Guest post by Kelly Richardson, Director and Curator, Elizabeth Sage Historic Costume Collection. In 1996, Disney released a live-action version of the beloved 1961 animated film 101 Dalmatians starring Glenn Close as the fur-crazed Cruella de Vil. The reframing of Cruella de Vil as a fashion designer — as opposed to a mere fur-loving clotheshorse —… Read more »
Tag: children’s film
The Importance of Perspective in One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and Cruella (2021)
If I had to describe Cruella (2021) in one word, it would be unexpected. Everything about it — from its sympathetic portrayal of one of Disney’s most iconic villains to its 1970s London setting — feels like a curveball. But what most surprised me about this film wasn’t its third act plot twist or its… Read more »
WALL-E: Robots, Romance, and Resilience
Guest post by Abby Carmichael. When I first saw WALL-E in summer 2008, I was at a drive-in theater in Door County, Wisconsin, lying under the stars. Onscreen, I saw fantastical sequences of robot romance unfold in an animated outer space, but just behind WALL-E and EVE’s (or, as our hero says, Eve-ah) tale, I… Read more »
Cinema and Childhood
“It’s one thing to learn to watch movies ‘professionally,’ but it is another to live with those movies that watched us grow up and saw us — prematurely hostage to our coming biographies — already entangled in the snare of our history.” — Serge Daney (1992) Literary depictions of the experience of childhood tend to… Read more »
Disney, Dine, and Collodi: The Many Faces of Pinocchio
Guest post by Leah Marie Chizek. Ahead of the Eskenazi Museum of Art’s recent reopening, I had the opportunity to walk through the galleries, where I ran across Jim Dine’s 44-print Pinocchio suite just after it had been installed. Dine first saw Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) when he was six years old, and his prints… Read more »
The Realistic Surrealism of Harold Lloyd
There are many pleasures to be found in silent comedy. There’s the energy of the Keystone Kops, the mix of slapstick and emotion of Charlie Chaplin, and the stone-faced absurdity of Buster Keaton. But one of the most underrated pleasures in silent comedy can be found in the films of an underappreciated actor: the escalation… Read more »