10 Disney Villains Who Went Beyond Evil
8. Cruella De Vil (101 Dalmatians)
Nobody likes it when a dog or some sort of cute animal dies in a movie. So imagine if it happened 99 times in which dalmatian puppies were skinned alive just to make a fur coat? This movie would have been much darker, that’s for certain.
Cruella De Vil is one of the very few Disney villains set in their own contemporaries. She has no magical powers, no sorcery, no transformation skills, no knowledge of combat – her greatest weapon is her own vanity. Right from her chic car to her delightful cackle, Cruella De Vil is a confident, stylish woman.
Within her first five minutes of screen time, she freely lets herself into Roger and Anita’s house and slams the door on nanny in the process, not shy of freely roaming their household and filling it with smoke. Roger avoids Cruella whilst the dogs either growl or hide from her. This woman is trouble from the get go.
But her glamourous persona slowly melts away into full on recklessness as the story progresses. Nothing is going to stop her from getting her puppy-skin fur coat. Cruella’s need to remain fashionable overtakes any sanity she has left. The final climax of the film sees her go on a destructive drive, ramming the back of a van which holds the puppies. In the end, her car collides with the van of her minions, Jasper and Horace, and she lets the pets escape. Thankfully, the skinning of the puppies never happens but Cruella’s intent was always there.
And overall, everything about this woman is just synonymous with maliciousness. 101 Dalmatians was Disney’s first use of Xerox animation which allowed Cruella to have distinctively pointed features that made her appear more witchy.
Her name practically spells out Cruel Devil which implies she was either such a horrible baby that her parents had to give her that title or that she’s so self-aware of her wickedness that she took enough pride in it to change her name. Heck, Roger openly made a song about Cruella and how terrible she is and it became a successful chart-topper – clearly, she’s got a bad reputation!