaters 1969, 1979, 1985, and 1991. The 1991 reissue was
the twentieth highest earning film of the year for domestic earnings.
It has earned $215,880,014 in worldwide box office earnings during its
lengthy history, and currently holds a 97% "fresh" rating from critics
and users on Rotten Tomatoes.
Sequels and spinoffs
In 1996, Disney remade the film as the live-action remake 101
Dalmatians starring Glenn Close as Cruella De Vil. In the 1996 film,
none of the animals spoke, and the storyline had significant
alterations.Then they aired a TV series based on the film that aired
from 1997-1998. A sequel to the live-action remake was released in
theaters in November 2000.
On January 21, 2003, a direct-to-video sequel,
101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure was released.
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