Dodie Smith created Cruella de Vil in 1956, and the character's villainy is so pure that it requires no explanation beyond itself. She wants a coat made from dalmatian puppies. That is her motivation. She does not want power or revenge or world domination. She wants a garment, and she is willing to kidnap ninety-nine puppies to get it. The simplicity of the evil is what makes it effective. There is no ambiguity, no redemption arc, no sympathetic backstory that explains why she is this way. She is a woman who looks at puppies and sees outerwear.

Disney's 1961 animated adaptation turned Cruella into an icon through the design work of Marc Davis, who drew her as a walking fashion emergency, skeletal, draped in fur, trailing cigarette smoke, with a hairstyle split between black and white like a visual representation of her moral binary. Dr. Randy Malamud of Georgia State University, in his study of animals, fashion, and cruelty in cultural representation, has argued that Cruella functions as the embodiment of consumerism taken to its logical endpoint: the desire for a product so intense that the suffering required to produce it becomes invisible.

The Car and the Chase

Cruella drives like she lives: fast, reckless, and aimed at something she intends to possess. Her car, a massive red-and-black roadster, is an extension of her personality, all speed and no caution. The chase sequence through the English countryside is the climax of the film, and it works because Cruella's pursuit is so relentless, so personally invested, that ninety-nine puppies fleeing through the snow cannot slow her down. She is stopped by her own excess, the car crashing because she drove it the way she drives everything, past the point of control.

The Villain Who Needs No Depth

Recent adaptations have attempted to give Cruella a backstory, a sympathetic origin, a reason for being the way she is. The original character needs none of this. Her power lies precisely in her lack of justification. She is cruel because she is Cruella. The name tells you everything. Smith and Disney created a villain whose irreducibility is the point: some appetites are simply monstrous, and no amount of backstory makes a puppy coat acceptable.