The character of Cruella De Vil, played by Glenn Close, is the key to understanding the analogy used in 101 Dalmatians. Photo credit: Clive Coote. © Disney Enterprises Inc.

I kind of like it when the big studios make bad films. They are often the best teaching aids anyone could come up with. And that is definitely the case with our exploration of how analogy affects story development.

Take, for example, Disney’s 1996 live-action remake of 101 Dalmatians. What we can learn by comparing it to the 1961 animated original?

Well, for one thing, that rules, which draw their logic from analogy, really do make a difference. One of the most notable differences between the rules of these two films is that in the animated version, the animals can talk and in the new version, they can’t.

This seems like a simple, even unimportant, decision but, in reality, it was a fork in the road that took the two films down very different paths, one leading to the creation of an engaging fantasy, the other to mediocrity. To understand this, let’s look at the story’s core analogy.

The analogy beneath this story isn’t very obvious — in fact, I had some difficulty discovering it. The key turned out to be the most exaggerated personality in the film, the wealthy and aggressive Cruella de Vil. I love this character and will come back to her in more detail a little later, but for the moment let’s just look at her most defining characteristics.

This is a character who, on the one hand is terribly insecure and on the other hand adores, no, is obsessed with furs. Furs make her feel important and glamorous and they let other people know how rich she is. In other words, the furs help her cover up her insecurity.

Here, then, is a character who is so uncomfortable in her own skin that she drapes herself in the skins of others to make herself feel better and will stop at nothing to get the skins she wants. So who do you pit such a character against? The first thought might be an animal activist but in an animated film, why not the very creature whose skin is threatened? Doesn’t that create better contrast and greatly up the stakes?

So the most interesting protagonist for this story is not a human but a dog who would be perfectly happy in his own skin if the humans would leave well enough alone. And this is, essentially, the choice that was made for the 1961 original — with the twist that it was not directly his, but his offspring’s skins that were at risk.

By giving dogs the power to speak, the animated version of 101 Dalmatians became a dog’s story. © Disney. All rights reserved.

But in order for it to really be the dog’s story, he has to be able to communicate on a sophisticated level. And that leads naturally to the decision that he can talk. From this comes the idea that the story can be told from his point of view.

This then opens up a whole hidden “what if” world for the storytellers: the hidden lives of animals. What if they could talk? What would they tell us? What are they thinking about when they are with us; what do they do when they are alone? How would they solve problems that humans create for them?

This approach allowed Pongo’s rescue mission to carry the heart of the story, leading to such delightful inventions as the Twilight Bark and also allowed Pongo’s wry take on humankind to set the tone for the story and provide a lot of the humor.

By contrast, in deciding that the animals couldn’t speak, the 1996 live-action version had to shift the focus of the story to the interaction between the humans. But that interaction was more about the dynamics between workers and bosses and the relative status of fashion designers and game designers than about animals at risk of losing their skins. This significantly weakened the relationship between plot and theme, so productive in the animated version, and never really replaced it with anything else. With the loss of that relationship went the fantasy world with all its action possibilities and interesting POV.