Dodie Smith was a successful West End playwright who had been given a dalmatian puppy as a gift in 1934; Smith named the puppy Pongo, and he was the first of what would be seven dalmatians. During the late 1930s Smith moved to Hollywood to write movies; Pongo died there, but he had fathered a number of successors, including Folly and Buzz, who parented 15 puppies of which they kept one, Dandy. Smith and her husband Alec were so devoted to their dogs one of the reasons they delayed returning to England was the thought of putting their dogs through quarantine. (When Smith did return home in 1953, she visited the dogs in quarantine every day and paid for extra heat and meat rations.) Smith’s plays had become temporarily out of fashion in the post-war world and in Christmas 1955 she decided to write The Hundred and One Dalmatians.
The story revolves around Pongo, a dalmatian who not only arranges to marry to the female of his choice, Perdita, but for his master, Roger Radcliff, to marry Perdita's pretty mistress, Anita. Perdita soon produces 15 puppies, which attracts the attention of the evil Cruella De Ville who wants to use them to make a dalmatian fur coat. (This idea came from a comment made to Smith by actress Joyce Kennedy about a dalmatian: “he would make a nice fur coat.”) The book was an instant commercial and critical success on its publication in 1956, and Disney bought the film rights.
Walt Disney had been making animated feature films since Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) but by the 1950s, he was finding his theme parks, television shows, and live action features more lucrative and less stressful. His most recent animated feature, Sleeping Beauty (1959) had been a financial disappointment on its release, failing to cover its $6 million cost on first run. However, animation was Disney’s passion and he decided to make a film of 101 Dalmatians.
The film represented something of a departure from previous Disney animated features. Not only was it not based on a fairytale, it would be the first animated Disney feature to have a screenplay rather than just storyboards, and the first animated feature to solely use the Xerox process for transferring the animators' drawings to cells. (Prior to this, each one of the animators' drawings had to be hand-traced in ink onto a cell.) The new process sped up production greatly – something especially useful for a film that featured so many spotted dogs.[ Many animators preferred the new process because the line the audience saw on the screen was the one they had actually drawn, rather than an inker’s approximation of it. 101 Dalmatians was made at a reported cost of $4 million over three years, using some 150 artists.
The film is joyful and quite brilliant, enjoyable from start to finish. Scary, exciting and funny, it was the last uncontested animated classic made in Disney’s lifetime.
No comments:
Post a Comment