Opinion | Ani Bundel: The cattiness of Disney's 'Cruella' means it accidentally stumbles into being more delightful than it has any right to be. - NBCNewsTHINK
Ani Bundel, cultural critic
It is cliché to say that playing the villain is vastly more interesting than the hero — which goes double for Disney stories in which, by and large, the princesses are usually just trapped in some manner, rendered helpless or sleep all day until they are rescued. But of all the Disney women of the dark side — the Ursulas, the Maleficents and, of course, the Evil Stepmothers — none has quite captured the imagination like the fantastically named Cruella de Vil.
So she’s been rewarded with a Joker-like origin story in Disney’s latest live-action reboot, “Cruella,” in theaters this weekend and on Disney+ Premier Access. It is, unfortunately, hobbled by Disney’s dogged need to be child-friendly — even though she is, of course, the only Disney villain with a rap sheet that includes “the attempted murder of a triple-digit number of puppies” — but the film’s cattiness means it accidentally stumbles into being more delightful than it has any right to be.
On the one hand, trying to make a puppy-killer into the protagonist of your film was bound to be a losing battle in the end for Disney, the leading purveyor of uplifting Happily Ever Afters for the under-12 set. But the good news here is that the film’s writers were fully aware of the ludicrousness of their assignment and leaned in to it as best they could.