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Cruella is stylish and chaotic, just like its future Disney villain
It’s not until its final moments that Cruella really starts to feel like a live-action Disney movie.What We Do In The Shadowsstar Kayvan Novak sits down at a piano in his shabby walk-up apartment, the camera pulling back to reveal a charmingly crooked mélange of London rooftops as he sings, “Cruella de Vil, Cruella de Vil, if she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will,” to the Dalmatian that arrived at his doorstep that morning. Up to this point, any real connection between Cruella and 101 Dalmatians—including a penchant for dog fur coats—has been absent. The Cruella of Craig Gillespie’s origin story is an underdog, an iconoclast, and a trendsetter, with some intense mommy issues and a sense of pride in being both “brilliant and bad.” What she is not is a puppy killer.
Squaring the glamour of the character with audiences’ well-documented aversion to animal cruelty (see: the long-running website Does The Dog Die?) is the project of this decadent Dickensian mid-’70s fashion show. The film’s five-person screenwriting team—which includes both the co-creator of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and an Oscar-winning writer ofThe Favourite—goes about rehabilitating Cruella de Vil’s image, first through the most ludicrous self-mythologizing since we found out how Han Solo got his last name. It’s arguably a spoiler, so we’ll avoid details, but trust that the Cruella of the prequel has a reason for disliking Dalmatians that’s sure to produce a hearty snort from all but the most credulous viewers. Mostly, however, Cruella ignores the bad in favor of the brilliant, a more agreeable form of revisionism.
The plot crosses Oliver Twist withThe Devil Wears Prada, beginning with the exact moment of Cruella’s birth and winding through a childhood marred by tragedy and redeemed by the kindness of two pickpockets, Jasper (Joel Fry) and Horace (Paul Walter Hauser). Eventually, the pair will be relegated to the role of bumbling henchmen. But they’re like brothers to the girl initially known as Estella (Emma Stone), landing her a job at an exclusive department store and encouraging her to follow her dream of becoming a fashion designer. Though she starts as a janitor, Estella soon snags the attention of the imperious Baroness (Emma Thompson), queen of the London fashion scene. The Baroness, it barely needs to be said, is both utterly fabulous and completely rotten—a cruel, spiteful boss who shamelessly takes credit for the creative work of others. That last character flaw is what leads Estella to remake herself as Cruella de Vil, an inscrutable fashion terrorist whose mission is to upstage the Baroness whenever possible.
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