Josh Spiegel
In one of its very best episodes, The Simpsons has its doofy patriarch Homer voice a new character on “The Itchy and Scratchy Show.” And while he’s excited by the process, Homer is amazed to learn, as a fellow voice actor tells him, that “very few cartoons are broadcast live. It’s a terrible strain on the animators’ wrists.” The idea of animation being broadcast live is, of course, hilarious to ponder, but there is a weird kernel of truth in that joke. Some hand-drawn animation is more challenging, especially if the timeline to produce a piece of animation is awfully quick. Consider a film that turns 65 this month, the Disney animated classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians. This iconic feature not only introduced the world to the unsubtly named villainess Cruella De Vil, but it gave animators an unexpected gift in the form of the Xerographic process, enabling them to not have to fret over animating frame by frame of the unique spotted designs of…well, one hundred and one dalmatians.
The story of how the dogs Pongo and Perdita, like their respective owners Roger and Anita, fall in love is notable even to the untrained eye. As of the year 1961, One Hundred and One Dalmatians stood apart from past Disney favorites like Cinderella and Pinocchio, because it was the studio’s first animated feature set in the present. One Hundred and One Dalmatians was also a critical flashpoint for the Walt Disney Company, not just because the namesake of the studio was a few years away from his death, but because Uncle Walt had grown largely disinterested in the art of feature animation. It didn’t help that the studio’s previous entry, the now-rightly-beloved Sleeping Beauty, was as expensive to make as it was a flop on arrival at the box office. Because of these details, One Hundred and One Dalmatians was going to be a moderately low-budget affair, and if it failed to do well, it may have been the studio’s last hurrah.
Enter one of Walt’s longest-tenured colleagues, Ub Iwerks. Iwerks (his granddaughter Leslie is a documentary filmmaker whose latest title, Disneyland Handcrafted, premiered on Disney+ this week) is a Disney Legend in the purest sense, having co-created Mickey Mouse with Walt back in the late 1920s. Among his many other achievements, Iwerks also adapted the Xerographic process, in which animators’ drawings could be transferred to animation cels without including the traditional inking process. For a film that would require distinctive character designs for so many dogs, the process allowed for a quicker turnaround on a shorter budget. (In an old interview, none other than Chuck Jones postulated that by utilizing this process, the studio cut the film’s budget in half.) Walt Disney was not, it should be noted, a fan of Xerography, which sought to capture the rougher, scratchier quality of an animator’s initial drawing as opposed to the more polished approach achieved through inking and clean-up. As John Canemaker noted in his 1996 book Before the Animation Begins, Disney slammed the film’s art director Ken Anderson and said, “We’re never going to have one of those goddamned things [again]”.
Disney would not get his wish. One Hundred and One Dalmatians was a massive box-office success for the studio (even though the man himself was still less inteerested in pursuing animation despite the good doggos being a big win). The film was, at the time, the first animated title to make more than $10 million at the box office. (Can you imagine?) Over time, the film grossed hundreds of millions more thanks to re-releases. Audiences may not have been immediately able to tell how much easier Xerography made the animation process, but because of its utility, the studio would return to Xerography a number of times in the next two decades.
The inherent flaw of Xerography is captured in its name (at least for those of us old enough to know Xerox as a brand). While the process trimmed back production time, it also enabled animators to copy drawings in ways that are unavoidable if you know where to look. The cult favorite Robin Hood, for instance, features an extended musical sequence in which a jovial bear voiced by Phil Harris dances goofily with a squat chicken. Some of its shots look awfully similar to an extended musical sequence in The Jungle Book in which…a jovial bear voiced by Phil Harris dances goofily with a squat orangutan. (The sequence in Robin Hood also visually quotes a dance scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with Dopey.)
Every technological breakthrough has its place. For One Hundred and One Dalmatians, a movie set proudly in the present day, utilizing a cutting-edge way to save animators time and energy to preserve the strength of their wrists was the right move. And it paid off handsomely for Disney, seeing as this 1961 classic has served as the launching point for multiple live-action remakes, direct-to-video animated sequels, and related animated TV series. But while Xerography had its moment in the sun here, the Disney studio ended up overusing it, instead of leaving it to the world of a whole lot of spotted dogs.
“One Hundred and One Dalmatians” is streaming on Disney+.
