Gustave Dore's 'Droll Stories' illustrations

'Without doubt the best work ever done by Gustave Dore was that for the Contes Drolatiques,' declares a New York Times article of January 24, 1883, looking back on all of Gustave Dore's work. 'We will place next the wood-cuts for Rabelais followed by the great series of drawings for Dante's Inferno.'

That one of Dore's earliest sets of illustrations - his only great publication before this was Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel in 1854 - is considered his best work by the New York Times critic (I am unable to find the name of the writer of the article) suggests that certain qualities may have been lost in his later work. Indeed, as Dore became more and more determined to be appreciated as an artist rather than an illustrator his work seems to have lost some of its charm, though there is no doubt that his draughtsmanship and imagination, qualities for which he is most admired, remained right up to the very end.

His illustrations for Balzac's Droll Stories are the most gothic of all of Dore's work. The full-page illustrations that are not dominated by the grotesque main characters feature moody skylines framed with ridiculously tall spires and dark, foreboding fortresses, while gallows, most of them put to use, are dotted over the land down below. The twisted medieval city is Dore's expressionist vision of Strasbourg, a place with which he was very familiar; he passed the cathedral every day on the way to school. I'm strongly reminded of the villages in Der Golem and Faust.

There is a tremendous amount of physical comedy juxtaposed with the extravagant horror. One of my favorite illustrations shows hundreds of bodies hanging from gallows, with ravens setting to work on them so eagerly that they lift some of the bodies, some uprooting the gallows as they do so. Another shows a young lover, in mid woo, being sliced in two by a rival for the object of his affections. Dore's boisterous vulgarity - which he represses in much of his later work - has never been more at home!

The character designs are wildly imaginative. Filling one or two full-page illustrations and quite a few vignettes are swarms of rotund monks (refugees from Dore's Rabelais illustrations) who specialize in falling over in comical fashion. There are also a number of characters who stay in their armor - helmets and all - all the time, feasting, reading and, indeed, sleeping with maidens with the stuff on. The only characters that disappoint are the beautiful women - as is always the case, they are little more than stock archetypes. Admittedly, though, they are more interesting than the damsels in distress featured in his later Perrault fairy tale illustrations, and they are surrounded by such an interesting cast of characters that it doesn't really matter - the diminutive servant carrying his mistress' ridiculously long train is a nice touch.

The highlight of all the illustrations, though, are the full-page illustrations dedicated entirely to the grotesque faces of the main characters. It is here that Dore proves himself, more even than in his cartoons for the Journal Pour Rire, as a master of the grotesque. In no other publication does Dore pay such close attention to facial features.

What interests me about the faces in the illustrations is the sheer variety. They do not appear to be constructed in as regimented a manner as most artists plan out a facial drawing (eg. Leonardo, who divides the face, however deformed, into planes). Possibly this is a side-effect of any lack of formal art training on Dore's part, but, in this instance, it has a positive effect, allowing the faces to seem at times impossibly twisted and deformed. Some of them even appear to be disintegrating before our very eyes.

Here are all twelve full-page grotesque faces from Dore's Balzac illustrations.

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Disney have recently released the 'Special Edition' DVD of Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians in the UK. To me this is one of the most interesting of all of the Disney Animated Classics; though I all but ignored it as a child, and its reputation has been somewhat tarnished by countless remakes and spin-offs, I now consider it to be the best animated film the Disney studio produced after their Golden Age (from 1936's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to 1942's Bambi). No other Disney film succeeds in sheer force of style as much as One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which makes full use of its medium; the result is an extremely graphically strong film, with a rough, linear look that seems to complement the animation rather than attempt to convince the viewer that they are watching anything but a cartoon. It takes full advantage of aspects of its medium Disney had previously seen as obstacles to be defeated.

Much of the success of the film can be attributed not to Walt Disney (who was too busy with theme parks and television shows to attend many meetings on the film, only breezing in from time to time to leave annotations on story sketches) but Bill Peet, a 'story man' many at the studio felt was close in personality to Walt himself. Perhaps this is why the two didn't get on and eventually had a rather dramatic falling out. At any rate, Walt recognised Peet's skill at creating stories and, for the first time, gave only one man the job of writing and storyboarding a feature animated film.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians remains among the best written of all of Disney's features. The tendency towards excessive sentimentality and 'chocolate-box charm' (as one reviewer called it) found in many of the Disney films of the 1950s, and of the 1990s, is mostly dropped in favour of a more satyrical mood. As a result, the few moments of pathos are given greater gravity. An aspect of Dodie Smith's book which translates very well in the film is it's amusing reversal of roles. We see this right at the beginning of the film; the audience initially assumes that the narrator is Roger, the human, only to discover that the voice is that of his dog, Pongo, who considers Roger his pet.

References continue to be made to this throughout the film. I wrote in an earlier post of earlier Disney films, such as Pinocchio, depicting nature as inferior to humanity, a state which man descends to through primitive and uncivilized behaviour. In Dalmatians this is reversed, the story being told from the dogs' point of view; Nanny, the human with the closest affinity to the dogs, is one of the most sympathetic characters, while Cruella De Vil, the film's villainess, becomes more and more bestial and savage as her schemes unravel. Like earlier villains such as the Witch in Snow White and even Count Orlock in Nosferatu, Cruella has characteristics that make her a far more wild creature than any of the animals in the film. Her claws, bony frame, manic hair and posture all evoke the image of some sort of vulture or harpy. Her car is also given bestial characteristics, both in design and sound, roaring and growling in the film's climax.

I still consider Cruella, animated exclusively by Marc Davis, to be Disney's best villain. As has previously been mentioned, she possesses bestial qualities in both design and animation; despite this; she possesses a certain elegance. Character actress Mary Wickes performed live-action reference for the character, but Davis used the footage 'sparingly'. The character is a masterpiece of design, almost blurring the line between caricature and abstraction. Davis' skill at animating female characters shines through; he had been honing his skills throughout the 1950s, but it is in animating Cruella that he appears to have the most fun and exhibit the greatest skill. It is thought by many that the work of the animators known as the 'Nine Old Men' went into a decline in their later years; Cruella De Vil, Davis' final animation job, proves that at least one of them didn't experience such a decline.

It's interesting that Walt Disney himself hated the look of the film. I suppose if, as Ken Anderson (largely responsible for the style of the film) said, 'Walt hated lines', it's rather unlikely that he would have liked the film. Nevertheless, he did 'forgive' Anderson for the lines a few weeks before his death. Anyway, whatever Walt thought of it, I find it to be one of the best animated films ever to come out of his studio.