The Movies That Inspired Cruella

Welcome to Movie DNA, a column that recognizes the direct and indirect cinematic roots of both new and classic movies. Learn some film history, become a more well-rounded viewer, and enjoy like-minded works of the past. This entry highlights the movies that inspired or otherwise contributed to the making of Disney’s Cruella.

Do you know the origins of the 2021 Disney movie Cruella? In 1956, from June through September, Women’s Day magazine published a serialized fiction story by Dodie Smith (with illustrations by William Pene Dubois) called “The Great Dog Robbery,” introducing the fur-obsessed, black-and-white-haired character Cruella de Vil. Later that same year, the UK company Heinemann released the same story, retitled The Hundred and One Dalmatians, in book form with new illustrations by twin sisters Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone. Viking Press handled the US publication the following year, at which time Walt Disney read the children’s novel (which in magazine form was called “a novel for dogs”) and immediately sought the rights for its adaptation.

The resulting movie, an animated feature, retitled again as One Hundred and One Dalmatians, opened in theaters in January 1961 with the now furrier-husband-less and Persian-cat-less Cruella de Vil making her cinematic debut as the studio’s reigning new queen of villainy (New York Times critic Howard Thompson said she “makes the Snow White witch seem like Pollyanna“; thirty years later, reviewing the film’s re-release, Roger Ebert wrote, “she’s in a league with the Wicked Stepmother and the other great Disney villainesses). Disney remade the movie in live-action form, retitled again as 101 Dalmatians, which was released in 1996 with Glenn Close portraying Cruella, now essentially the focal character. A sequel, 102 Dalmatians, followed in 2000.

Twenty-five years later, Disney spotlights Cruella de Vil again with the live-action Cruella, a prequel loosely connected to both the animated original and the 1996 version that reimagines the iconic baddie as an orphan turned thief turned fashion designer in 1970s London. With the character’s origin story now presented on screen and that movie’s most literal origin story laid out easily above, I still want to highlight and recommend more of the specifically cinematic heritage of Cruella beyond the obvious. From acknowledged influences to unofficial yet certain precursors with regards to character traits, scenes and set pieces, plot points, tropes, and more, these are the movies that inspired and/or generated the Disney Villain showcase.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Disney’s original animated feature has as much influence on Cruella as the new movie’s literal source material. As recognized in the New York Times quote above, the Evil Queen had long been, and somewhat remains to this day, the archetype for Disney Villains. But even if the animated Cruella de Vil was understandably compared to Snow White’s nemesis, who happened to be her stepmother, she wasn’t that similar to the earlier baddie. In Cruella, however, The Baroness (Emma Thompson) has traces of the Evil Queen in the way she orders the death of her own child due to her narcissistic jealousy. And she has a henchman who can’t carry through with killing the girl. In the original fairytale, the Evil Queen was actually Snow White’s biological mother.

Available to stream on Disney+. 

Lifeboat (1944)

Another quote from Howard Thompson’s New York Times review of One Hundred and One Dalmatians likens the animated Cruella de Vil to “a sadistic Auntie Mame, drawn by Charles Addams and with a Tallulah Bankhead bass.” As it turns out, Bankhead was one of the literal inspirations for the look of the character, according to Marc Davis, the animator responsible for her design — Bette Davis and Rosalind Russell were two others, though the official model was character actress Mary Wickes.

But Cruella’s voice may have been coincidentally like Bankhead’s due to actual Cruella voice actor Betty Lou Gerson being raised in Alabama, same as Bankhead. “We both had phony English accents on top of our Southern accents and a great deal of flair. So our voices came out that way,” Gerson told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. Still, Cruella pays homage to the myth of Bankhead being a vocal inspiration by having Emma Stone’s incarnation of the character see Bankhead laughing in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat on television and emulating it.

Available to rent.

All About Eve (1950)

As previously mentioned, the animated Cruella de Vil was also inspired by Rosalind Russell, apparently specifically in the 1958 adaptation of Auntie Mame, and Bette Davis, apparently specifically in All About Eve. I can’t really find more than a fan wiki source for those films being involved with the inspiration for Marc Davis’ characterization of the One Hundred and One Dalmatians villain, but All About Eve does have two connections worthy of mention. The first is that Tallulah Bankhead believed Davis’ character, Margo Channing, was based on her in the original short story (“The Wisdom of Eve”) and that Davis was purposefully imitating her as well in the portrayal. Neither is certain, but Bankhead did also play the role in a 1952 radio play.

The other connection is the presumed influence of All About Eve on the screenplay for Cruella, which creates a back story for the titular villain in which she’s the fan turned mentee of a famous fashion designer but then becomes the industry veteran’s rival and eventual successor. It’s a loose parallel to the story of All About Eve, in which a young actress is mentored by her idol, a Broadway star (Davis’ Margo Channing), before becoming her rival and then surpassing her in notoriety. There are plenty of other movies inspired by All About Eve worth checking out as a bridge to Cruella as well, such as Showgirls (1996), Love Crime (2010), and The Neon Demon (2016), which is set in the fashion world but focused on models rather than designers.

Available to rent.

Star Wars (1977) and Superman (1978)

These two highly influential blockbuster movies arrived toward the end of the 1970s (the presumed time period of Cruella), and they clearly continue to inform Hollywood storytelling today. With Star Wars, you have the orphan hero who believes the Big Bad killed his parent but (as is revealed later in its sequel, 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back), it turns out the Big Bad is in fact their true biological parent. In both Star Wars and Cruella, the orphan hero’s adoptive parent(s) is/are murdered through the command of the villain, too. Having young Estella/Cruella witness her “mother’s” death as intentionally caused by the Baroness also evokes the scene in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker sees his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi struck down by Darth Vader.

As for Superman, the prototypical superhero movie starring Christopher Reeve as the titular DC Comics character is felt in the duality of Cruella and the silly but allowed manner in which nobody, not even those very close to her, recognizes Cruella as being Estella in barely a veiled difference in appearance. The whole Superman/Clark Kent dynamic isn’t specific to this movie, of course, as it’s an element of the comic books and had already been an element of previous screen versions of the character. And the way that Cruella/Estella has a connection at a newspaper is as much akin to Spider-Man as it is to Superman given that Anita Darling is a photojournalist taking pics of the mysterious Cruella as well as a columnist. But given the timing, the movie fits.

Available to stream on Disney+ and HBO Max, respectively.

Jubilee (1978) and Death Is Their Destiny (1978)

There’s no telling when precisely Cruella is supposed to take place, but the setting is somewhat informed by the UK punk rock scene of the 1970s, as centered around London’s King’s Road. By 1978, the punk movement was already getting too big and trendy, and Derek Jarman’s provocative cult classic Jubilee arrived at the time to showcase and also critically exploit the scene, featuring real punk icons as well as characters allegedly based on others, including punk fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. Jubilee spawned a lifelong feud between Jarman and Westwood, who also definitely inspired the main character’s portrayal in Cruella. Westwood famously slammed the film through fashion, which is surely something Cruella would have done, too.

Westwood herself makes an appearance in the short documentary Death Is Their Destiny, which has become a significant historical record of the King’s Road punk scene at the time. It features Super 8 footage shot by Philip Munnoch, a.k.a. Captain Zip, who also made the more fashion-focused punk films Don’t Dream It – See It (1978) and We’re No Angels (1979) as he continued these punk rock home movies for a few years. I could go on and on about other relevant chronicles of the scene and the music, from 1977’s Punk in London and Julien Temple’s many early Sex Pistols docs to Don Letts’ The Punk Rock Movie (1978) and beyond. But you can find the most essential recommendations in a comprehensive BFI list published in 2016.

Jubilee is available to stream on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel. Death Is Their Destiny is available to stream on the BFI Player in the UK.

The Terminator (1984) and Hook (1991)

Two more major Hollywood studio movies that have nothing in common except for Cruella having nods to both. The Terminator is not an acknowledged homage, but despite the fact that these things sometimes happen in real life, Cruella driving a garbage truck into the front of a police station is just too reminiscent of the similar crash attack by the T-1000 in James Cameron’s sci-fi thriller to not be intentional. As for Hook, Steven Spielberg’s live-action fantasy film — set after the events of the Peter Pan story as depicted in a Disney animated film, so it’s like the opposite of what the prequel Cruella is doing — has been named in connection to Paul Walter Hauser‘s portrayal of Horace. Specifically, he says he modeled his accent on Bob Hoskins as Smee.

“I studied Bob Hoskins quite a bit in preparation for this role,” Hauser told The Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview. “I was given two options by the dialect coach Neil Swain; he said to me, ‘Do you want to go for a Bob Hoskins or a Ray Winstone?’… and I couldn’t shake Bob Hoskins as Smee from the movie Hook. I just felt like that was dead on and what I had to do. So I studied that, I did it and I’m happy really, really happy with how it turned out. I don’t think it’s perfect, but it’ll fool some people who don’t know my work very well.”

Available to stream on Amazon Prime and Netflix, respectively.

Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven is one of the few movies that Cruella director Craig Gillespie looked at while making his new movie. “I actually gravitated toward the Ocean’s Eleven look with the heist stuff,” he told Slashfilm, “and how to tell that story in a film and how much the audience needs to understand what the plot is or be ahead of or behind it…I didn’t do much in the way of research outside of the plot design of Ocean’s Eleven on this.” He even goes so far as to mention the movie again as the only thing he can think of to watch alongside Cruella. But you could also very well add the female-centric spinoff Ocean’s Eight (2018) since one of its main characters is a fashion designer and its heist is at a major fashion event: the Met Gala.

Available to stream on HBO Max.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and Alice in Wonderland (2010)

The most obvious and common movie referenced in comparison to Cruella, since our very first look at the Disney feature through its reviews and audience reactions is The Devil Wears Prada. Emma Thompson’s Baroness is the Miranda Priestly (played by Meryl Streep and based on Vogue editor Anna Wintour) to Cruella’s Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway, portraying the character based on the source material’s author, Lauren Weisberger) in a similar story about an extremely difficult and oppressive boss in the fashion world. Gillespie has even admitted the influence, telling Radio Times that Cruella is “sort of like the Joker, Devil Meet Prada [sic] and Ocean’s Eleven, sort of all tied up together!”

Okay, but maybe you need to also watch Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland afterward. Not because it’s another Disney live-action reimagining of the studio’s own animated classics (that began the current trend even) but because it features Hathaway in perhaps a more Cruella-like role than Andy’s meeker Estella type. While it’s not something I’d necessarily think of, Hathaway claimed of her take on the non-villain White Queen, “She is a punk-rock, vegan pacifist. So I listened to a lot of Blondie, I watched a lot of Greta Garbo movies…then a little bit of Norma Desmond got thrown in there, too.” Punk, Debbie Harry, and Old Hollywood film actresses? Sounds like the recipe for Emma Stone’s Cruella.

Available to stream on Amazon Prime and Disney+, respectively.

Maleficent (2014)

I could highlight a number of the Disney live-action remakes in relation to Cruella. Emma Thompson was previously in Beauty and the Beast (2017), and Cate Blanchett’s Lady Tremaine in Cinderella (2015) is similarly inspired by Old Hollywood divas. But while Disney had already done the villain-is-the-star thing with the live-action 101 Dalmatians, the Sleeping Beauty-based Maleficent was the precursor to Cruella‘s idea to do a Disney Villain origin story in which the audience is made to empathize with this misunderstood and wronged woman who had been exaggerated and misrepresented as pure evil in cartoon form. Cruella is not quite let off the hook as Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent is, even if teases of future canicide can be taken as dark humor.

Available to stream on SyFy.

I, Tonya (2017) and The Favourite (2018)

Typically, I like to avoid the inclusion of previous works by cast and crew of the movie in focus because past experiences of any kind are always going to directly influence present experiences, consciously or not. But these two movies are just too significant to ignore. I, Tonya is Craig Gillespie’s prior feature as a director, and it’s also an empathetic portrait of a woman with a villainous reputation. The difference is that its main character, figure skater Tonya Harding, is a real person, infamously remembered for her rivalry with Nancy Kerrigan and her association with the men who attacked Kerrigan in 1994. I, Tonya is also notable for giving Cruella co-star Paul Walter Hauser his breakout role, as Harding cohort (almost her own Horace) Shawn Eckardt.

The Favourite is the prior feature co-scripted by Tony McNamara, who is one of five writers who contributed to (and one of two credited with authoring) the Cruella screenplay. The 18th-century-set historical comedy also stars Emma Stone in an Oscar-nominated role as a servant to a powerful yet irrational royal pain. She also develops a rivalry with another woman in her place of work. The parallels between the two films aren’t striking, but there are some relatable character dynamics for sure. I’ve seen it said that Stone’s work in The Favourite proved she was apt for the part in Cruella, which is a shame since the former is one-hundred-and-one-times the better film. Cruella hair and makeup designer Nadia Stacey also worked on The Favorite.

Available to stream on Hulu and to rent, respectively.

Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist (2018) and McQueen (2018)

Two of the biggest inspirations for the look of Cruella, specifically Jenny Beavan‘s scene-stealing costume design, were fashion designers Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen. Coincidentally, both of them had great documentary features released in the summer of the same year. Lorna Tucker’s Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist offers something of a biographical primer on its subject, though Westwood herself is not a fan of the film as a representation of her life and work (especially the “activist” part of the title). Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s McQueen is a more fascinating and compelling and cinematic documentary about its late subject. And possibly even more relevant.

“From a character standpoint it was Alexander McQueen for me,” Gillespie told the Los Angeles Times. “His rebellion against the establishment and the shock value of his shows and the creative outrageousness of some of his work. I felt like that was very much in character with what Cruella was trying to do. It’s obviously not like anything that he was doing, but the aggressiveness of the pop-up [fashion shows] she does throughout the film is similar. And being able to create her own narrative with the press was something I took inspiration from with McQueen.”

Available to stream on Kanopy and Hulu, respectively.

Joker (2018) and Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020)

Everyone had jokes about how Cruella looked like Disney’s take on Joker, but as seen in a quote from a Radio Times interview above, Craig Gillespie acknowledges the likeness if not the influence. Why wouldn’t someone want to be compared to the DC Comics villain origin story anyway, given that it was nominated for eleven Oscars, including Best Picture, and won two, including Best Actor for star Joaquin Phoenix? Disney rarely seems to care about awards recognition, but I don’t think they’d mind one of their live-action redos having that sort of respect from the industry. Alas, Cruella can only really expect nominations for costumes and makeup/hair. How funny/sad would it be, though, if Stone won an Oscar for playing Cruella de Vil instead of Glenn Close?

You could think of other DC movies as precursors to Cruella, too, since she has a bit of the Bruce Wayne/Batman complex of revolving her life’s work around the death of her parent and taking on a double life as a mysterious figure — one who makes cool clothes and causes a bit of competitive mischief rather than one who makes cool clothes and gadgets and goes after criminals vigilante-style. Burton’s Batman (1989) also has the coincidence of the main villain being the one who killed the parent. But last year’s Birds of Prey makes the most sense since Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is an easy antihero model for Cruella, from her voiceover narration to her rebellious personality to her fashion sense. It’s like Cruella is the Joker and Harley’s love child.

Available to stream on HBO Max.