101 Dalmatians: Diamond Edition arrives in stores & digital download today, February 10th, and to celebrate, we have a fantastic collection of behind-the-scenes material for you! Relive the magic of the cute pups!
Pongo, Perdita and their super-adorable puppies are in for thrills, hilarious spills and an epic action-packed adventure when they face off with Cruella De Vil, Disney’s most fabulously outrageous villainess. When Cruella dognaps all of the Dalmatian puppies in London, brave animal heroes launch a daring plan to save all puppies from Cruella’s clutches! Unleash all the excitement and suspense of Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, a beloved classic you’ll want to share with your family again and again!
There are so many great bonus features in the newly released Diamond Edition.
- All New Short – The Further Adventures of Thunderbolt
- Walt Disney Presents “The Best Doggoned Dog in the World” (1961 Version)
- Lucky Dogs
- DisneyView
- Dalmatians 101: Hosted by Cameron Boyce (Disney Channel’s “The Descendants”)
- Plus a Selection of Classic Bonus Features
At the link below, you will find a variety of fun facts including how many spots are in the film, how Xerox was introduced to the animation process, the extraordinary color styling of the film and a How-To-Draw Cruella De Vil by Master Animator Andreas Deja!
Here are some more fun movie facts:
The 17th animated feature film from the Walt Disney Studios, many historians believe this to be one of Disney’s finest animated films as his animators had perfected their craft and the studio’s Animation Department was at the height of their success. 101 Dalmatians’ was the first of Disney’s animated features to be set in a contemporary context, This imaginatively animated telling is a wonderful mixture of fantasy, comedy, sentiment, adventure, suspense and an extraordinary number of spots!
To ease the daunting task of continuity for millions of spots across an entire feature length film it was the technical genius of longtime Disney collaborator, Ub Iwerks who adapted the Xerox process to create ‘Xerography.’ This technique not only made it possible to consider making a movie with 101 spotty dogs, but it also reduced the number of steps in transferring the animator’s drawings to the finished film. At the time of it’s release in 1961, 101 Dalmatians received unanimous critical adoration and box office success. The subsequent reissues have proved continually successful with each new generation of puppy-lovers! The legendary Marc Davis was the master artist behind the lines of Cruella DeVil. One of Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men of Animation, Davis captured the comic creepiness of La DeVil from her biologically impossible frame to her flamboyant fashion sense. Madame DeVil was the only character in the history of Disney Animation to have been exclusively drawn by one artist throughout the entire production.
Three people were key in shaping Cruella into such an iconic villainess Bill Peet -Disney’s legendary story man, Betty Lou Gerson the source of Cruella’s booming voice, and Marc Davis. Character actress Mary Wickes provided filmed live-action movements as a reference. “I had several partial models in mind when I drew Cruella,” declared Davis, “including Tallulah (Bankhead) and one woman I knew who was just a monster. She was tall and thin and talked constantly you never knew what she was saying, but you couldn’t get a word in edgewise. What I really wanted to do was make the character move like someone you wouldn’t like.”