ADAM Visually, that was my favorite one.

BETH I agree.

ADAM The story was a little flat, but visually it was top-notch.

BROOM Yes. The designs of the still imagery, and also the lively way that they animated it, starting with the opening credit sequence, were all gratifying.

BETH And they way they used color was very sophisticated, I thought.

ADAM They decided to be cartoony again. For real. It was like the Sleeping Beauty cartooniness taken to a jauntier and more confident level. And it was a more cheerful subject, so it was more befitting.

BROOM There’s no reason for this to necessarily be a more cheerful subject than Sleeping Beauty; it was just directed more cheerfully.

ADAM It was about dogs! Everyone loves puppies.

BROOM I felt like this movie made Lady and the Tramp feel like a warm-up. It sort of ate up Lady and the Tramp. What does Lady and the Tramp have going for it over this? This had more dogs and more events.

BETH It was surprising to me that they chose to do another dog movie so soon after Lady and the Tramp.

ADAM Lady and the Tramp must have been a hit.

BETH I guess so.

BROOM I liked seeing all the Lady and the Tramp characters in their brief cameos, but it also made the point to me that we don’t really want to see them more than that. What do they have to offer us?

ADAM I liked Peg!

BROOM Well, you’ll be happy to know she made it out of the pound and is now in a store window.

ADAM In England.

BETH Fifty years later.

ADAM I thought that the puppies were not all that well characterized. It got irritating when Rolly kept saying that he was hungry.

BETH Yes.

BROOM “One of them will be fat!”

ADAM My bias in coming to this is that I don’t remember having seen the movie as a kid more than once, if that, but I read the book about a dozen times. I loved the book.

BROOM I’ve never read it. What is it like? Is the plot like this?

ADAM The plot is the same but there’s more incident in the book. I seem to remember an incident where they stop and are fed by a kindly old man who feeds them buttered toast… but maybe that’s in “Lassie Come-Home.” I don’t know.

BROOM It seems like the idea here, at least in the movie, is that animals take care of animals.

ADAM Right. Well, that’s why I’m not sure. I have to check. Anyway, a couple more of the puppies have personalities. The puppy that gets nursed back to life is like albino, and it’s sort of weaker than the others, and I think it’s called either “Cad” or “Pig.” [ed. – Cadpig].

BROOM They didn’t follow through with that character in the movie. Just the event of its being nursed back to life after being pseudo-stillborn was strange.

ADAM It just sort of was there and they didn’t do anything with it.

BROOM Not even that it didn’t connect to the plot, but just the life-and-death stakes of it, when he’s rubbing it to see if it will live or not. There’s a lot on the line there, while the rest of the movie was very frothy.

ADAM Well, I mean, the puppies are about to be brutally murdered! They’re within seconds of being brutally murdered. It doesn’t feel quite as frightening as that, though. Also in the book, Cruella has a husband, and they get arrested at the end. Here there’s no reason to think that Cruella’s not going to come back and continue to menace them. In fact, she must hate them now that she’s the target of this popular ballad. And they buy Hell Hall at the end of the book, and paint it white, and it becomes their country home.

BETH That’s cool. I wish that had been in the movie.

BROOM You did like that book by Dodie Smith.

ADAM There’s another book by Dodie Smith?

BETH It’s called “I Capture the Castle,” and it’s just delightful. It’s about a poor family who happens to live in a rotting castle.

ADAM There’s another part at the end, where all the puppies come in, and they call up all of the hotels in London – the Savoy and the Ritz and everyone – and have them send over steaks. Much of my idea of what England was like came from this and Paddington Bear. Not very accurate. But this did have a lot more real London-iness than Peter Pan.

BETH Yes.

BROOM Absolutely. They mentioned all the locales and actually made it look like those places.

BETH They did. It looked like Regent’s Park.

BROOM Hampstead Heath you couldn’t really see. But Primrose Hill I recognized. I was struck by how television was a recurring theme here. It was sort of showing how Disney had embraced television.

BETH But it was also criticizing it.

BROOM I don’t know if it was. It had a relationship with television that was complicated. There was a whole scene of the family sitting around watching TV…

ADAM Which was pretty wholesome.

BROOM Yes, like that’s where the family comes together, that’s their hearth, and it was sincere about that.

ADAM But then Lucky almost loses his life to television addiction.

BROOM Well, television is what saves them too, because dopes watch television, and that’s how they have time to escape. Also, surely whatever show “Thunderbolt” was supposed to be, it was clearly a Disney-produced show. Essentially they were watching “Davy Crockett.” And I’ll repeat what I said, for two years from now, or whenever it is that we get to Bolt: Was that Bolt?? I mean, it was a TV show with a superhero dog called Thunderbolt. We’ll find out!

ADAM Do you think that the Colonel and the Sergeant were a gentle satire of British military pig-headedness in the First World War?

BROOM I don’t know if it was a satire; I think they were just pulling stock characters. The addled British officer…

ADAM And the clever staff sergeant? We’ll see that again in Dr. Strangelove.

BROOM Yes, exactly. That was the Peter Sellers character, right?

ADAM I’ve never seen it.

BROOM You’ve never seen Dr. Strangelove?

ADAM No.

BROOM Well, yes, it was like that guy.

ADAM Beth, what was your favorite of the many lovely visuals?

BETH I’m not sure. What was yours? Let me think about it.

ADAM I think the way that they portrayed the city with line and patches of character that spilled over line was really lovely.

BETH I loved all of that. I guess my favorite was the city when they had the neon signs flashing. I kind of wish the “Kanine Krunchies” sign wasn’t in that.

BROOM It was part of the joke. I liked the “Kanine Krunchies” TV ad.

ADAM The dogs themselves, while perfectly adequately animated and pretty acute, were nothing magical. It was the backgrounds that I thought were really amazing. And Cruella herself.

BROOM I have to say that I thought that faces of the dogs and Roger and Anita – well, Anita wasn’t always dead-on, but Roger and Pongo and Perdita had expressive but convincing heads. The three dimensions of their heads were perfectly handled; you felt there was a solidity to them. Whereas Cruella de Vil, actually, I thought looked good as a still, but they didn’t really know how to manage her head in three dimensions quite as well. Her mouth would get a little crazy; she looked a little erratic, I thought.

ADAM But you kept getting distracted by the swishings of her coat.

BROOM Yes. Most of the animation on her was in her coat because her face wasn’t so expressive, I thought.

BETH When we first saw Anita, I thought, “they’ve done the perfect female face.” I thought she looked pretty, and smart, and looked like a real person. That was in that first scene. But then later, I thought, “Wait! She got less pretty somehow!”

ADAM The scene where he’s watching the animals and their matching humans go by was my favorite scene.

BETH Yeah, that’s great.

BROOM I thought the first half of the movie was a lot better than the second half.

BETH Once the people disappear…

ADAM It took a lot of effort to get them out and into Hell Hall. The chase really had no incident other than just stock chase stuff. Basically, when the other eighty-four dogs come on the scene, the animators seemed to get exhausted by that, and not a lot happened.

BROOM Yeah, I agree with that.

ADAM There wasn’t a lot of clever animation with the puppies. Either they all went in single file or they were all massed in clumps, but there wasn’t anything really clever with them.

BROOM Back to the design: I think this was a really impressive job of reinventing the Disney movie, the Disney animated look, for a new time.

ADAM Right. There’s no sense in which this is a gold-leafed book being opened.

BROOM They sort of took some steps in this direction with Sleeping Beauty, but it didn’t really mesh so well with the material.

BETH Here everything fit together.

BROOM They really hadn’t had a sense of matching their era since 1940, basically. Dumbo felt natural. The 50s had an in-between quality to them. Not that I didn’t really enjoy Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. But it felt now like obviously they had to reinvent their product, and they did, cleverly. And I think this is going to get them through…

ADAM What’s next?

BROOM The Sword in the Stone…

BETH Which I love.

BROOM The Jungle Book, and then The Aristocats…

ADAM I’ve never seen any of these.

BROOM … and then Robin Hood. And those are all in a pretty consistent style with each other.

ADAM The jaunty era.

BROOM Right! And I think Robin Hood is the last one that people really like in that style – well, I guess the Winnie the Pooh movie, too. And then you get into The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron, and those movies are sort of the descendants of the style that we saw inaugurated here, but it doesn’t feel right anymore. It’s the late 70s and the early 80s and somehow that’s not quite right. And they didn’t find a new feel that suited its time until Little Mermaid. I think finding the tone and style for One Hundred and One Dalmatians took real inspiration, and I’ll bet when audiences went to see it they immediately identified it as right. I bet if Don Draper took his kids to see this, he would have thought it was great.

BETH You said that they needed to reinvent this style, but don’t you think that they were being influenced by other animation that wasn’t Disney animation?

BROOM Like UPA? Mr. Magoo and all that? Well, I’m sure they were. All the things here that we identified as very 60s, it’s not like they all originated in One Hundred and One Dalmatians. But I’m saying that “the Disney animated feature” was a branded product…

BETH You’re saying it took balls to go in that direction?

BROOM Not just balls – it’s not obvious how to apply these things. You can know what the elements are and still not know how to make them work for your product. Like now, I would argue.

ADAM I think Disney’s lost its way in the face of Pixar. They don’t have the confidence of just doing two-dimensional animation any more.

BETH They never seem confident. That’s true.

BROOM I think there’s a challenge in simply matching the times. There’s all this stuff out there; you could do any number of things that looked “2000s-y” and everyone would know that it was from the 2000s, but whether it felt like it made sense and worked and was satisfying, and at the same time was “a Disney animated feature” – that takes inspiration.

ADAM Right. You could go, like, Emperor’s New Groove “young adult sarcastic,” or you could go “futuristic technology / CGI,” or…

BROOM I gotta say, I thought The Emperor’s New Groove was pretty successful as what it was.

ADAM And Hercules was pretty much the same thing.

BETH I haven’t seen them.

ADAM I think you’ll like them a lot.

BROOM I don’t know. Hercules I think might in retrospect might seem a little shrill in a 1997 way.

ADAM So 1990s Disney movies all seem sort of shrilly moralizing, to me.

BROOM Whereas this had no moral content whatsoever.

ADAM Other than just, like, “don’t murder puppies to turn them into coats,” which is pretty straightforward. It was pro-puppies and pro-family.

BROOM It was pro-domestic cuteness. A particular kind of being cute with each other at home.

ADAM And it was anti- a sort of exaggerated, like… you sort of imagine that they went to Vassar together, in America.

BROOM Yeah, exactly. We’re always talking about “what does this movie say about how to be” – when Roger is singing the Cruella de Vil song to tease Anita about Cruella coming over, and then when she’s there he’s upstairs playing the trumpet at her – that was a kind of teasing based on a particular sense of the family unit. “There’s just us at home, and when that lady comes over that I hate, I’m going to tell you in code that I wish it was just us and our little unit.” It definitely had a different sense of interpersonal relations, based on the insular world of their home. When they had to go out into the world, it’s inherently an adventure. Though there are people who are nice to them.

ADAM Cruella is like a crazy rich women’s-libber woman gone mad.

BROOM I don’t think women’s lib has anything to do with it.

ADAM She’s not political, but…

BROOM I think she’s like Grey Gardens. I think she’s like a socialite who lost it and has no idea what to do with herself other than get crazier.

ADAM She’s a woman addled by too much money and too little anchoring responsibility, and, indeed, lack of children, and that allows her to become untethered from moral notions, which… is gendered, to some extent.

BROOM Oh, it’s gendered, but I don’t think it has to do with feminism at all.

ADAM Well, I don’t know. She’s like a 20s-style feminist; she smokes and she is sexually confident, you know.

BROOM Yeah, but I don’t think “feminist” is the right word for that.

BETH And she’s the boss of two men.

ADAM Right: two stupid men. And in the book she has a weak husband. Roger later explains that Cruella was strong and evil, and her husband was weak and evil. This is his explanation of why it’s just that they should both go to prison.

BROOM You see her bed and it’s clear that she’s one of these people who wants to think of herself as leading a luxurious, glamorous life.

BETH She looks like Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number.

ADAM Yeah, with the pink curlers and her wonderful phone.

BETH That phone is great.

BROOM I don’t think it has to do with her being an empowered person at all.

ADAM But there’s certainly an obsession in these last few Disney movies with “unbridled womanness.” That’s what Maleficent is, and that’s what Cruella is too.

BROOM I think she’s very similar to Maleficent.

ADAM Right; it’s when women go wild, you know. It’s not about politics.

BROOM I don’t think it’s about domestication versus wildness; I think these women are people who became delusional when they lost the milieu to which they want to belong. She wants to be at some party where everyone is swooning “Oh, Cruella!” – she wants to be among sassy sophisticates, but for some reason she has absolutely no community and is just clutching at things like furs that represent that world to her.

ADAM But the movie made fun of all kinds of women untethered from domestic life. Basically that whole parade of women at the beginning with their dogs. I understand why they all have to be women, because they have to be potential mates…

BROOM That’s also why they’re all single.

ADAM They’re all single and they’re all pathetic in their own way!

BROOM The painter lady was a caricature, but I don’t think she was supposed to be pathetic.

BETH I think she was.

ADAM She’s painting a landscape in a park! That’s ridiculous!

BROOM What’s ridiculous about that?

ADAM There’s this concept of Sunday painter ladies, which dates back to, like, the 1910s, as being a ridiculous image.

BETH And they made her very unattractive.

BROOM Well, that’s why he didn’t want to go with her! She was the wrong breed of dog.

ADAM Admittedly, he’s ridiculous too, but in a much more sympathetic way.

BROOM His wife is more sympathetic than he is.

ADAM That’s because she’s so submissive. She’s not submissive, but…

BETH She’s agreeable.

ADAM The scene of them bantering, where Cruella’s coming over and he’s teasing her – I thought that was a really nice image of what it’s like to be part of a couple. Moreso than most Disney movies, where the parents are just non-entities.

BROOM But that’s exactly what I was saying; it’s something modern. I don’t think the idea of being annoyed at your bantering couplehood being interrupted by company is one that had been celebrated this way for too long – but maybe I’m wrong; maybe it’s in Trollope or something and I just haven’t read it. It seemed like a very contemporary ideal of what you get out of a relationship. Also, there’s just the blatant and obvious point being made by the movie, where it asks “what kind of person, i.e. what kind of dog, do we want to be?” You don’t want to be a little Scottie, and you don’t want to be big sheepdog, and you don’t want to be a poodle! Instead of saying that you want to be, say, Thunderbolt, this movie was endorsing a different attitude – not exactly “hipster,” but…

ADAM Definitely not hipster.

BROOM No, but it’s an idea that still appeals to people now, that you are going to be sleek and intelligent and attractive but you’re going to have spots, and that’s the ideal. I feel like the movie was saying, “let’s not want to be Golden Retriever people.” It was saying, “don’t we all really want to be Dalmatians?” An obscure, yet attractive breed. Let’s be interesting. You hear Pongo’s voice right at the top, urbanely saying, you know, “I used to live in this flat in London,” or when he says that thing about “we lived in a little place that was small but just right for couples starting out.” It felt like a cosmopolitan sort of fantasy – something close to what I think is still alive in Brooklyn as an ideal for how to live. And I don’t think that would have been saleable in a cartoon movie prior to 1961.

ADAM But in the end we will give that up, and move to East Hampton with our ninety-nine children.

BROOM I know, but it was a kind of comfortable pseudo-Bohemianism.

BETH It was. Because he was an artist trying to be commercial.

ADAM It’s like the happy version of Revolutionary Road.

BROOM But he was an artist only in his actual business; he was Bohemian in a way where you could still have all of the comforts of a really nice flat, and look good and not be weird in any way. He was an artist, a composer who nonetheless smoked a pipe and looked basically like a 50s dad.

ADAM Interestingly, in the book he’s not a songwriter; he did some kind of service for the government during the war and is living on a permanent pension, and they give him this flat as a reward for his wartime service.

BROOM That is interesting. When was the book written?

ADAM Don’t know.

BROOM The fact that the social stuff I’m talking about was added in the Disney rewrite just bears me out, because I’m saying it couldn’t have dated from much earlier.

BETH It also gives a reason for the Cruella de Vil song to exist. Which is very catchy.

BROOM I’m not sure it’s really a good enough reason, or a necessary one; they could just start singing it for no reason if they wanted. But it does add a lot of charm to the way the song fits into the movie.

BETH It makes it diegetic.

ADAM Good word.

BETH I wanted to say – maybe I’m harping on this too much, but going back to what I said about Anita looking so much different when we first were introduced to her. She’s wearing this – while not fancy like the poodle lady – very fancy, expensive outfit, and seems to have a career and a life. And then she just became the domesticated, kind of frumpy version of herself.

BROOM I don’t think she was frumpy.

BETH Not frumpy, but she suddenly wore an apron all the time.

BROOM Housewife-y.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM I thought she still looked good. But she looked more glamorous in the park, certainly.

ADAM [reading from Wikipedia]: “Mr. Dearly is a financial wizard who has been granted exemption from income tax for life, and has been granted a house in the outer circle of Regent’s Park as a favor for wiping out the government’s national debt.” Sorry, I got that wrong. The book is 1956.

BROOM Of no interest to American audiences at the time. Oh, so it was quite a recent book.

ADAM Also, I had forgotten about this, but Pongo’s wife is named Missis, and Perdita is another lost dalmatian whom they recruit as a wet-nurse for the puppies.

BROOM Yeah. It makes no sense for her to be called Perdita here. I remember thinking that “Perdita” must just be a regular name, and not until I read “The Winter’s Tale” did I put it together that it means “lost” and nobody would want that name.

ADAM [reads more from the book’s Wikipedia article…] So that would explain why “one hundred and one” is more than just a jaunty number. They’re a flat one hundred, and then there’s a surprise Dalmatian at the end.

BROOM It is a jaunty number, though. So how about those opening credits, showing all the different departments with a related visual. Is that a first? That’s something that happens all the time nowadays. I guess we’re just watching Disney cartoons, and all this stuff is also going on in every other movie, but at least in our little survey, it felt like a delightful first.

BETH Yeah, it was satisfying.

ADAM I liked her “C. D.” hubcaps.

BETH That car was pretty funny.

BROOM That reminds me; there were some unusual special effects. When the car ran into the snow, it was pretty clearly drawn over film of real snow, but so was the car itself, I think. The way it was manipulated in three dimensions, I think they must have had a model car that they filmed.

BETH Maybe.

BROOM There were several three-dimensional things that they moved so perfectly, and that’s the kind of thing that in the past has always been clunky. It’s very hard to do. I think they filmed more things, and a couple times with the people, Roger especially, it seemed very clearly to be based on film footage.

[At this point the program recording us froze, unbeknownst to us, and we didn’t realize it until after reading the New York Times review and returning. But I think we were pretty much done at this point. If the participants have anything they’d like to add or reconstruct, please do so in the comments. Thank you.]