Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of One Hundred and One Dalmatians
1961 · Clyde Geronimi · One Hundred and One Dalmatians on Sightlines
Begin with the field. Ninety-nine dogs are filing across frozen white country in a line, small spotted bodies against hard blue-white snow, and somewhere behind them a single enormous car is quartering the lanes. If you saw this film as a child, you probably remember this before you remember the plot. A lot of small, identical things are moving together, and one large thing is hunting them.
That picture holds most of what this film is and most of what it did. It is also a good place to bring in Gilles Deleuze, who wrote two books on cinema and sorted films by how their images link perception to action. One Hundred and One Dalmatians belongs entirely to what he called the movement-image: a cinema where characters see a situation and act to change it, and where the cutting serves that chain. Nothing here is ambiguous. The puppies are stolen, and the parents go after them. That isn't a limit on the reading. Watching a film this clear lets you see the gears of classical cinema working cleanly, and seeing them makes them interesting.
Start with how the film looks at things. The camera stays at dog height. In the London scenes people come into frame as legs, torsos and heads looming from above, and Cruella standing full height in a doorway is genuinely frightening. Deleuze's term for an image that puts the angle of seeing in front of us is the perception-image. Here it is a working idea, and it came down from Lady and the Tramp, which first cropped humans at the knee and turned table legs into architecture. The low eye gives the film its jokes and its fear. It also tells you whose story this is.
Then comes the big shape Deleuze calls the large form of the action-image. A situation that covers everything presses on the characters until a decisive act changes it. The covering situation here is England itself, soot-gray London and then a countryside the chase gives real geographic weight. Deleuze's diagram is situation, then action, then a changed situation. The film's acts follow it exactly: the courtship and household, the theft, the long retrieval. Inside that shape sits the oldest duel there is, which Deleuze calls the binomial, force against force. The staging shows it as scale. Fifteen puppies pressed around a television set. One car bearing down a lane. A mass of small identical bodies against a single large threatening one, over and over.
That mass deserves a closer look. Deleuze borrowed the word dividual for a crowd shown as one feeling body instead of many separate people. The ninety-nine dogs crossing the snow work this way. You don't follow any one of them. You feel the column. That was only possible because of a machine. Ub Iwerks adapted a Xerox camera to burn the animators' pencil drawings straight onto cels, and the spot patterns could be duplicated, shifted and recombined instead of redrawn on every dog. The story and the technology plainly grew up together. A film about multiplying a spotted animal ninety-nine times is only sane if you have a way to duplicate.
The film's best editing invention is the Twilight Bark. A bark is passed from London rooftops to a Great Dane to a countryside collie to a farm, and the cutting doesn't just show a message traveling. It draws one. Deleuze would call this a vector, a zig-zag line that joins spaces with no connection between them, and here it is a whole communications network made of cuts. Lady and the Tramp had already imagined the city's dogs as a social web. This film turns the web into a relay you can watch. In the last act the cross-cutting picks up speed: puppies at Hell Hall, Pongo and Perdita on the road, Cruella's car, Sergeant Tibbs stalling for time. That is Deleuze's American organic montage, parallel lines converging toward a last-minute rescue, the grammar Griffith built. Between those taut lines the film keeps opening onto the deep, cold, receding fields of the winter sequences, the swing between a wide milieu and a tight line of action that Deleuze calls respiration-space.
So far this is classical storytelling done well. What makes the film matter for the art is the line itself.
In the first chapter of his book on the movement-image, Deleuze argues that animation belongs fully to cinema because the drawing no longer shows a pose. It shows a figure always in the middle of moving, any instant whatever, never the frozen climax. For thirty years Disney had hidden that moving pencil under an inker's smooth, uniform trace. Xerography took the inking stage away, and suddenly the animator's own drawing reached the screen, overshoots, doubled strokes, nervousness and all. For draftsmen like Milt Kahl and Marc Davis it was a promotion. For the women of the ink department it was the end of their craft, and a great many jobs went with it. Both facts belong in the story.
The Xerox printed only a black line, so everything got a hard black outline, flesh and fire and sky alike. Ken Anderson made the limit into a style. He carried the same sketchy line into the backgrounds and laid color over it that deliberately misses the outlines, so that scenery and characters live in one graphic world. The permission came from outside Burbank: from UPA's Gerald McBoing-Boing, which threw out atmospheric depth for flat planes, and Rooty Toot Toot, which treated the drawn line as design instead of a boundary to hide. It also came from inside, through Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, the precedent Anderson cited when he defended the look. Goliath II had already tested the camera, with Bill Peet writing and Reitherman directing. Sleeping Beauty is an ancestor by negation. Its tapestry surfaces broke the budget and made the change unavoidable. It is also an ancestor by direct descent, since Davis carried Maleficent's tall, cape-driven silhouette straight into Cruella.
Studio lore has Walt Disney hating the result. He never brought the old line back. The grammar set here ran Disney animation for about a quarter of a century.
One more thing to watch for. Walt Peregoy's palette is chalky and restrained: dishwater browns, sour greens at the De Vil house. Against it, Cruella's red and white is a wound in the frame. That is Deleuze's affective colour, a color that soaks up the feeling of the scene. You don't need anyone to tell you she's dangerous. The color has already said so.
So when you watch it again, stop following the dogs for a minute and follow the line. It trembles. It overshoots. That trembling is the hand of the person who drew it, left on screen for the first time, and it is what the film is actually made of.
Concepts in play
- action-image-large-form — A three-act structure Peet tightened from a picaresque novel: an encompassing situation (the kidnapping across London and England) presses until the rescue transforms it.
- montage-organic-american — Second- and third-act cross-cutting between puppies at Hell Hall, Pongo and Perdita on the road, Cruella's car and Sergeant Tibbs stalling for time, converging on rescue.
- line of the universe — The Twilight Bark: a relay from London rooftops to a Great Dane to a countryside collie to a farm, with montage drawing a network between disconnected spaces.
- binomial — Scale contrast staging: fifteen puppies around a television, ninety-nine dogs on a frozen field, one enormous car bearing down a lane; dogs against Cruella.
- dividual — Ninety-nine near-identical puppies filing across the snow as one collective body, made possible by xerographic duplication of spot patterns.
- perception-image — The dog-height camera: humans entering frame as legs, torsos and looming heads; Cruella at full height in a doorway as a menacing compositional object.
- respiration-space — Deep, cold, receding multiplane fields in the winter countryside alternating with the taut cross-cut line of the chase.
- affective colour — Walt Peregoy's muted palette (soot-grays, dishwater browns, sour greens) against which Cruella's red-and-white reads as 'a wound in the frame.'
- any-instant-whatever — Xerography put the animator's raw pencil line on screen, with weight variations, overshoots and doubled strokes, showing the figure caught mid-movement instead of a clean pose.