Disney’s Cruella is a live action retelling of the 1961 film (and preceding book) 101 Dalmatians, told from the perspective of the antagonist. The film also labels itself as a prequel to the original animated film, although the storylines are distinct enough that this doesn’t really hold up beyond a handful of character names. I will say before we start that Cruella has generally been well received and it deserves a lot of the praise it’s been given, but in my opinion there’s something at this film’s core that simply doesn’t work – or, at the very least, didn’t need to be there, and actively takes away from the experience.
Let me explain what I mean:
How We Got Here
On its own, rewriting such a well-known story to reframe Cruella de Vil as a protagonist – or, more accurately, antihero – is a solid concept. Everyone loves a villain and Disney villains in particular tend to cultivate their own fanbases. Their popularity is such that it has given rise to any number of secondary productions, such as the Twisted Tales book series featuring ‘what if’ scenarios favouring various Disney antagonists, or the StarKid Productions musical Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier, which retells Aladdin from the point of view of Jafar (sort of). The latter also includes many other Disney villains as supporting characters and portrays almost all of them as far more sympathetic than their original films.
It was this line of thinking that ultimately led to Disney’s Maleficent in 2014, a retelling of 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. The film floundered a little with critics but was popular with movie-goers and it became a commercial success, ultimately netting a sequel five years later. Notably, Maleficent’s biggest success was widely credited to the main character herself, and Angelina Jolie’s portrayal therein. The film does a fantastic job of incorporating in elements of the original story, while still managing to make Maleficent an understandable and sympathetic protagonist. More on that later.
So, can we say the same for Cruella? Well, not really, and the issue lies entirely with one simple decision: which Disney villain they chose.
Picking a Villain
When I mentioned the Twisted musical above, an important detail I left out was that the one Disney villain it makes no effort to excuse is our dear own Miss De Vil. It even makes a joke about how while the other characters might have had sympathetic motivations the viewer was unaware of, Cruella’s ambition in 101 Dalmatians is, ironically, entirely black and white. ‘I only wished to have a coat made out of puppies’ indeed.
The truth is that out of almost all the Disney villains to feature in the old animated films, Cruella de Vil is one of the least complicated and least nuanced. While it’s always very clear who the bad guy is supposed to be, it’s not exactly hard to paint Gaston as being in the right for trying to save Belle from a hulking, hairy beast, right? With a little bit of rearranging and tweaks, you can make similar arguments for most of our antagonists: Ursula was a powerful witch outcast from society for her powers; Captain Hook lost his hand because a literal child with magic didn’t like adult authority; Scar was a fiercely intelligent prince who was constantly overlooked and belittled for his lack of physical strength.
It’s not a universal truth – I can’t think of any way you could conceivably paint someone like Frollo as being in the right without drastically changing the story to the point of being unrecognisable – but examples aren’t hard to find, particularly if you’re willing to be a little flexible with the source material. Maleficent, for example, did it by introducing the horror of King Stefan and the violence he does to her, despite the original Sleeping Beauty mentioning nothing of it.
There’s a limit to how much you can change a story before the idea of it being a remake rather than a new property is laughable, but fragments like this are entirely acceptable. The key is that films like Maleficent are, unlike Disney’s recent spate of live action titles, retellings not remakes. Truthfully, it’s a bit of a relief to see Disney doing something new, even if it is still couched in pre-existing properties.
The thing is, Cruella De Vil’s story is a little harder to work with than Maleficent’s, not least because she plays a more actively malicious role in her film.
Adapting Cruella
I’m not going to try to excuse Maleficent’s desire to curse an infant, but she was at least spurred on by her rejection from society. Like any good villain, she had clear motivation, and, interestingly, it isn’t really centred on Aurora at all; her being cursed was a way to punish her family rather than any personal ill will.
Rewriting that into Maleficent, where the inciting incident is expanded to include Stefan’s betrayal and a long-standing war between humans and fairies, doesn’t fundamentally change the dynamics of the story. All it does is give Maleficent a =much more sympathetic and understandable reason for her rage. And, vitally, Maleficent still included Aurora’s curse. The film didn’t shy away from the fact that Maleficent acted cruelly and was, at least in part, the one in the wrong. Instead it became a story of redemption, where the character was able to grow and recognise the evil she had done. It is a different story from Sleeping Beauty, but it’s close enough you can believe they are simply two versions of the same original tale.
So, if we apply that approach to 101 Dalmatians, what do we get? Well, we have Cruella de Vil, looking to kidnap some puppies to make a coat. Right. Her motivation is… she thinks their spots are cute? The inciting incident of the whole tale is Roger refusing to sell her the puppies that, in case it didn’t sink in the first time, she wanted to skin. There’s very little nuance here, no matter how you look at it, and it’s immediately apparent that the slight rewrites Maleficent relied on just aren’t going to cut it.
Let’s try to use the same template Maleficent did with regards to its story: Maleficent is wronged; the curse happens; Maleficent sees the error of her ways; she fixes what she did. That leaves us with something a bit like this: Cruella decides she wants a new coat; she kidnaps the puppies because she wants to skin them; she realises she can’t hurt them because that would be wrong; she returns the puppies to Roger and Anita. Well, you can kind of see a possible film in there, but it still hinges on the now-main character actively trying to murder puppies. Not exactly the wholesome image Disney normally shoots for. For the film to work, something much more substantial had to change.
Crafting A plot
In 101 Dalmatians, Cruella didn’t really have a motivation and she didn’t need one. She was there to be an obstacle to the protagonists and nothing more, which is completely fine. It becomes an issue, however, if you’re looking to drag her into the spotlight and make her the central focus of your film. There’s not enough original source material to adapt into something reasonable without having to entirely change the character. First, we need to give her a reason to actively hate the dogs in question.
Cruella’s solution to this was, bafflingly, to include a plot point wherein Dalmatians murdered her mother.
Now, I’m not going to try to tell anyone how to write their story, but as an indicator of my thoughts on this: I had this part of the film spoiled for me by a friend before I saw it, and it was so ridiculous I assumed they were lying to me. How wrong I was.
Conceptually, the idea is actually pretty sound: Cruella needed a motivation to kickstart the plot and a villain to fight against, but this has got to be one of the weirdest possible ways of doing it. What’s strange is that the film makers clearly realised Cruella wasn’t going to work if they made the dogs themselves the actual antagonists. Beyond the sheer unbelievability of it, most audiences aren’t going to want to root against three adorable puppies, no matter how murderous they might be.
Instead, the antagonistic requirements are fulfilled by Emma Thompson’s character, the Baroness, but it gets tangled up in this bizarre twist that, for the early part of the film, frames the dogs themselves as a sort of secondary villain.
The absurdity of it isn’t precisely the strangest idea I’ve ever seen in a Disney film, but it certainly feels like one of the most pointless elements of Cruella. For the rest of the film, the Dalmatians act more as objects to be moved around than characters with any sort of agency, and the most important thing any of them do is swallow a necklace Cruella wants, prompting the kidnapping that was central to the 1961 film. The infamous spotted coat does make an appearance, but only as a ruse to rile up the Baroness by making her think Cruella killed her dogs.
With the dogs relegated to set dressing, the primary conflict of the film is between Cruella and the Baroness and honestly, that made it a much better film than it had any real right to be. Cruella had clear reasons to hate the Baroness and the film didn’t shy away from making it clear that she was a villain herself. Aside from some genuinely incomprehensible story choices, the central narrative of the film is surprisingly well-developed for what could have just been an easy cash grab. Although Cruella didn’t feature the same kind of character growth Maleficent did, it also isn’t trying to frame itself as a redemption story in the same way.
Where does this leave us?
In the end, Cruella isn’t an excessively bad film. It is dripping in style and Emma Stone and Emma Thompson both put in brilliant performances. If you were to strip away the names and the ridiculous dog-murder subplot, you’d be left with a really solid film. That’s reflected in how well it’s been received; despite a lot of its flaws, the film still has a 74% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and it’s a deserved accolade.
At it’s core, the issue is simply that it should have been called anything else. Cruella de Vil of old was a cardboard bad guy who has mostly been remembered because of a really enjoyable live action version in the 90s. She wasn’t nuanced or misunderstood; she was simply fun, different, and stylish. All of these features make for a perfectly good villain, but they absolutely fall to pieces when put centre stage.
To make up for what was lacking, Disney have had to write a plot that is so disconnected from its source material that the two bear no real relationship with each other beyond character names and the inclusion of a very specific breed of dog. Unlike Maleficent’s clear connection to the story it came from, Cruella could change out some names and hair styles and it would be an entirely new product. Because of that, a part of me can’t help but consign Cruella to the pile of tired remakes Disney keeps trotting out in an attempt to consolidate their properties and to me, at least, that feels like a shame.
I actually really liked some parts of Cruella. I just think that if Disney hadn’t been so focused on digging into people’s nostalgia – and protecting their aging copyrights – we might have got something even better.
Nerd Talk 