The Hundred and One Dalmatians
Dodie Smith
Fur is a legal business; stealing the neighbour’s dog is not.
Green criminologyIn the novel Cruella is a wealthy woman married to a furrier and obsessed with a Dalmatian-skin coat; she has also drowned every litter her own cat has had. She tries to buy the puppies, is turned down twice, and then hires professional thieves to steal them. Green criminology highlights exactly that boundary: her husband’s trade is legal, and what makes the plan a crime is not the harm to the animal but the fact that the dog has an owner. The novel shows where we draw, arbitrarily, the line of who counts as a victim.
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi y Wolfgang Reitherman · Betty Lou Gerson (voz)
First she offers money; if they will not sell, she steals.
Rational choice theoryDisney keeps the plan but turns it into an operation: Cruella offers money for the puppies, Roger refuses, and she hires the brothers Jasper and Horace to steal them; she has also bought 84 other Dalmatians from shops for her coats. Animated entirely by Marc Davis, she is a caricature of luxury and haste. Rational choice theory reads her well: she tries the legal route and, when it fails, reckons that theft will pay. Her mistake is that of many real offenders: she underestimates the odds of being found out.
101 Dalmatians
Stephen Herek · Glenn Close
Animal cruelty as a product line for a fashion house.
Green criminologyIn the live-action version, written by John Hughes, Cruella runs the fashion house House of DeVil, where Anita works as a designer; when the couple will not sell her the puppies, she fires Anita, has the puppies stolen and hires a man called Skinner to kill and skin them. The animals do not talk: they are real dogs. Green criminology sees harm tied to a luxury industry. And there is an off-screen epilogue: after the release, animal welfare groups protested at impulse purchases of Dalmatians that ended up abandoned in shelters.
Cruella
Craig Gillespie · Emma Stone
A childhood nickname that ends up becoming an identity.
Primary and Secondary DevianceThe film invents an origin story: Estella is a girl with two-tone hair whose adoptive mother scolds her with the nickname Cruella when she misbehaves. After that mother’s death she grows up as a thief in the punk London of 1977, discovers that the Baroness she works for is her birth mother and, in the end, takes on the name Cruella de Vil for good. It is Lemert’s secondary deviance: the person ends up organising their identity around the label they were given. The Dalmatian coat is no longer the point: the conflict is revenge.
The novel and the animated classic treat Cruella as a dog thief with luxury whims; the 1996 film puts her at the head of a fashion business; the 2021 film turns her into an antiheroine with a trauma and moves her away from fur coats. It is telling that, at a time when animal cruelty is taken more seriously than ever, the version that humanises Cruella is the one that distances her from the dogs.
The archive reads them with Green criminology · Read the case file →
Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki · en.wikipedia.org/wiki · en.wikipedia.org/wiki · es.wikipedia.org/wiki · en.wikipedia.org/wiki · fantasy-animation.org/current-posts. All the villains with versions.