ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS (1961) Cruella De Vil in Car Original Production Cel

A spectacular original production cel of Cruella de Vil from One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Walt Disney Productions, 1961, presented on a pink gradient display background. The cel itself is confirmed original production material, the peg registration bar visible at the base of the sheet, production number 9 legible bottom right.

The scene this cel comes from is one of the most kinetically charged sequences Disney produced during the entire Silver Age. The climactic car chase through the snow, Cruella in her red coupe pursuing the van she believes is carrying the ninety-nine puppies back to London, is animation at full throttle: fast cuts, extreme angles, barely controlled panic compressed into seconds of screen time.

Cel animation at that speed generates few frames of the kind of expressive clarity visible here. Cruella hunched over the steering wheel, the enormous fur coat consuming her entirely, just her face visible in its manic focus and those red heels planted on the pedals, the car itself implied entirely by her grip and her posture.

The performance behind that pose belongs to Marc Davis, one of Disney's legendary Nine Old Men, who served as the primary supervising animator for Cruella de Vil. Davis had a particular gift for villain comedy rooted in physical extremity, and Cruella remains one of his defining achievements: a figure of genuine menace rendered simultaneously ridiculous, her obsession so total it becomes its own undoing.

The Xerographic process introduced for One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which transferred animators' pencil lines directly onto cels rather than having inkers trace them by hand, gives Cruella's fur coat its distinctive scratchy vitality, every hair a separate nervous line, the texture of mania made visible.

Original production cels from One Hundred and One Dalmatians are among the most sought-after in the Disney canon, and action cels from the chase sequence are rarer still. This is a genuine artefact from the last years of Walt Disney's personal stewardship of the studio, and from one of the most celebrated sequences in the film.

Estimate: $3,000 - 6,000

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