One Hundred and One Dalmatians

I appreciate this film’s generous use of the word ‘idiot.' It’s a refreshing echo of a saner time. In other news...other marks of distinction are sprinkled throughout this flick. The animation is not the masterful artwork we saw in earlier works from the studio, yet it does have a certain visual character to it, a style of drawing the inhabits the screen with a certain panache. We know that by this point, Disney's studio was cutting corners in the graphics department--using Xerox machines to make animation cels, apparently--but here I wouldn't say the work suffers from that; more that it, again, gives this work it's own visual style. And there’s more story here than we saw in, say, Lady and the Tramp. Then again, the characters beyond the dogs are either bland (the couple) or over the top and simplistic at the same time (the henchmen, if not Cruella herself). Also, there's more of having a song where most of the lyrics are a character's name repeated throughout; it would take a couple more decades for really good songwriting to make its appearance in the studio's oeuvre. Still, the film portrays a continuous thread of kindness and generosity shines throughout its running time, and that sensibility (plus one heroic cat) elevates what would be an otherwise simple but flawed comedic story into an enjoyable presentation. This film may not have been particularly well trained, but at least it's housebroken enough to tolerate its presence.