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| Film critic Leonard Maltin told SCI FI Wire that Disney's 1961 animated film 101 Dalmatians has been corrected to fix wobbly animation for the upcoming DVD release. "Even when the film was released, the new form of animation had some jitters in it, and that had been corrected now," Maltin said in an interview before a preview of the new print in Hollywood last week. "It's in far better shape." The new version of the movie will screen theatrically at Hollywood's El Capitan Theatre through Jan. 30. To fix the animation, technicians pored over nearly four miles of film, correcting 104,000 frames of the hand-drawn animation. Last week, Maltin led a star-studded panel at the new print's premiere, which included Lisa Davis (the voice of Anita), animator Blaine Gibson, Disney legend Alice Davis (wife of animation great and Cruella De Vil creator Marc Davis) and animator Eric Goldberg (Pocahontas). The audience include June Foray (the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel), Margaret Kerry (Peter Pan's Tinker Bell) and the family of Frank Thomas, one of the "nine old men" of Disney classic animators. The panel screened behind-the-scenes footage and revealed secrets about the making of the dog film, which was remade into a live action movie in 1996 with Glenn Close and Jeff Daniels. "The animation in this looks so beautiful, especially the city scenes around London," Davis said. "And when we all were originally talking about the voice of Cruella De Vil, it was supposed to be more of a Zsa Zsa Gabor-kind of voice." Maltin described the film as "a contemporary story, not a classic fairy tale. And the look is so different. It was the first contemporary Disney animated film where the characters were really stylized, angular, not rounded or cute. There was a very kind of rough, almost sketchy quality visually that made it look very modern." The 101 Dalmatians: Platinum Edition two-disc DVD debuts on March 4 and includes songs that were deleted from the film, an interactive game with a virtual puppy, behind-the-scenes featurettes and an in-depth look at the personal correspondence between Walt Disney and Dodie Smith, the author of the original novel. |