Superb

Rating: 10/10 (29 September 2010)

Of all Disney's post-Golden Age work, One Hundred and One Dalmations is my favorite, though it oddly features many of the things which bug me about Disney's other post-sixties work. The production methods are cheaper, the structure more focused on various side characters than its protagonists, and clean-up methods are noticeably sloppier. These problems were due in tandem to the financial failure of Sleeping Beauty and to Walt Disney's waning interest in the animated feature department as he delved more into his theme park (anyone who thinks Disney's input into the animated features is oversold because he didn't draw anything for it need only compare Disney's early work with that toward and after the end of his life to see how vital he was to the process).
What makes it work regardless is its style. Disney brought in the input and influence of the great cartoonist Ronald Searle, and combined this with Ken Anderson's UPA esquire art direction (which had previously been explored in shorts like Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom). I'll also defend the xeroxing methods as having been an initially positive development, which allowed the animation to appear much more organic and handdrawn. Granted, it hinders believability at first, but it brings out a pleasing gutsiness and exciting individuality that I wish hadn't been wasted after The Jungle Book. For once, the human characters work as much as the animals, as the animators just the right balance between caricature and realism.
Everyone is on their A-Game here, from John Lounsbery's comic animation on Horace and Jasper (an obvious influence on Sylvain Chomet) to Milt Kahl's consummate professionalism on Pongo and Roger (which isn't his most theatrical stuff, but does its job perfectly). As always, though, it's the villain who gets to have the most fun, and Marc Davis delivers his masterpiece with Cruella de Vil. Years later, Milt Kahl would respond to this marvelously bombastic work, which makes a brilliantly imposing use of her fur coat, with Medusa in The Rescuers. For a master like that, who considered himself (with good reason) to be the finest of Disney's animators, to attempt to one up a colleague is saying something. Not that this makes the animation better or worse, but I'll also point out that there was a single animator who worked for two years and the accuracy of the dots on the damn dags. The climax also remains one of the finest action scenes in American animation, a school of animation that I usually find far too conservative in terms of action.
Rather than splinter the narrative with its many characters, I think they work with the design to make this film's world one of the most fun to watch in any Disney film. To me, it seems heavily influenced by Hitchcock, making this the only Disney movie of this period to feel a bit like a thriller (only instead of being framed, Pongo and Perdita simply lack the speech functions to go to the useless men who are only good for burning down Bambi's forest anyway). The ensemble nature prevents it from being truly Hitchcockian, but the cast of characters met along the way do recall films like The 39 Steps or Saboteur. Nearly every one of the characters are enjoyable and add to the narrative without intruding too much upon it (aside from the collie, who doesn't leave much of an impression other than his poorly animated fur). Captain and Sgt. Tibbs are especially ludicrous and delightful, in how they represent the most ragtag military unit imaginable. Even the entirely irrelevant television sections are great satiric fun.
My one big complaint is that Roger and Anita wind up disappearing through the entire second and most of the third act, but it's not too big an issue in the long run, this being an animal story after all. Other problems are minor matters of animation. While I'll continue to insist that the Xerox methods had serious virtues, the reused animation is jarring (though in the case of this film, it's much more skillfully used than in later works that abused it).
For these reasons, I love One Hundred and One Dalmations. It's witty, fun to look at, and highly entertaining. Alas, it also marks a final triumph before a steep decline, which didn't hurt the sixties work too much but crippled Disney in the seventies, and even the next few Disney films had their problems.