In 102 Dalmatians, a new brood of puppies is born, one of which, Oddball, doesn't develop spots. The resulting feelings of inadequacy are such that the poor thing runs away from home and hides in a cave, gets bitten by a bat, and turns into a slavering mad dog. Cruella De Vil is in the midst of trying to capture the other puppies when Oddball shows up, bites her, and turns her into a slavering madwoman. The two run amok through the streets of London, until they are shot in the final scene by a tearful Tommy Kirk, who thus becomes a man.
Glenn Close (with Gérard Depardieu) is the De Vil in disguise
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Screenplay by Kristen Buckley and Brian Regan, based on the book by Dodie Smith
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Just kidding.
Actually, though this sequel is every bit as ersatz and perverse as the ghastly live-action 101 Dalmatians of 1996, it is, surprisingly, a lot more agreeable -- it's breezier and less oppressive. The earlier film was based on the popular 1961 animated feature by Disney, which in turn was adapted from a Dodie Smith book. The animated version was pleasant enough but is remembered less for its titular canines and more for its villain, the slinky, fur-craving socialite Cruella De Vil, who was desperate for a coat of many spots and who aroused the bloodlust of thousands of Boomer-era girls. So the remake was conceived as a showcase for Glenn Close's Cruella.
A logical-enough approach. The trouble wasn't Close, who in her go-for-broke diva mode was quite impressive. It was, rather, the skin-crawly, genteel tone of everything else in the film, from the gooey bourgeois hero and heroine (Jeff Daniels and Joely Richardson) to the creepy paternalism with which the surreal miracle -- seemingly one litter of a hundred plus -- was proudly clucked over, as if it was a tribute to the male dog's virility and by extension that of his owner.
Fortunately this '50s-style smarminess is far less apparent in 102 Dalmatians. The story gets rolling with a good, funny device: Cruella (Close again, of course) gets paroled after Pavlovian conditioning turns her, à la Alex in A Clockwork Orange, into a dog-loving philanthropist. She soon snaps out of it, of course, through an amusingly laborious twist, and is after her Dalmatian coat again, abetted this time by a nasty French furrier named Le Pelt (Gérard Depardieu). The costumes are by Anthony Powell, and he makes Close and Depardieu look as if they're ready for Mardi Gras on the Planet Mongo.
The romantic ingénues (Ioan Gruffudd and Alice Evans) are as insipid as Daniels and Richardson were in the first film, but at least the characters are useful working people this time -- she's Cruella's parole officer, and he runs the dog shelter at which the villainess is made to do community service. Tim McInnerny plays Cruella's cringing chauffeur, who struggles with his conscience, and Eric Idle provides the voice of a parrot who thinks he's a dog.
Make no mistake, 102 Dalmatians is suffused with the same anthropomorphism as its live-action predecessor. It's not the legitimate, allegorical sort of anthropomorphism that threads from Aesop and Aristophanes through to that Brechtian wonder Babe but rather the infantile, psychologically projected sort that's parodied in Christopher Guest's recent, brilliant Best in Showor in the recurring "Dog Show" on the current Saturday Night Live. The skewed, sexually frustrated couple played by Molly Shannon and Will Ferrell in that hilarious-yet-disturbing sketch -- they dress their terrified lap dogs in absurd costumes and make them the center of bizarre narratives -- would probably love 102 Dalmatians. They'd probably insist that their dogs loved it, too.
But if the film is a sappy view of canine nature, it's more skillfully sappy than its predecessor. Kevin Lima, one of Disney's top animation directors, here makes his live-action debut. While he can neither avoid a bit of icky schmaltz nor prevent Cruella's interminable slapstick comeuppance from growing tedious, his work overall is lively and visually imaginative. There's a particularly nice moment when Cruella, liberated from dreary beneficence, staggers through the streets of London seeing everything from streets and buses and buildings to her fellow pedestrians covered in spots. And then, of course, the dogs are awfully winning, especially Cruella's -- one of those hairless jobs who hates her guts and keeps a sharp eye out for opportunities to sabotage her. The canine protagonist this time really is a puppy called Oddball who's white all over and feels inadequate alongside his blotched siblings -- surely the first Disney hero who's had to overcome spotlessness.
