Cruella is a 2021 American crime comedy film based on the character Cruella de Vil from Dodie Smith's 1956 novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians.[10] The film is directed by Craig Gillespie with a screenplay by Dana Fox and Tony McNamara, from a story by Aline Brosh McKenna, Kelly Marcel, and Steve Zissis.[11] It is the third live-action adaptation in the 101 Dalmatians franchise and serves as both a prequel and reboot. Emma Stone stars as the title character, with Emma Thompson, Joel Fry, Paul Walter Hauser, Emily Beecham, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, and Mark Strong in supporting roles. Set in London during the punk rock movement of the 1970s, the film revolves around Estella Miller, an aspiring fashion designer, as she explores the path that will lead her to become a notorious up and coming fashion designer known as Cruella de Vil.
The name Cruella de Vil is a pun of the words cruel and devil, an allusion that is emphasized by having her English country house nicknamed 'Hell Hall'.[3] The name 'de Vil' is also a literary allusion to Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), in which the realty firm Mitchell, Sons & Candy write a letter to Lord Godalming, informing him that the purchaser of a house in Piccadilly, London is "a foreign nobleman, Count De Ville." Count De Ville, however, proves to be an alias for Count Dracula himself.
Cruella is an archetypal corporate villain who will seize on any scheme to make money, and Jasper and Horace are her oft-fired company employees, in this version. Cruella's schemes involve such things as drilling oil from the swamp near Dearly farm (thereby polluting it), buying Kanine Krunchies and replacing the nutritious ingredients with sawdust and chalk, or sending Jasper and Horace to drive out the owners of Mom and Pop's Grocery Store so she can buy it herself.
In the film, Cruella grew up as Estella Miller, daughter of Catherine, who is expelled from her first school due to her temper provoking various fights. When Catherine visits a mansion for financial support, she is killed by Dalmatians after Estella accidentally provoked them into chasing her, causing Estella to run to London by hiding in a bin lorry, where she is aided by Horace and Jasper, dying her distinctive black-and-white hair to better hide herself. As an adult, she gets a job in a prominent fashion boutique that brings her to the attention of famed designer Baroness von Hellman, but Estella soon realises that the Baroness was the woman who her mother visited before her death. Planning to retrieve a necklace of her mother's that the Baroness has claimed as her own, Estella creates the identity of 'Cruella' to create a distraction during the party, which begins a longer campaign against the Baroness. During her efforts, Estella learns that the Baroness is actually her biological mother; she intended to have her baby killed after birth, but her valet John gave the baby to Catherine, who was a maid in the house at the time. With this knowledge, Estella provokes a confrontation with the Baroness and then fakes her own death in a manner that gives the impression that the Baroness killed her, she is then arrested as a result, and Estella inherits her entire fortune as Cruella.
