Cruella

Disney's Cruella is what happens when a studio takes one of its most iconic villains and runs her through the Joker-meets-The-Devil-Wears-Prada sympathy machine. The result is a slickly produced, often entertaining film that works better as a fashion spectacle than as a character study, and whose ideological commitments are more interesting than its plot.

The premise is simple: Estella Miller, a creative, rebellious child with distinctive black-and-white hair, loses her adoptive mother Catherine when the Baroness von Hellman's Dalmatians push Catherine off a cliff. Orphaned and wracked with guilt (she blames herself for provoking the dogs), Estella flees to London and grows up as a small-time thief alongside her friends Jasper and Horace. When she finally gets a job in fashion under the Baroness, she discovers that the Baroness is the woman responsible for her mother's death and transforms herself into Cruella, a punk-rock fashion guerrilla who wages an escalating war against the establishment.

Emma Stone is the primary reason to watch this film. She commits fully to the dual role, toggling between Estella's vulnerability and Cruella's manic showmanship with genuine skill. Emma Thompson matches her blow for blow as the Baroness, delivering a performance of ice-cold narcissism that is the film's most purely enjoyable element. Their scenes together crackle with energy. The costume design, by Jenny Beavan, is legitimately spectacular. Beavan won the Academy Award for her work, and it is easy to see why. Every outfit tells a story. The film's 1970s London setting is rendered with loving detail, and the soundtrack (featuring The Clash, Blondie, Nina Simone, and The Doors, among others) is excellent.

The problems emerge when you scratch the surface. Cruella is a villain origin story that does not actually want its protagonist to be a villain. The film goes to extraordinary lengths to justify Estella's behavior and remove any genuine moral darkness from her character. The Baroness, not Cruella, is the real monster. The Baroness murdered Cruella's mother, ordered a baby killed, drove her husband to death, and treats everyone around her with casual cruelty. By contrast, Cruella's crimes are limited to property damage, fashion pranks, and dog theft. She is never cruel to people. She is never dangerous. She is, in the film's framing, entirely justified in everything she does.

This is the ideological core of the film: Cruella is a girlboss origin story in which a brilliant, misunderstood woman smashes the patriarchal and institutional barriers that keep her down. The Baroness represents Old Money, Old Power, and Old Rules. Cruella represents New, rebellious, authentic self-expression. The film is explicit about this framing. Multiple scenes position Cruella as an anti-establishment hero fighting a system designed to crush individual creativity. Her allies are a diverse coalition: Jasper and Horace (loyal working-class friends), Anita Darling (a Black female journalist), Artie (an openly gay fashion shop owner), and John (the Baroness's conscience-stricken valet). The Baroness's world is uniformly white, wealthy, and oppressive.

Artie, played by John McCrea, is marketed as Disney's openly gay live-action character. His queerness is understated, expressed through flamboyant fashion and a brief moment where he adjusts Cruella's outfit with the line 'I have always been a little different.' The character is more symbol than person, a progressive checkbox rather than a developed human being. He appears in perhaps ten minutes of screen time. Disney's pattern of claiming firsts in queer representation while keeping the actual content minimal enough to edit for international markets is well-established by now, and Cruella follows this playbook precisely.

The film's biggest ideological problem is its relationship with its own protagonist. Cruella de Vil, in the original One Hundred and One Dalmatians (both the novel and the animated film), is a genuinely terrible person who wants to skin puppies for a fur coat. The 2021 film needs this character to be sympathetic, so it rewrites her entirely. The Dalmatians are recast as the Baroness's attack dogs rather than victims. Cruella does not harm animals. The puppy-skinning motivation is nowhere to be found. The film even ends with Cruella gifting Dalmatian puppies to Anita and Roger, a gesture of generosity that directly contradicts the character's established nature.

This is a trend in Disney's live-action strategy: take a villain, strip away the villainy, add a tragic backstory involving a dead or absent mother, and repackage them as a misunderstood hero. Maleficent did it. Cruella does it. The ideological implication is that evil does not really exist. Bad people are just good people who were hurt by worse people. This is a fundamentally progressive position on human nature, and Cruella embraces it without reservation.

The film has genuine virtues: Stone and Thompson are both excellent. The costume design is world-class. The pacing, despite the 134-minute runtime, mostly works. The heist and fashion-show sequences are inventively staged. Paul Walter Hauser steals every scene he is in as Horace. Nicholas Britell's score is effective.

But Cruella is also a film that asks you to root for a character named after cruelty while ensuring she is never actually cruel. It is a punk movie made by a corporation worth $200 billion. It is an anti-establishment story that exists to sell Disney+ subscriptions. The contradictions are the point, even if the film does not seem aware of them.

Cruella grossed $233 million worldwide during a pandemic-affected release, won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, and earned generally positive reviews (74% on Rotten Tomatoes). A sequel is in development. The film works as entertainment. As ideology, it is a carefully calibrated piece of corporate feminism that wants credit for being rebellious while never actually rebelling against anything that would hurt the brand.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Girlboss Narrative / Female Empowerment Through Rebellion	4	High	High	5.04
Villain Rehabilitation / Evil Does Not Exist	3	Moderate	High	2.1
Diverse Coalition as Moral Shorthand	2	Moderate	Moderate	1.4
Token Gay Character (Artie)	2	Low	Low	0.7
Anti-Establishment as Default Virtue	3	Moderate	Moderate	2.1
Dead Mother as Backstory Engine	2	Moderate	High	1.4
Corporate Feminism / Punk Without Consequences	3	Low	Moderate	1.5
TOTAL WOKE				14.2

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Loyalty and Chosen Family	4	High	High	5.04
Justice for the Dead / Honoring Your Mother	3	High	High	3.78
Consequences of Narcissism and Selfishness (The Baroness)	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Resourcefulness and Self-Reliance	2	High	Moderate	1.4
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				12.3

Score Margin: -2 WOKE