Emma Stone goes punk in the first trail­er for Disney’s Cruella

The suc­cess of Malef­i­cent, in which we get to hear the evil queen’s side of the sto­ry and find her a more com­pelling­ly sym­pa­thet­ic char­ac­ter than once assumed, rewired at least one Dis­ney executive’s brain. They rea­soned that there was tremen­dous mon­ey to be made in faint­ly fem­i­nist reap­praisal of the great­est vil­lains in the studio’s con­sid­er­able rogues’ gallery, and hence, we now have a Cruel­la de Vil ori­gin sto­ry of sorts.

Today brings the first trail­er for the upcom­ing film from Craig Gille­spie, his first since attract­ing Oscar atten­tion with I, Tonya in 2017. For his unlike­ly fol­low-up, he taps Emma Stone to por­tray the sadis­tic, Dal­ma­t­ian-skin­ning fash­ion maven in her ear­ly years, when she was just anoth­er hood­lum tak­ing on the world in London.

While the new trail­er leaves the details of its plot or char­ac­ters beyond the epony­mous one pret­ty vague, Cruel­la seems intent on shak­ing up the Eng­lish sta­tus quo with her dar­ing looks (an over­coat bursts into flames to reveal the red dress under­neath in one shot, very RuPaul’s Drag Race) and her pen­chant for mis­de­meanour mis­chief, includ­ing the occa­sion­al case of grand theft auto. She declares her­self ​“bril­liant” and ​“bad” in equal mea­sure, a shock to the sys­tem for all things stuffy and uptight.

It’s also some­what dif­fi­cult to dis­cern the intend­ed tone of the film, which looks a shade or two grim­mer than the usu­al big-tick­et release from the Mouse House. What with all the rol­lick­ing adven­ture and CGI effects and 101 Dal­ma­t­ian IP recog­ni­tion, one would assume that the film was made with a kid­die audi­ence in mind, and yet there’s a lack of an antic qual­i­ty that defines the fam­i­ly releases.

This falls more square­ly into the realm of the pho­to­re­al­is­tic Lion King, or the Tim Bur­ton takes on Alice in Won­der­land – films based on mate­r­i­al known to and loved by kids, pre­sent­ed in a style that doesn’t make adults feel like they’re watch­ing baby stuff. His­tor­i­cal­ly, this par­tic­u­lar nee­dle has only been thread­ed awk­ward­ly, but who’s to say that Stone’s spin on Harley Quinn-ian sexy-mad­ness won’t be the mag­ic X‑factor that some­how makes this all work.

Cruel­la will come to the­aters, pend­ing COVID-19 reg­u­la­tions, in the US and UK on 28 May.