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Any rigid solid object is extremely challenging for 2D artists to animate because if one stray line isn’t kept perfectly in check, the object will seem to wobble and shift unnaturally.

Even as early as the mid 80’s Disney was using a technique where they would animate a 3D object and then apply a 2D filter to it. This practice could be applied to any solid object a character interacts with: from lanterns a character is holding, to a book (like in Atlantis), or in the most extreme cases Cybernetic parts (like in Treasure Planet).

But 101 Dalmatians was made WAY before the advent of this technology. So how did they do the Cruella car chase sequence at the end of the film?

The answer is so simple I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner:

They just BUILT the models and painted them white with black outlines 🤣

That was the trick. They’re not actually 2D animated, they’re stop motion. They were physical models painted white and filmed on a white background. The black outlines become the lineart lines and they just xeroxed the frame onto an animation cel and painted it like any other 2D animated frame.

That’s how they did it! Isn’t that amazing? It’s such a simple low tech solution but it looks so cool in the final product.

The whole things' worth a watch, but the xerox process shows up at 11:41 and they go into the cars at 22:18.

This was the first full length movie to use the xerox process, without which you would just be rotoscoping. Which is a cool technique, but would have required both much more work and probably not given you quite the rigidity that they get here. It also mentions how the early version of xerox was perfectly suited to 101 Dalmatians because it produced extremely stark black lines that could have been distracting in a different context but are perfectly suited for the black and white dogs. This early version also produced a rough scratchy sort of line that fit well with the modern, jazzy style of the movie. It also let them "cheat" in the crowd scenes with gaggles of dogs in frame, letting them easily copy and rescale and flip individual action cycles to make multiple dogs from a single animator's work.