THE DeVil WEARS PUPPY

At first you think Cruella is the devil, but after time has worn away the shock – you come to realise you’ve seen her kind of eyes, watching you from underneath a rock...” So sings sweet spotty dog owner, Roger Radcliffe, about his wife’s wicked, fur-obsessed school friend in Disney’s 1961 animated feature, 101 Dalmatians. Introduced as a careless chain-smoking driver with an unhealthy interest in the Radcliffes’ imminent puppies and social niceties as chaotic as her two-tone hair, Cruella is set up from the get-go as an archetypal baddie. Her dog-napping and plans to skin numerous pups for coats has ensured she’s made umpteen villain lists over the years and inspired numerous iterations, but though we knew from Dodie Smith’s 1956 book that Cruella was expelled from school for drinking ink, she has always previously arrived on screen as a fully formed adult. So if at first, as Roger trills, we think she is the devil – what will we think once we’ve been educated about her past? Especially in an era of ‘reclaiming the narrative’, when a president dismisses a female opponent as a ‘nasty woman’ and at a time when gender politics and the liminality of ‘good/bad’ behaviour is headline news?

‘IT’S VERY HARD TO CALL SOMEONE A BAD ’UN COMPLETELY WHEN YOU SEE THEM FROM THE VERY BEGINNING’
EMMA STONE

“It’s hard to call someone a bad ’un completely when you see them from the very beginning,” says Emma Stone, her voice], you start to understand how this narrative around Cruella developed.”