101 Dalmatians: Give the Lady a Hand

Above is an early section of 101 Dalmatians that I regularly show my students when talking about walks.  The three women are great contrasts in design and movement and we analyze how the visuals form our impressions of these characters.

There are variations in timing.  The first woman walks at 15 frames per step, which is a relaxed gait.  The second at 10 frames per step, showing more urgency and the third woman walks at 8 frames per step and is clearly in a hurry.  There are variations in body shape.  The first woman is gangly, the second stout and the third svelte.  There are variations in dress which imply what class the women belong to.  The first woman wears an ill-fitting coat and is bohemian, the second woman wears a smartly tailored outfit and is middle class and the third woman wears fur and is upper class.

While I've seen the film many times and I've shown this clip easily dozens of times to students, there was something I didn't notice until this week: the way each woman holds her leash.

The first woman is the most casual of the three.  Her hand is in her pocket.  The second woman is quite rigid in her arm motions and she holds the leash in a fist.  This implies that she's very guarded and not willing to take chances.  The third woman holds the leash with an open hand.  That shows her confidence that nothing will go wrong.

Then there's Anita, the woman who Roger will eventually marry.

She holds the leash in a fist, but isn't holding the leash by the loop.  She's not as rigid as the second woman, but not as confident as the third.  Also notice what she's carrying.  The first woman, we see later, is a painter.  She's carrying her supplies.  The second two women are carrying purses.  Anita is carrying a book, implying intelligence.

At this point in the film, the women, including Anita, are just vignettes.  The audience is only given brief glimpses of them.  Yet it's clear that the artists have worked hard to visually differentiate the women and to give the audience clues as to who these women are.  Even something as potentially trivial as how someone holds a leash has been thought out to be consistent with what the artists want to communicate.

The credited animators for the walks are Frank Thomas and Blaine Gibson.  It's impossible to know what came from the designs and what was added in animation, but these walks are a testament to how much information can be compressed into a short amount of time.  That's the power of good design and expressive movement.

101 Dalmatians: Part 21

101 Dalmatians: Part 20A

This is the climax of the film where Cruella and the Baduns attempt to stop the truck carrying the dogs back to London.

While it is an exciting sequence, what strikes me is how little the dogs have to do. They have been active characters before this - searching, fighting and avoiding capture - but there's nothing left for them to do. Except for Perdy catching a pup by the tail as the truck tilts dangerously, the dogs are literally just along for the ride. While the audience has been asked to identify with the dogs as protagonists, now the audience is stuck rooting for a truck driver who has no history with the audience and no idea what's really going on. It's a bit of an odd turn for the film to take.

It's also something of a disappointment that the bad guys are the authors of their own misfortune. Again, after the dogs have worked so hard to rescue the puppies and return home, why not give them the opportunity of striking the final blow? Instead, the bad guys cancel each other out and the dogs ride home to safety.

There are some interesting shots where the backgrounds recede behind the characters riding in vehicles. If they were done as traveling mattes, the matte work is excellent as there are no matte lines visible. Those lines are visible in later films like The Rescuers, so why are the shots here better? Perhaps they were done using the multiplane camera, which would not require matte work as the entire shot would be done in camera. Does anyone know?

This part of the film really belongs to Cruella. While her henchman have done most of the dirty work until now, she is the main villain in the chase. In shot 158, her car crashes through some trees and parts of it get stripped off, the resulting look in shot 160.1 is very much a nod to the California hot rod culture of the 1950s. Big Daddy Roth, anyone?


Prior to those shots, in 149-154, the car lands in a snowbank and instead of animating the snow, someone decided to use the live action footage from the model shoot of the car. The live action images were transferred directly to cels and painted. As a viewer, these shots have always called attention to themselves and taken me out of the story momentarily. For one thing, the texture of the snow in these shots doesn't match any snow in the rest of the film. For another thing, there are registration problems. You can clearly see the live element weaving relative to the painted backgrounds they've been inserted into.


The film leaves Cruella, Horace and Jasper stuck in the snow without a way home. Are the arrested? Horace and Jasper are guilty of burglary. Cruella is guilty of attempted murder of a truck driver. Are they fined? There's no doubt that Cruella has broken the speed limit and driven recklessly. We'll never know.

101 Dalmatians: Part 20

101 Dalmatians: Part 19

101 Dalmatians: Part 18A

As I go through this film shot by shot, one of the things that keeps jumping out at me is how much re-used animation there is. It's fairly well hidden as the animation is placed over a new background and the story material is different, but this film probably re-uses more animation from itself than any other Disney feature.

I don't know if the re-use was Woolie Reitherman's idea or not, but he certainly endorsed it. In all the features that list him as a director, re-use is present. In Reitherman's later films, he lifted animation from earlier features and usually had it cleaned it up for use as a different character, though there are spots where animation is lifted without changes. There are websites (here, here and here) devoted to documenting Disney re-use.

The reason for it boils down to money. The feature before 101 Dalmatians was Sleeping Beauty. That film was in production for many years as Walt Disney was seemingly more interested in Disneyland than he was in the movie. As a result, the expenses were high and the resulting box office did not meet expectations. There was a massive layoff when Sleeping Beauty was finished and there was some question as to whether the studio would continue to make animated features.

As a result, the financial pressure on 101 Dalmatians to come in at a significantly lower cost was strong. The introduction of the Xerox process was done to save money, as the inking department could be laid off. Xerography also made the animation of the puppies far more efficient as they could be repeated. The fact that cels are not truly transparent always restricted animated scenes to four or five cel levels before the background colour was degraded unacceptably. Today, the puppies could all be animated individually and there is no limit to how many levels could be digitally composited, but when you've got dozens of dogs on the screen and only five possible cel levels, life becomes a lot more complicated.

Here's just a few examples from this sequence of animation re-use. The first and third images below are from the current sequence. The second and fourth images are from earlier in the film, where the animation originated.

101 Dalmatians: Part 18

101 Dalmatians: Part 17A

In this segment, Cruella and the Baduns are searching for the dogs, who are fighting their way through a snow storm. They are rescued by a collie who brings them to a dairy barn where they are able to eat and rest.

You will notice that in Part 17, I was able to identify which animator did which character in a shot. That's because Ruth Wright, the secretary responsible for this portion of the draft, included the information whereas none of the other secretaries bothered. I did make one change to this in shot 17. Wright had Ollie Johnston animating Perdita and Hal King animating Pongo. Given the characters' relative size in the frame and the amount of acting each had to do, I believe that Wright made an error.

The opening scene between Cruella, Horace and Jasper is cast by character. Marc Davis handles Cruella (as he does throughout the film), and Cliff Nordberg takes care of her henchmen. I've talked a fair bit about the so-called "lesser" animators at Disney. Here's a perfect example of excellent work being done by Nordberg. At other times in the film, Horace and Jasper are animated by John Lounsbery or John Sibley, but Nordberg is fully capable of animating to their level on these characters. He shares the screen with Marc Davis, certainly one of the best of Disney's animators, but there's no feeling that Cruella is a more polished piece of work than what Nordberg is doing. Nordberg's handling of the acting and dialogue in shot 4 is excellent, as is his action animation when Cruella throws Horace back into the van on top of Jasper in shot 5.

The march of the dogs through the snow storm (and the draft notes that there is "live action blowing snow") is a demonstration of the power of posture to communicate a character's emotional state.
Perdita's entire spine, from head to tail, is drooping, showing her to be exhausted. Facially, her eyelids are partially closed and drooping, while a single line beneath each eye, indicating a bag, reinforces how tired she is. This one drawing shows the power of cartooning. What Hal King has done here is to isolate what conveys the necessary emotion. Adding more detail to this drawing would not strengthen it; additional detail would distract from what's important. The point of cartooning (and animation) is to strip away everything that doesn't contribute to the desired statement and to play up what's left.

Hal King pretty much handles the entire march through the snow and deserves praise for how effective the animation is in these shots. Eric Larson and Ollie Johnston get some personality scenes with Pongo, but King sets the tone.

The first shot of the collie (shot 14 by Julius Svendsen) is my nomination for the worst piece of animation in the entire film. The collie is running through deep snow, yet the dog does not appear to be exerting himself in the slightest. There is no sense of force emanating from the dog's limbs or a sense that the terrain isn't solid. There is also no effects animation of snow being disturbed by the dog's legs (though this probably wouldn't have been handled by Svendsen). The run is especially weak when you compare it to Ollie Johnston's Pongo animation in shot 16.1, where Pongo struggles to run through deep snow to let Perdy know that they have reached shelter. Johnston's run is specific to the environmental conditions, where Svendsen's is not.

Later shots of the collie tend to go quite flat. In contrast to the other dog animators, Svendsen leaves the collie in profile most of the time and doesn't turn or tilt the character's head during dialogue. It's a shame, as the collie has a heroic role to play and his voice, by Tom Conway, is quite distinctive. While other supporting characters in the film are successfully realized, the collie is a missed opportunity.

(Tom Conway was the brother of George Sanders, who later voiced Shere Khan in The Jungle Book. Sanders was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, whose sister Eva voiced Bianca in The Rescuers. Instead of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, for Disney features you can play Six Degrees of George Sanders.)

Svendsen is the sole animator of the collie, so he has to take responsibility for this. His animation of the horse earlier in the film is far superior. Once the characters move to the dairy barn, the drawing and animation of the collie look decidedly weak next to Hal Ambro's cows, who are far more dimensionally drawn and animated.

You can tell that censorship was breaking down by the 1960s. In the '30s, Disney had to cover up Clarabelle Cow's udder with a skirt. Here, the pups are actually shown suckling on the cow's teats, something that never would have been allowed in earlier years.

101 Dalmatians: Part 17

101 Dalmatians: Part 16A

In this section, the pups and their parents spend some quiet time together before Horace and Jasper arrive to resume the chase. The Colonel, Captain and Sgt. Tibbs delay the Baduns, but are not capable of stopping them.

As Peter Emslie points out in the comments to Part 16, the delaying action gives the Colonel his brief moment in the sun. He finally gets to take action. It's an important moment because it shows that Tibbs and the Captain respect the Colonel for valid reasons and they're not simply indulging him. The story forces limitations on how successful the three can be, though, so as not to distract from the main characters.

This is a sequence which is pretty much cast by animator. Frank Thomas has a major hand in animating the dogs, especially the adults. Blaine Gibson contributes some animation to Pongo and Perdita. Hal King takes care of the personality close-ups of the puppies while Ted Berman gets the their long shots. John Lounsbery animates the Colonel in addition to some scenes of the Baduns. Cliff Nordberg animates Tibbs. Julius Svendsen continues to animate the Captain.

The first part of the sequence is low key, bringing down the tension and the action in preparation for the long chase to come. Frank Thomas is the right choice to animate the dogs here as what's needed is a stong feeling of warmth between the parents and the pups. Once Horace and Jasper arrive, the chase is back on and with the exception of the upcoming sequence with the cows, the tension continuously rises from here until the climax of the film.

Pongo's snout is something that should have been better defined on the model sheets. Frank Thomas draws Pongo with a prominent bump on his snout. Other animators who handle the character treat the bump differently.

Frank Thomas

Eric Larson

Milt Kahl

Watching this sequence (and the entire film) closely, you run across all kinds of cheats. Here's a detail from shot 54 animated by Dan MacManus. Perhaps this was a stop motion model shot that was rotoscoped, but in any case, Horace and Jasper could use some more detail.
If you think it looks bad here, imagine how it looks on a theatre screen.

Shot 63, with pups sliding on the ice, has the animation and the pan done on two's and there's noticeable strobing as a result. There are also continuity issues. When the Captain is about to kick Jasper in shot 45, he has his left rear leg raised. But when he kicks Jasper in shot 46.1, he does it with his rear right leg. I wonder if this a mistake or if someone decided it made for clearer staging?

101 Dalmatians: Part 16