Why Cruella was a good movie, and you can't tell me otherwise

This post is in defense of Cruella. Y'know, the Disney movie.

Let's have some quick backstory. My sister and I saw the Cruella trailers, and frankly, it looked fantastic, so we took a Friday afternoon to see it after we both got off work. We saw the full movie, and while it had a few flaws like all movies, we walked away thinking it was a great movie. So now that I'm seeing so many people roasting it on social media, my brain is in a state of ??????

So here I am, ready to defend it for the awesome movie it was.

For myself, I have to say that my only qualm with the movie is that it wasn't dark enough. Disney holds back their movies a little too much these days I think, which doesn't make any sense after they've already made movies like the Dark Cauldron or Maleficent. Watching Cruella, I got the feeling that the writers wanted to push it further and make it darker, but my suspicion is that Disney wouldn't let them, what with their 'audience standards' to keep up with.

But I think darkness is what the movie needed. The Cruella Deville of 101 Dalmations is a dark, twisted woman who thinks that it's okay to steal and kill dozens of beloved pets to make fashion. She looks like a demon when she's in a road rage and nearly commits murder in her pursuit of baby dogs. She's a dark character, and her descent into madness in the movie needed to be dark. That's why I have a slight problem with how the writers clearly pulled their punches and why I would have preferred a bittersweet or even sad ending over the triumphant one they wrote into the movie.

I even think that the movie would have ended quite nicely at the gritty, handheld scene where Cruella speaks to her dead mother at the fountain. Casting off her previous moral compass and fully committing to her havoc-driven wrongdoing side would have made a beautiful ending to a dark movie, in my opinion. I even think that if the movie had been handed off to a studio with fewer reservations, like Warner Bros or Fox, they might have been allowed to push the boundaries further, and instead of a good movie, we would have had a great one.

But leaning away from the moral compass of the movie, can we please talk about the fashion in this movie?? The Baroness's fashion in the first place is so classic and divine with all the satin and the gilt colors and the cool brown shadows used on the eyes. And then Cruella's fashion is even more spectacular. The garbage dress alone made me drool. Every new Cruella dress my sister and I saw made us freak out. The dresses, the mindblowing concepts, the makeup, every little thing was astronomically beautiful. I wanted to applaud or lose my mind or something. An overreaction was well deserved.

Not to mention the way the movie shows off the interior of the fashion industry and how the big fashion houses work. Granted, I know very little about this concept, so I can't be the one to say how accurate it is, but Cruella's apprenticeship to the Baroness's big fashion house was the sort of thing that not many movies portray, and I adored it.

Okay. Now down to the hot topic. The only thing anyone wants to talk about with the movie. Not the fashion or the character design or how exquisite the plot twist was. All anybody wants to talk about is the meme.

'How cringe! She hates dalmations because they killed her mother.'

Oh boy.

There's a lot to unpack here, okay? Important thing number one: Cruella doesn't hate dalmnations. She doesn't even hate dogs. She just hates those three dalmations, the ones the Baroness owns, because they did kill her mother. 

And granted, the parent death is a little tacky— Disney just seems to go into a blood frenzy whenever they see a parent enter the room— but the dalmations killing her mother is not Cruella's backstory. It's not her backstory any more than Scar's backstory is being a weirdly skinny lion. 

Cruella's backstory is a story of being overlooked and shoved into the gutter and told that the way she thinks and the things she creates are wrong and ugly when actually they're not. Her backstory is being the second generation of women to be abused and manipulated by a horrible, murdering woman who will do anything to be the best.

I can't blame Cruella for thinking those murder dogs would make a pretty coat.

That's all.