“She reminds me of my mother,” said the man. “So does the witch in ‘Snow White.’ ” : Empty-Lapper Shows Soft Spot for Disney’s ‘Dalmations’

A wise and gentle friend warned me ages ago that most of the milestones of parenting occur unnoticed, without bells or fanfare.

Your child doesn’t vault from your lap the last time he sits there, shouting, “Really appreciate all those bedtime stories and years of kissing my hair, Mom, but that’s it--forever.”

He just sits in your lap one day, and then never does it again, leaving you with a permanent tendency to tear up at the scent of no-tears shampoo. The fact that there’s nothing called an empty-lap syndrome doesn’t keep parents from getting it.

Which brings us to “101 Dalmations.”

The last of the great Disney animated features was playing in Valley theaters recently. That was the good news. The bad news was that no kid took me to see it.

There was a time, not long ago, when I was assured a seat at the re-release of every Disney classic. Raising children can be duller than tending rocks and so painful it scalds the soul. But one of the great things about it is that you get to see “Bambi” again, and “Pinocchio” and “Dumbo.”

But the vanishing child in question is now so tall he looks down at the top of his mother’s head and affectionately describes her as “a pygmy of my imagination.” People whose parents have recently turned into pygmies have little time for Disney doggies.

“Hey, ‘101 Dalmations’ is at the Peppertree!” I said, with the same sunny chirp I successfully used, once, to trick him into eating kohlrabi.

“Forget it, Mom,” he answered.

I wasn’t the only popcorn-for-one at the Northridge theater.

A middle-aged Granada Hills man ate a solitary sandwich as he waited for the 7 o’clock show to begin. In fact, he explained, he was here indulging a child--”the child inside me.” A graphic designer in his 50s, he has gone to each of Disney’s animated films as they’ve been re-released. His favorite is “Fantasia,” which he’s seen dozens of times.

We chatted about Disney’s cartoon Kalis, the vicious, child-hating females who provide the terror in one Disney movie after another. Uncle Walt didn’t create many memorable bad guys, but he certainly had a way with witches and other wicked women. Cruella DeVil of “101 Dalmations” is a classic example, an anorexic chain-smoker who is so evil she’d make coats out of puppies. And children know in their bones that puppies are a lot cuter than they are.

“She reminds me of my mother,” the man said. “So does the witch in ‘Snow White.’ ” Adults can say things like that without bursting into tears. They can sit calmly in the dark, observing that Disney’s misogyny is as urgent and unsettling in its own way as Spillane’s or Shakespeare’s.

As a student of animation, he has high regard for the palette of “101 Dalmations” (first released in 1961), which repeatedly contrasts the clout of color and the eloquence of black and white.

Sara Maguire of Newhall doesn’t care about that stuff. She’s preoccupied with the spotted puppies and their destiny, even though she doesn’t know what that last word means. “They’re going to be skinned now,” she predicted grimly at one point. She is especially taken with young Roly, who is always hungry. Sara frequently refers to the puppies as “the kids.” If Roly were a kid instead of a plump cartoon puppy, he would wear glasses as Sara does.

Sara was 5 last weekend, and “101 Dalmations” was a gift from her grandmother, who lives in Northridge. Extremely charming now, Sara may yet grow into a movie-house pain. Like the hard-of-hearing couple who always follow me to the movies, Sara has a tendency to announce the obvious in a ringing voice. “It’s morning,” she piped, for example, as if she were explaining the screen sunrise to Helen Keller.

But Sara knows her movies. She understands that “101 Dalmations” isn’t really real, so that it will probably end well enough. But she also knows, as you and I have all but forgotten, that being young means never being, or at least never feeling, truly safe.

When Pongo and Perdita’s puppies did the canine equivalent of slipping on a rug, she observed: “That is very, very dangerous.” Childhood is very, very dangerous, which may be why our small hearts pounded through every Disney movie. We knew who Cinderella was and that the stakes were not a slipper but our lives.

At 5, Sara is already a critic. She has seen two films in her lifetime. “ This, “ she ruled, “is better than ‘E.T.’ ”

Disney doles out its singular re-releases with cruel, stingy cunning. The show at the Peppertree included a trailer for the next “movie event so special it only happens once in a generation”--the studio’s 1959 version of “Sleeping Beauty.”

As I recall, it was disappointingly derivative of “Cinderella,” but had a Tchaikovsky score to die for.

I wonder if Sara already has a date?