Film
At the beginning of the 1960s, Disney animation turned over a new leaf on the content front and began to favour animal stories, light comedies and contemporary tales. For the new classic, they chose to adapt the novel Hundred and One Dalmatians by English author Dodie Smith, published in 1956 and to which Walt had already secured the rights. The plot tells of a bizarre kidnapping of Dalmatian puppies at the hands of the bored billionaire Cruella De Mon, one of the best Disney villains ever, eager to turn them into fur coats. The rescue of the puppies takes Pongo and Peggy's parents through the English countryside, taking a detective/adventurous turn that gives colour to the film along with the screen-printing technique, used here for the first time to cut down on inking costs.
Art
Silkscreen colouring represents a first step towards more modern inking techniques, but manages to create at the same time a watercolour or painting effect that, in landscape scenes, is reminiscent of Claude Monet's Impressionist style. The artist, famous for having painted over two hundred water lilies looking at the same pond (proving how beautiful the same thing can be, every day, when you look at it with love) also devoted his time to a series of snow paintings. This one for example, A Charrette on the Snowy Road in Honfleur (La Charrette, route sous la neige à Honfleur), is an oil on canvas painting that is believed to be his first completed snowy landscape. Similar to other paintings such as The Road in Front of Saint-Simeon's Farm in Winter, The Magpie, Snow at Argenteuil and The Red Head, the painting is believed to have been strongly influenced by the snow landscapes of Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), such as Ochanomizu and Clear Weather after Snow at Kaneyama (1797-1858).
The sequel
In 2003, Disney revived its old 1961 characters with the film The Charge of the 102 - Spot, a Hero in London. Here we can see a no longer decadent Cruella De Mon trying to come to terms with her own obsessions. Trying to replace her obsession with furs, she finds her fetish in the abstract art of Lars, a 'momentarily misunderstood' artist who tries to assert his own language in a context still tied to figurative representation (as can be seen from the paintings hanging around his in the art gallery). A language made up of dots, or as Cruella defines them, 'spots' that create movement as in Op Art. One example is the British artist Bridget Riley, who in the 1960s used these 'spots' to give movement to her works.
Lars' works are white on black, but if there is an artist who is known today for precisely the same reason, it is Anish Kapoor. His super black in particular represents a technological innovation, a black that absorbs 99.9 per cent of light, allowing the nature of objects to be altered so that they do not become completely real, leaving a sense of unreality that attracts and conquers. The artist thus traces a figure, a boundary, a veritable threshold from which to overlook the abyss of non-sense. Which is then (also) the meaning of art, which inhabits this thin borderline and aims to put us in contact with emptiness, without, however, making us fall into it and thus making us freer.
External Links
Watch One Hundred and One Dalmatians on Disney +
The painting:
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