nano☆

rich woman wants a coat that will make a statement. dalmatians have striking and unique coats. adult dog coats are too coarse, puppies have soft coats. therefore, puppies are best choice to make coat out of. tries to buy puppies from acquaintance. gets refused. time for petty revenge.

boom, easy. there's the entirety of cruella's character, and there's nothing wrong with that. unfortunately for all of us, Disney doesn't agree.

Cruella (the movie) is clearly trying to follow in the footsteps of Maleficent's success, but the inherent problem is that cruella de vil lacks the same malleability of character. maleficent had a lot of unknowns about her motivations, primarily "what happened to make her hold a grudge?", which is a GREAT start to a story.

cruella never had that question. cruella never needed to ask that question. she wanted a coat, and had no regard for animal welfare. there's no inquiry there, there's no mystery. "Oh what made her not care about animals?" unfortunate news flash, a lot of people don't actually care about animal welfare to begin with. also im pretty sure way back in the 60s when the original movie came out, they weren't even sure dogs could feel pain. so really, Roger and Anita were the weirdos here.

so with all of that rattling in my skull, the fact that they made cruella's backstory revolve around her mother being assassinated by dogs is just so unnecessary. also how do you have a protracted chase without anyone intervening? how do you miss a bunch of snarling, barking dogs dashing across the yard and just stand there? there's so much genuinely bad writing, and I am just confused as to why

there are much better candidates to make the next Maleficent. Ursula would be interesting, because there isn't actually a whole lot of backstory other than "She's a horrible witch with a grudge against the regent," which is literally the identical starting point as maleficent. plus, merfolk are in vogue again.

Captain Hook is an immediate smash hit, because his backstory is already there, and you can build up this huge tragedy of him being a lost boy who got too old, and escaped Peter Pan trying to kill him and spent his life rescuing other lost boys before they could also be murdered.

hell, I'd even rather watch a movie about Jafar, because I would love to watch a movie about a bright-eyed and eager advisor becoming increasingly jaded and angry at his boss' childish antics and seeming complete disregard for the wellbeing of his subjects and slowly having it consume him. which is a characterization I totally pulled out of my ass but once again, jafar totally lacks a backstory so I get to do as I please.