While I won’t recount the entire movie in detail, it’s needless to say that this post contains spoilers for Disney’s 2021 film, Cruella, so keep that in mind if you plan to watch the movie and are bothered by spoilers.
Over the years, Disney has published a few reimaginings of its classic stories. The recipe is rather simple: take the original story but turn the villain into something more akin to an antihero. Maleficent is probably the most obvious example of this, being a reimagining of the Sleeping Beauty, but instead of the prince on the white horse coming out of nowhere and saving the damsel in distress (a trope many have come to hate even when ignoring how sexist it is), the original story’s villain and the 2014 movie’s titular character, Maleficent, becomes more of an antihero, causing the main conflict herself but coming to fix her mistakes.
Now, why do I bring this up in a post that isn’t about Maleficent? Well, to say that Cruella isn’t that, but instead it’s something that I feel is much worse.
A quick recounting
Cruella centers around, well, Estella Miller. Bet ya didn’t see that coming.
The movie starts with Estella’s childhood, portraying her as a creative if rather problematic child, one who, and excuse my unacademic language, doesn’t take anyone’s bullshit and won’t shy away from giving back as much as she takes, with interest. This earns her the nickname “Cruella”, and eventually ends up getting her expelled from the school she was attending, forcing her and her mother, Catherine Miller, to move together to London. However, on the way there, Catherine makes a quick stop to meet an old friend, but this quick stop quickly goes awry as she ends up pushed off a cliff by 3 dalmatians, dying in the process.
The now orphan Estella ends up running away and arriving in London where she meets two street urchins: Jasper and Horace.
Fast forward 10 years, and the trio is shown to now be making a living from theft, be it pickpocketing strangers in buses, sweeping hotel rooms, or just about anything else they can get away with. Trough all of this, though, Estella keeps thinking back to her childhood dream: to become a fashion designer. This doesn’t go unnoticed by her friend, Jasper, so he pulls some strings to get her a job at a luxury store. However, this job doesn’t live up to Estella’s hopes, as she’s tasked with scrubbing floors and toilets rather than designing attires. This greatly frustrates her, which culminates in Estella, while fed up and drunk, redecorating the store’s window display, something which gets her fired from the store but impresses Baroness von Hellman, a renowned designer, who offers Estella a position at her fashion house. Estella takes this opportunity without a second thought, quickly climbs the ranks, showing herself a skilled designer, and earning the Baroness' favour.
Now, I’ll skip over a few details, but eventually Estella learns that it was the Baroness who, using a dog whistle, sent the dalmatians to kill her mother, prompting her to seek revenge. To achieve this, she creates an alter ego: Cruella. While Estella was still working for the Baroness, Cruella would openly challenge her by crashing her parties and stealing the spotlight.
Somewhere along the way she also kidnaps the Baroness' dalmatians, and later wears a coat with a dalmatian pattern on it, but it’s later revealed that she didn’t actually kill the dalmatians for the coat.
Following Cruella’s repeated offensives against the Baroness, the latter discovers that Cruella and Estella are the same person, and decides to settle things once and for all. She orders her man to kidnamp Jasper and Horace and turn them over to the police, framing them for murder, and sets their home ablaze with Estella inside.
However, no protagonist is allowed to die before the movie is over, so Estella is saved by the Baroness' own valet, John, who reveals to Estella that she is actually Estella von Hellman, the Baroness' daughter, and that he was tasked by the Baroness to kill her after birth but instead he gave her to Catherine who was working as a maid for the von Hellman family before fleeing with Estella whom she later raised as her own daughter. Following the revelations, Estella breaks her partners in crime out of prison, and the trio stages a plan to take revenge on the Baroness for everything she had done.
The plan was simple: show up at a party hosted by the Baroness as Estella, lure the Baroness to the same cliff edge that Catherine had been pushed off of years prior, get the party guests' eyes on the meeting between the Baroness and Estella, then let the former push the latter off the cliff, which she does, only realizing the guests were watching after the deed was done. Estella, prepared for this, survived the fall, showing up as Cruella de Vil at the party just before the police arrested the Baroness for murder. Before this, however, Estella left a will in which she names Cruella de Vile as her sole heir. And with the Baroness arrested for murder and her sole heir, Estella von Hellman, dead by her own hand, all of her wealth was left to Cruella de Vile.
Now, what’s wrong with this story? Actually, not that much. Cruella is built as a rather compelling antihero, the scenes in which she crashes the Baroness' parties and steals the spotlight are rather entertaining, and, while my recounting doesn’t do it justice, I think it was a good movie.
So why did I say that what Disney did was much worse than a mild twist on the original story?
Shoehorned references that ruin everything
There are a few things I’ve left out from the story. Estella has a single schoolmate whom she gets along with before getting expelled, Anita Darling, who ends up a columnist later in the movie. The Baroness' also has a lawyer, Roget Dearly, who is introduced in one scene in which it’s revealed that he likes composing music, and is later fired. Neither one really helps advance the plot in any way, and you could honestly remove both without changing anything in the story. So why do they exist? Well, after all is said and done, Cruella gifts each a dalmatian: Anita is gifted Perdita, and Roger is gifted Pongo. In other words, they’re revealed to be the couple of the original 101 Dalmatians story, and their dalmatians are revealed to both be gifts from Cruella.
This. This is what I take a major issue with. This film is supposed to be a prequel, an origin story for Cruella de Vil, the villain of 101 Dalmatians who was literally written by Dodie Smith in her original book to be so fucking evil that her name is literally Cruel Devil.
Now, I’m usually whatever about referencing previous works, but in this case the ties are very much shoehorned in: Anita Darling and Roget Dearly exist solely to be gifted the dalmatians at the end in order to say out loud what story this film is supposed to be a prequel to, the dalmatians themselves don’t need to be dalmatians (though I don’t take a problem with that in and of itself), and Cruella… doesn’t need to be Cruella de Vil. Actually, I want to know how these two women are supposed to be the same: the Cruella de Vil from the classic story had no qualms about killing 99 puppies to make a coat out of them. In short was pure distilled evil, hence the name. But the new Cruella is shown to have a heart, to deeply care about Jasper and Horace with whom she’s been trough thick and thin with over the years, and she’s shown to not be cruel enough to make a coat out of some dogs even while she was blinded by revenge.
In short: the compelling antihero whom you’ve cheered for during the movie is portrayed to somehow became cruel enough over the years to eventually have no qualms about making a coat out of the puppies… of the dogs that she herself gifted to their owners.
Smells of executive meddling
While I have no way to confirm this, to me it smells like someone at Disney wrote a compelling story, but then some executive said it had to be tied to one of their big franchises, so 101 Dalmatians was chosen. The story has nothing to do with 101 Dalmatians, however, so in came the painfully shoehorned ties that add nothing to the story. In fact, they’re so painfully shoehorned in that they don’t even have a good reason for the “de Vil” name: a car that Horace acquires just before the final plan is put into action simply happens to have the license plate “DEVIL” so that becomes Cruella’s last name. And the Hell Hall? Cruella just rips out the “man” out of a sign at the Hellman Hall’s entrance in the post-ending scenes.
How to fix it
Simply cut all ties to 101 Dalmatians. You had a good story, a nuanced antihero, but it’s all ruined by making it the backstory of a villain so fucking evil that that’s her entire character, start to finish, including her name.