It’s been 58 years and I still don’t know if 101 Dalmatians had a good ending or not

One Hundred and One Dalmatians. A classic film from Disney’s Silver Age. Based on Dodie Smith’s 1956 novel The One Hundred and One Dalmatians, the film adaptation was written by Bill Peet and released in 1961.

Image of the dalmatians watching the finale of Game of Thrones.

For those of you who may not remember, it follows the dalmatian Pongo, his human pet Roger, his wife Perdita, and her human pet Anita. Anita’s schoolfriend Cruella de Vil becomes so obsessed with the idea of a dalmatian fur coat, she has her henchmen Horace and Jasper kidnap Pongo and Perdita’s puppies, and otherwise acquire 84 more dalmatian puppies. Pongo and Perdita use the Twilight bark to communicate with other dogs in London, who then pass the message on to the countryside until the puppies are found. The third act of the movie is dedicated to a nonstop chase as Pongo and Perdita attempt to get all 99 puppies to safety. Finally, they make it back to Roger and Anita, who decide to open a “dalmatian plantation” to accommodate all their new dog friends.

And they all live happily ever after.

Except, hold on a second, Cruella de Vil is still free, y’all.

The dogs manage to escape Cruella during a car chase, when Cruella crashes her car into Horace and Jasper’s. The three are last seen stranded on the side of the road, Cruella yelling at her two henchmen.

Shoutout to Jasper who tells Cruella “ah, shut up.”

And that’s it. She’s free. She kidnapped her friend’s dogs and got away with it!

Okay, I know about 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure, at the end of which Cruella is locked up in a mental institution. But first of all, having a villain be declared “insane” and locked up in an institution is a cliche at best, fear-mongering propaganda against mentally ill people at worst. And second of all, that movie wasn’t released until 2003, it was direct-to-video, and like most Disney sequels, it wasn’t produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios so it doesn’t count. We’re focusing on the OG Dalmatians.

Villains must face retribution for their actions. Unless your story is a gritty dark look at the reality of happy ever afters, or something equally pretentious, your villain shouldn’t get away with it. That’s just how stories work. That’s especially how Disney movies work.

At least, that’s how they work now.

Let’s look at some early Disney films and the fate of their villains.

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937): The Evil Queen is chased by the seven dwarfs to a cliff. There, lightning strikes, and she falls to her death.
2. Pinocchio (1940): Stromboli, Honest John, and Gideon all get away.
3. Cinderella (1950): Lady Tremaine and the stepsisters keep living their lives.
4. Peter Pan (1953): Captain Hook and the pirates get away (although the crocodile is chasing them).
5. Lady and the Tramp (1955): Aunt Sarah is fine.
6. Sleeping Beauty (1959): Prince Philip kills Maleficent.

Maleficent’s dragon body then turns to stone and Wart retrieves the sword from it in Disney’s 1963 film, The Sword in the Stone.

The ten other Disney animated films released between Snow White and Dalmatians don’t have clear villains driving the plot, and those films’ minor villains all get away in the end.

So now let’s look at the films after One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

1. The Sword in the Stone (1963): Madam Mim (barely the film’s villain with only a few minutes screentime) gets sick in a duel with Merlin. They leave her to get better.
2. The Jungle Book (1967): Mowgli ties a flaming branch to Shere Khan, who, terrified of fire, runs off.
3. The Aristocats (1970): Edgar is literally shipped to Timbuktu.
4. Robin Hood (1973): Prince John and co. are all arrested.
5. The Rescuers (1977): Medusa is left in the middle of a swamp with her two alligators snapping at her.
6. The Black Cauldron (1985): The Horned King is consumed with fire.
7. The Great Mouse Detective (1986): Ratigan falls to his death.
8. Oliver & Company (1988): Sykes’ evil dogs die by electrocution on the third rail of the subway tracks. Sykes is killed when his car drives into the path of a train.
9. The Little Mermaid (1989): Ursula is killed by Prince Eric.
10. The Rescuers Down Under (1990): McLeach falls to his death.
11. Beauty and the Beast (1991): Gaston falls to his death.
12. Aladdin (1992): Jafar and Iago are trapped in the lamp.
13. The Lion King (1994): Scar falls to his death.
14. Pocahontas (1995): Ratcliffe is arrested.
15. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996): Frollo falls to his death.
16. Hercules (1997): Hades falls into the River Styx.
17. Mulan (1998): Shan Yu is killed in a firework explosion.
18. Tarzan (1999): Clayton falls to his (hanging) death.
19. The Emperor’s New Groove (2000): Yzma is turned into a kitten.

I could go on.

It’s no surprise so many Disney villains fall to their death. It’s an easy way for a family-friendly movie to show a death without getting too graphic.

Although I would argue Ursula’s death is pretty graphic…

But there’s a clear difference between pre-Dalmatians films and post-Dalmatians films. The two villains who die in the B.D. (before Dalmatians) years are classic evil witches. Evil witches die, that’s no shock to an audience. But when making the other films between 1937 and 1961, Disney decided that either the films didn’t need villains or that the villains didn’t need to die. Maybe this was because they thought that death was too dramatic for family movies, or maybe it was because they wanted to show more realistic endings. After all, abusive stepmothers get away sometimes.

This is the ending that One Hundred and One Dalmatians takes. Sometimes people are mean to dogs and face no retribution for it. Like Lady and the Tramp, the animals of Dalmatians go through an ordeal that their human counterparts have almost no involvement with. Anita and Roger don’t actually get definitive proof that Cruella was the one who kidnapped their dogs, and the dogs aren’t seen doing anything to let them know what she did, therefore Cruella does not face legal action.

But that’s no excuse. Disney villains rarely face legal punishment. Prince John, Ratcliffe, and Frozen’s Hans are all arrested, but that’s about it. In the A.D. (anno Dalmatians, aka “in the year of the Dalmatians”) years, Disney doesn’t hesitate to let their anthropomorphic animal protagonists indirectly kill their human antagonists. See The Rescuers Down Under, Oliver & Company, and even The Aristocats (there’s no way Edgar survived the trip in that trunk).

Cruella de Vil is also an interesting villain to survive because she so neatly fits into the witch stereotype that we saw before her. She may not exist in a fantasy world outside of time, but she is an irredeemably evil, ugly woman bent on ruining the life of a pretty younger woman, and isn’t afraid to hurt some animals on the way.

Unfortunately, we don’t have time to get into sexist stereotypes right now.

Cruella is not out of place next to the Evil Queen, Maleficent, and Ursula. But the other three women are killed about as dramatically as possible. And almost every villain following Cruella dies, or is implied to die soon after we see them, or is arrested, or is otherwise trapped for eternity.

Or has their skin ripped off by tendrils of magic fire, reducing them to nothing but bone before they are destroyed completely…did I say Ursula’s death was graphic? I meant The Horned King’s.

What happened after One Hundred and One Dalmatians that changed this pattern of Disney villain retribution?

Maybe we could look at history, and track down some switch in the public consciousness. We could say more villains were slain post-WWII, although Dalmatians was released 16 years after the war ended and we don’t see the uptick of villain deaths until the years after that. Maybe the Cold War and Vietnam War had some sort of influence. Maybe people became more desperate to track the source of suffering to one single person, because that person could be more easily eradicated. Without that single person in real life, they turned to satisfying villain deaths in fiction.

But I postulate we take our search more local to Walt Disney Animation Studios. After Dalmatians in 1961 and Sword in the Stone in 1963, what happened before The Jungle Book in 1967?

Walt Disney died.

I can’t pretend to know the exact differences between the values of Walt and The Walt Disney Company. I can’t sit here and say that Walt was a man who believed in showing us the realistic ways that “villains” permeate our everyday lives, while The Walt Disney Company would rather just present us with a character of pure evil that the good guys can defeat at the end. I can’t say that all the films spearheaded by Walt show a morally gray world, while those released later are much more black-and-white. I don’t necessarily think any of that is true.

But I do wonder how Walt’s death affected the people he worked with and the way that they told stories.

Walt died of lung cancer, a real-life villain that can be fought but never quite killed. Its rise to power is often facilitated by the folly of the hero who fights against it, but not usually with malicious intent. By the time the dangerous side effects of smoking were more widely known, it was too late for Walt.

When people die from something out of our control, it’s often our impulse to find some logic in the situation. Maybe the people of Walt Disney Animation Studios found logic and solace in creating clearcut villains who were easy to kill. In the decades following Walt’s death, every film had someone good and someone bad. You knew who was who from the beginning, and you knew that the good guy would win and the bad guy would, most likely, die.

Interestingly, Disney is beginning to change that.

Every Walt Disney Animation Studios film since 2011's Winnie the Pooh has had some sort of surprise villain. They’re getting more and more difficult to spot, but they’re usually still there, waiting to be defeated. But with these hidden villains, we get fewer witches and pirates, and more of those everyday people who just do bad things.

Because despite her appearance, Cruella de Vil is not a witch. She’s cancer, always moving in and out of your life, and the best you can do is try to fight her and hope she goes away forever. Ironically, Cruella de Vil, more than maybe any other Disney character, is known for always smoking.

This also despite her magic powers in Once Upon A Time.

More than that, Cruella’s definitely that bitch you went to school with that you just know would kill a dog and you secretly fantasize about her crashing her nice car — but she doesn’t die! Oh no, she stands on the side of the road in her fancy clothes and she tries to hitchhike home. That’ll show her.

Maybe Walt Disney, Dodie Smith, and Bill Peet understood something that we still struggle with today: it’s more important for the good guys to be happy than for the bad guys to be dead.

The reason that One Hundred and One Dalmatians has a good, satisfying ending is not because of what happens to the villain. This story is not about Cruella de Vil.

It’s a good ending because for a moment we get to live in Anita’s shoes, and revel in the fact that our cute musician husband is making bank off a song about how mean that girl you went to school with was, and also we’ve just decided to move to a farm with 101 dogs.

And that bitch from school? We have no idea where she is, and we don’t need to. Because we’re living our best life while we can, and that’s all that matters.