An incredibly captivating origin(al) story about one of Disney's classic villains. Emma Stone delivers an award-worthy display, interpreting two personalities in impressive fashion, stealing the spotlight from the other outstanding interpretations. Ultimately, it's impossible to deny that Cruella is fun.
Sinisterly superb, this is a well-crafted, phenomenally acted, artistically drenched triumph that's a whole lot more responsible than most other villain-as-main-character films. And yet it does make a hero out of a criminal. So, there's that. It's easy to see why Disney might feel that the accolades for.
A huge theme to acknowledge in this film is the idea of nature vs. nurture. Estella was raised by a caring mother who always tried to “love her into shape” as Cruella herself states it. Try as she might, Estella could never quite tame those wild inclinations.
She had a single white streak in her hair as a child. She finally snapped and turned evil in her teens, when her parents led her to believe they would be home for Christmas with her dream puppy, and then sent cardboard cutouts of themselves and a puppy instead. Her hair also turned half-white at this time.
In 101 Dalmatians, Cruella wanted to purchase Perdita and Pongo's Dalmatian puppies because she was a selfish heiress who viewed the puppies as a fashionable commodity to be exploited rather than as innocent living beings.
Cruella begins with Estella as a child with black and white hair, something that she was born with due to a disease called poliosis. The condition is caused by a decrease or absence of melanin in the hair on the body, typically resulting in a white streak or splotches in someone's hair.
In the 1961 animated original film, the fashion-obsessed heiress was usually seen clutching a cigarette and holder as sickly green smoke wafted behind her. When asked why the wardrobe statement piece was intentionally left out, Stone attributed it to evolving opinions about smoking within the past 60 years.
The first thing Disney did to make Cruella a redeemable character was to portray her as having dissociative identity disorder (sometimes called multiple personality disorder).
Cruella's Story Becomes a Mission of Revenge Rather than Greed. With an evil desire to be clothed in the fur of baby dogs as her one character trait, the original Cruella was merely an entertaining, creepy villain. Stone's Cruella doesn't have any dark instinct to kill Dalmatians and wear them.
In Disney's original animated “101 Dalmatians” from 1961, Cruella de Vil is an evil woman in her sixties whose goal is to kill and skin the Dalmatians for their fur as a new fashion statement.
Like any villain, Cruella De Vil is evil! Her fierce, unkind and selfish behaviour makes her one of the most evil characters. On her arms she wears a pair of long, ruby gloves to cover her pale, wrinkly skin which is transparent like a window.
Although Cruella — a 101 Dalmatians origin story centered around the film's villain, Cruella de Vil — is a Disney film, it's not as kid-friendly a movie as most others. Rated PG-13, Cruella is filled with action, deceit, and many a dicey moment.
“Cruella” is an origin story that begins with a little girl named Estella (played at age 12 by Tipper Seifert-Cleveland), a girl bullied at her boarding school because her hair is half black and half white.
It is not until the end Cruella reveals her true personality, a violent, careless, murderous, destructive, and downright evil psychopath, after the dalmatians escape, she becomes nearly insane and preposterous, so she goes on a rampage trying to retrieve the dogs but accidentally crashes the car she was driving.
It's clear that Disney is exploring the metanarrative about Cruella, building on her love of furs and fashion as well as fans' interpretation of her as a fabulously camp performance artist. The film also draws on the current trend of reevaluating demonized women to give her a far more sympathetic persona.
Box office. As of March 6, 2022, Cruella has grossed $86.1 million in the United States and Canada, and $147.4 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $233.5 million.
For decades, Cruella de Vil has been known as one of Disney's most evil characters. “Cruel” and “devil” are literally in her name. She's on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest Heroes and Villains—coming in just before Freddy Krueger and the Joker.
It is there the movie arbitrarily suggests Cruella de Vil's eventual obsession with Dalmatians is because that breed of dog was used as a literal murder weapon in the death of her mother.
Estella tries to be calm and kind but struggles with what appears to be a borderline personality disorder and has trouble keeping her raging and mean alter ego, Cruella, under control. When school bullies repeatedly taunt and torment Estella, she loses control and is expelled from school.
This could be a reference to Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder), which requires that someone have multiple distinct personalities, but there is no way for us to know for sure because there are gaps in the characterization that make a diagnosis impossible.
Rather than extend some compassion, the Baronness silently whistles for her trained Dalmatian attack dogs, who leap at Estella's mother and push her off a cliff into the sea. Cruella keeps Disney's dead parents tradition alive and well. It's meant to be a horrifying moment, and it is – for Estella.
For the real dogs, there were about six trainers on the set of Cruella. According to Gillespie, dalmatians were especially hard to work with because their attention span was limited and they became rather rambunctious and fidgety when in a scene with other dogs.
