100 Disney Things [009]: Designing Villains

[chacusha]

100 Disney Things [009]

Note: I started writing this essay even before I decided to participate in this 100 Things meme. (It is so old that the file on my computer is called "disneyessay1.txt". There are no other files with this naming pattern because I quickly realized that I was going to need more descriptive filenames.) Since starting this meme, I have always known this would be one of the entries, but it just took me a really long time to clean up enough to post.

So here is an essay dedicated to evaluating Disney villains that work well and villains that fall flat.


As a general rule you know I love Disney villains. However, I think some work better than others, and in particular some of the more recent Disney villains as well as many Pixar villains tend to make me feel really dissatisfied at the end. I think the heart of it is this: when you make villains, and especially when you flesh them out, give them backstories, or do anything that makes them sympathetic, you have to make sure to give them an ending that feels appropriate. Otherwise, it's really jarring.

In this post, I group villains into five groups:

Group A: Disney villains with very little backstory or pathos. They often spring into the world with typical Evil Mastermind Goals and show little remorse for their actions. Disney villains fitting this type can be found in Disney movies from all periods of time. They may be a pantomime villain: an over-the-top villain who may even be somewhat self-aware of the fact that they are evil and delight in it. Madam Mim (The Sword in the Stone) and Jafar (Aladdin) are examples of this. Or they may just be selfish and cruel human beings to the point of being sociopathic, often being people whose work intrinsically involves some amount of cruelty. The hunters/poachers Clayton (Tarzan) and McLeach (The Rescuers Down Under) and the military man Rourke (Atlantis: The Lost Empire) are examples. Some have Magnificent Bastard traits or badass moments -- Shere Khan (The Jungle Book), Ratigan (The Great Mouse Detective), and Shan Yu (Mulan) are examples. However, they all share the trait of it being unclear why they're evil, cruel, or hellbent on accomplishing goals that hurt others. There is no backstory or explanation.

This lack of motivation is best illustrated by the earliest Disney movie villain, the Evil Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Why is she so evil? What's her story? Vanity/jealousy motivates many of her actions but there's no reason behind the vanity either. That's just the way she is. She (along with many other villains of this type) ends up seeming more like an embodiment of pure evil rather than a living, breathing person.

The endings these types of villains get range from absolutely no consequences (for example, the Coachman (Pinocchio) gets no punishment for his actions and is presumably still in his business of selling children into slavery, as dark as that is) to minor consequences (for example, Yzma (The Emperor's New Groove) is thwarted AND turned into a cat or Madam Mim (The Sword in the Stone) loses the duel AND is infected with a cold), and all the way up to death (for example, Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty, who is killed by a sword to the heart). In most cases, the punishment received doesn't seem all too jarring (either too little or too much) given that the villain almost doesn't feel real in a way. In many cases, the villains who die are killed in a fight when they are also using lethal force.

The main jarring deaths in this category are Hopper (A Bug's Life) and Clayton. Hopper's death involved being torn apart by birds, and Clayton's death involved falling to his death and being hung by a vine that gets wrapped around his neck. The sheer graphicness of the deaths are jarring in an otherwise kid-friendly film, and even though both characters are pretty deadly and cruel (Hopper moreso than Clayton) with no backstory, something about the deaths doesn't "feel" right. There is even a dark humor to Hopper's death because Hopper spends the whole movie behaving like a menacing gangster, but his death reveals that at the end of the day, he is (like the ants he bullies) a tiny bug, very low on the food chain. I'll discuss villain punishment played for laughs later.

Note that villains in this category can be quite popular even though they are not fleshed out. There seems to be some pressure/temptation to flesh these flat villains out (maybe inspired by the success of Wicked?) but such attempts are not necessarily successful. For example, Maleficent is one of the most popular Disney villains, but the reception to her live-action movie that gave her a sympathetic treatment was (AFAICT) lukewarm.

Group B: Antagonists (not quite villains) who get redeemed. This character type is fairly rare in Disney movies, unlike in Studio Ghibli / Miyazaki movies (I will return to the topic of comparing recent Disney movies to Studio Ghibli movies later in this post). There are some cases where a movie has a real villain and then there is a less villainous antagonist who gets redeemed (e.g. John Silver (Treasure Planet), the Bowler Hat Guy (Meet the Robinsons)). But, in this post, I'm mainly interested in looking at the most villainous character in each movie and how creative decisions regarding that character changes the movie, so I'll set those examples aside. Some examples of movies where the main villain/antagonist is redeemed or softened are The Fox and the Hound (Amos Slade) and Ratatouille (both antagonists). I also think Lilo & Stitch is an example of a movie without a villain, only well-meaning antagonists, although they ruin this in the tie-in TV series by putting Gantu in the role of a villain. The opposite of jarring, these films have a happy, peaceful ending for most of the characters.

Group C: Sympathetic Disney villains with significant backstory whose narrative punishment nevertheless feels reasonable. I think starting from the Renaissance, you start to occasionally see villains who are a little more fleshed out and human. Scar (The Lion King) has a minimal backstory but you can read some hints of growing up the resentful, younger-and-more-scrawny brother who has largely had to rely on his cunning to get by (people compare his character and relationship with Mufasa to Snape & James Potter, or Loki & Thor, for a reason...). He ends up dying a fairly gruesome death, but because he pissed off his hyena allies by selling them out to save his life. Frollo is a villain who actually feels TOO human, and that actually ends up making him more chilling and villainous. He ends up falling to his death after using lethal force on the heroes (and even when he dies, he is convinced that he is acting righteously).

Starting from the Pixar era, you start to get a huge number of plot twist villains. Examples of this: Toy Story 2 (1999), Atlantis: The Last Empire (2001), Monsters, Inc. (2001), The Incredibles (2004), Meet the Robinsons (2007), WALL-E (2008), Bolt (2008), Up (2009), Toy Story 3 (2010), Cars 2 (2011), Wreck-It Ralph (2012), Frozen (2013), Big Hero 6 (2014), Zootopia (2016), Coco (2017), and Incredibles 2 (2018). Of Walt Disney Animation Studios' (WDAS) and Pixar's CGI films, 15 out of 30 (50%) of them have featured plot twist villains. By virtue of these villains passing as normal characters (or even helpful / kind / respectable figures) at the beginning of the film, they are almost by definition somewhat humanized and sympathetic. At the same time, however, their ability to pass flawlessly as respectable beings despite villainous intentions gives them somewhat of a sociopathic vibe, capable of lying with a completely straight face, on top of being villainous. More on this later.

Some of these characters' punishment seem fitting to the character. For example, Waternoose (Monsters, Inc.) is simply taken into custody and loses control of his company. Not too jarring and fitting the mundane "factory man" world of Monsters, Inc. However, there are some characters whose fates are so cruel and extreme that the whole film starts to appear gleefully vindictive and cruel as well. That brings us to:

Group D: Sympathetic Disney villains with significant backstory whose narrative punishment feels unusually cruel. I argue that this type of villain has disproportionately cropped up in the Pixar era, due to a combination of (1) villain characters who have a mundane persona (contrast with the camp aesthetic of e.g. Jafar, Gaston, Ursula, and Yzma) embedded in a realistic/human/modern world, often linked with that character being a plot twist villain so their ability to signal "villain vibes" towards the beginning of the movie is curtailed, and (2) a trend of fleshing out villain backstories to give them a Villain Origin story (contrast with the Zero Backstory of villains like the Evil Queen and Maleficent). I basically blame John Lasseter, who has been creative director of one or both studios throughout most of this time period, for this trend. (But actually, it may be part of a larger tendency of audiences of rejecting black-and-white morality plays and simple storylines, hence rewarding deep/sympathetic (anti-)villains and plot twists. I don't know.)

Mundane personas and backstories tend to go together, as giving a villain a backstory often has the effect of treating them more like a real human being who didn't always used to be evil. They used to be an ordinary person (relatable), and then a concrete reason is given for them going "off the rails". If you go this route, though, you have to be extremely cautious. First, by giving a villain an origin story, you not only build up sympathy for that character (if you do it well; and if you don't do it well, your villain just kind of falls flat and it makes your storytelling abilities look bad), but given that there is a path from normal → super villain (if you do it well), there should exist a path from super villain → normal. This isn't to say that this particular character would be able to take that path or it wouldn't take way more time than can be depicted in a 90-minute movie. But it does mean that a hero who goes straight for the kill when fighting a sympathetic villain looks cruel and callous and sociopathic themselves. It also means that a narrative where the villain dies or gets harshly punished and the hero quickly bounces back and is happy shortly afterward is unsatisfying for the viewer. Let's look at some case studies.

Case study 1: Stinky Pete and Lotso - Toy Story 2 (1999) and Toy Story 3 (2010). These villains are both Toy Story plot twist villains who initially come off as kindly mentor figures but are actually cruel people embittered by their experiences being an unwanted toy, so I'll just lump them together. Because they are plot twist villains, they spend some of the movie being ostensibly nice and ordinary people. They both have a backstory / villain motivation explanation involving a lot of pathos. Stinky Pete's involves being the least popular toy in Woody's Roundup and sympathizing with Jessie's tragic backstory of being outgrown by her child, and so deciding he'd rather be a collector's item rather than be unloved by a child. Lotso's backstory involves his child replacing him with a newer version of himself when he gets lost and goes through many trials trying to get back to his child, resulting in him realizing that toys are replacable and mere tools. Given this sympathetic backstory, the narrative punishment seems cruel and unusual. Stinky Pete, who wanted to be a pristine, perfectly restored collector's item, becomes the possession of a girl who likes to draw all over her toys (kind of nightmarish in general, given that the Toy Story films seek to humanize toys, and from that perspective, this just looks like being doomed to a life of having one's bodily autonomy repeatedly violated o_O). Lotso's fate is to be picked up by a garbage man and attached to the front of the garbage truck's grille by his arms and legs. The fates are played for laughs both times.

In both cases, the punishment comes off as cruel and vindictive. Like, I'm not exaggerating when I say that Stinky Pete's fate is a kind of toy-rape, and Lotso's is analogous to being paraded around town in stocks. The mismatch between the pathos-filled backstory, and the narrative's delight in their humiliating, medieval punishment is frankly disturbing. It may have worked if the villain seemed less real, but because of the backstory, it doesn't work. For example, compare those endings to the ending Captain Hook gets in Peter Pan, which is similarly cruel and played for laughs: he gets chased off into the horizon by a crocodile that wants to eat him. But because Hook seems less real (you get the distinct impression that his and Peter Pan's rivalry is a form of fantasy game that resets and repeats forever) it seems less mean-spirited.

Case study 2: Syndrome - The Incredibles (2004). Syndrome is a plot twist villain in two different ways: first, because he's ostensibly helping out the main characters at the beginning of the film (but secretly advancing his own agenda), and second, because he's also the grown-up version of a cute but annoying sidekick character that appears earlier in the film. His backstory / villain motivation is that he was frustrated because he wanted to be a superhero but no one would give him a chance. This is an incredibly weaksauce motivation as far as villain motivations go, but rather than make it easier to justify any kind of villainy or villain punishment for Syndrome, it instead makes the character a very meh and uncompelling villain, unclear how one goes from "idealistic kid" to "remorseless sociopath" (the more likely interpretation might be that he was twisted and messed up and unhealthy all along, which just pushes the question of "how are supervillains born" back a stage rather than explaining anything). He certainly is a supervillain who uses deadly force, and so the fact that he dies isn't surprising. However, there is (1) the fact that he has a backstory and therefore wasn't always "bad" (maybe), and (2) the particularly horrific death (sucked into a turbine while wearing a cape, also played for laughs/dramatic irony because of Edna Mode's earlier rant about why she never uses capes in her designs). The combination of these two things also makes his death seem unnecessary and vindictive / delighting in punishment.

Another aspect that bothers me about Syndrome as a character is that it is hard not for me to interpret him as a kind of Scrappy archetype (in this case, an expy of Batman's sidekick, Robin). His weak villain motivation story that strains credibility and his punishment (similar to the way Scrappy (the Scrappy) was handled in the live-action Scooby-Doo movie) seems like a juvenile way of fantasizing about killing That Annoying Goody Character You Hated in that Kids' Show You Watched as a Kid: make them into a villain so you can hate them (even if character-wise, it is hard to buy why they would become a villain) and have the heroes kill them off or humiliate them. I dislike that "DIE DIE DIE" attitude that people have toward annoying fictional characters (Chibi-Usa, Relena, and Wesley Crusher are examples of characters who were so hated when I was growing up that they'd get people fantasizing about violently killing them), so I'm very much not here for Syndrome's whole character and the cruel death he gets that seems to have some kind of disturbingly gleeful aspect around it.

Case study 3: Muntz - Up (2009). Similar to AUTO (WALL-E) and Ernesto de la Cruz (Coco), Muntz is an entirely superfluous, unnecessary villain in an otherwise peaceful film that would have been well capable of standing on its own merits of (1) being largely driven by personal conflict and character development and (2) featuring mundane moments of stunning beauty that make you feel a joie de vivre. While I find all three villains boring and unnecessary, at least AUTO and Ernesto have some menacing, creepy aspects to them that make them slightly more interesting as villains. Muntz is... just a sad (and crazy?) man. He is also the only one of the three who has backstory, although again it's weak. He used to be a well-known and respected explorer but was discredited and shunned when the only evidence he had for a rare bird species he discovered turned out to be fake. He then became obsessed with catching the bird and proving to the world it was real. Like Ernesto, Muntz is the childhood hero of the main character who ends up disappointing the main character. But the backstory makes him just... way more sad and unsatisfying as a villain. It's hard to take seriously a sad old man as a menacing villain. And hey, this is even lampshaded in the humorous Old Man Catfight that he and Carl have. Which makes it all the more disappointing that Muntz's end is to fall to his death from an airship. In a movie with such a mundane, cheery, humanistic look on life and whose major themes are letting go and second chances, the fact that it felt it had to have a villain (and a sympathetic one) who doesn't get a redemption arc (centered around the theme of letting go and second chances!) is pretty disappointing.

Case study 4: Dr. Facilier - Princess and the Frog (2009). Dr. Facilier is very clearly a two-bit villain. He's a con-man and a swindler who tricks people in order to make money, caught in a spiral trying to pay off his debts. He is one of the most pathetic Disney villains in the sense you feel sorry for him, and also in the sense that he is hard to take seriously. He not only doesn't kill people, but from his build and villain powers you kind of suspect it'd be pretty hard for him to kill people. He does kill a character (Ray the firefly), a creative decision that is so questionable that I assume it must have been met with resistance at every stage of the creative process, and someone (or multiple people) must have pushed for it very hard for it to make it into the final work, despite the obvious reaction to killing off the sweet, cute, animal sidekick being, "... Really?!" Undoubtedly, the writers must have known they would get flak from audiences for this creative decision, and so in a way, I think the best way to describe Dr. Facilier is that he is a fictional fallman for the writers: functioning as a fictional outlet for audience anger that should really be laid at the feet of the people who I assume pushed extremely hard for this very questionable permanent death to make it in the film. In any case, even granting that Dr. Facilier murdered a firefly(!) in cold blood, his end which involves being dragged into hell by demons and being memorialized with a tombstone featuring his screaming face is so gruesome as to feel disproportional.


Facilier's death

Luckily, none of the heroes knew this would happen to him, and he brought his own troubles on himself by making a deal with the devil, so this ending doesn't reflect badly on the hero characters. But something about the gruesome death seems gleefully cruel and reflects badly on the writers, in my opinion. It's especially hard not to feel like it's a shame he didn't get a better ending such as redemption given how much his storyline mirrors Tiana's (people trying to scrape together money in a racist society that keeps people stuck in cycles of poverty).

Case study 5: Mother Gothel - Tangled (2010). Mother Gothel is a grey case -- she is not a plot twist villain and has a lot of Camp Villain Signalling. However, unlike previous "evil stepmothers" of Disney, she actually does have a backstory / villain motivation explanation, being a person who has long been using the power of a magic flower to keep herself young. Also unlike previous evil stepmother characters, her relationship with Rapunzel is not the exaggerated "reduced to a servant in her own home" fairy tale kind of abuse, but the emotionally abusive relationship that real mothers frequently have with their daughters featuring cutting jabs and "jokes". This nuance is illustrated by recollections of Mother Gothel's design process: I can't remember where I read this, but I remember reading somewhere that early versions of Tangled had to be reworked to change who possessed the flower from Mother Gothel (original) to it being in a kind of public field (final). The reason why is that, having the flower be definitively Mother Gothel's possession (as it was in the original Rapunzel fairy tale) caused audiences to view the king and queen's appropriation of the flower as wronging Mother Gothel, causing them to sympathize with her throughout the rest of the film. Second, Mother Gothel and Rapunzel's relationship was created by asking women about the most controlling or hurtful things their mothers (who they would not even describe as abusive!) had done or said to them (see here).

Mother Gothel's death is odd. Technically, it seems like she dies of "natural causes" when Flynn cuts Rapunzel's hair off, which causes all the years of aging that she had reversed using the flower's power to catch up with her, eventually turning her into dust. However, what makes this death scene jarring is that she is actually tripped by Pascal, Rapunzel's sidekick chameleon, causing her to fall out of the tower, which would have certainly killed her if she hadn't disintegrated on the way down first. This odd, unnecessary inclusion not only adds a jarringly dark comedic aspect to Gothel's death but also means that if the aging hadn't happened, Pascal would have actively murdered Gothel with malice aforethought. Like... what. Morally, this is an incredibly jarring action for the cute animal sidekick to take and the movie just kind of shrugs over it as if it isn't remarkable. Second, while Rapunzel is somewhat torn up about seeing Gothel die, the emotional impact on Rapunzel is largely glossed over, being superceded by grieving over Flynn's death and then going directly into a happy ending with Rapunzel reuniting with her "real" parents. The fact that the movie doesn't properly deal with the emotional fallout of seeing your abusive mother (who you nevertheless loved) die and glosses over it, is part of the jarring mismatch between how much the movie strove for realism in its depiction of a humanized villain character yet settled for cartoonishness and fantasy in its punishment of her.

Group E: Disney plot twist villains with backstories who end up coming off as sociopaths. Most of the villains mentioned above are ones whose backstories cause them to fall slightly on the "sympathetic" side of the line. However, the more common case among Disney and Pixar's recent work featuring plot twist villains is that they come off more as sociopathic and therefore very uninteresting and deeply creepy/unpleasant to watch. Syndrome is actually an example of this (for various reasons, I think he is over-punished by the narrative, but his weak backstory renders the character more sociopathic and hollow than understandable and interesting). Hans (Frozen) is also another example, coming off as a remorseless sociopath, at ease and extremely skillful at lying to people to their face and 100% willing to kill people in cold blood. (In contrast to the examples above, his played-for-laughs punishment comes off as under-punishment and making light of serious crimes.) His backstory doesn't seem in any way explanatory and instead comes off as an emotionally empty sob story that he doesn't even believe in. Most plot twist villains that I didn't include in Group C or D fit into this category, where I'm not particularly invested in seeing them redeemed, but also I just find them generally unfun, uninteresting, and fairly forgettable.

The struggle to portray realistic, humanized villains that are treated respectfully throughout the movie including having the chance of (the beginning of) redemption is odd given that John Lasseter frequently cites Hayao Miyazaki as an artistic inspiration. Miyazaki's movies have many famously recurring themes, one of which is that there are no villains, only sympathetic antagonists whose goals conflict with the main character's. Frequently, even some of the most cold-hearted and irresponsible characters in his movies have redeeming characteristics or end the film having backed off of their villainy by their own choice.

Let's take a tally of Miyazaki's films:
No villain: My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, The Wind Rises (yeah, yeah, you can view most of the main characters as villains given that they are helping fascist Japan's war effort but they are depicted sympathetically nevertheless, and the movie wrestles with the morality of their actions)
A villain who gets softened/redeemed by the end: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Porco Rosso ("villain" is more of a rival), Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Ponyo.
Unredeemed villain: Castle in the Sky (the movie also features several sympathetic antagonist characters)

Studio Ghibli's movies, more generally, have a similar pattern -- a lot of movies with no villains, conflict driven by characters who are trying their best, and redeemed or softened villains by the end.


Several of the interesting and/or sympathetic antagonists of Miyazaki.

Because Lasseter and others at Pixar claim to be inspired by Miyazaki, it's strange that many of their movies have unnecessary villains (e.g. WALL-E, Up, Coco, even Frozen (a Disney movie but with Lasseter as producer)) as well as unredeemed, sociopathic villains. There are some exceptions, notably Brave, which has some antagonists (the Witch and Mor'du, who each have their sympathetic aspects), and Inside Out, which has no antagonists (the deeply flawed main character is the closest thing to a villain).*† However, for the most part, their films often contain the opposite of a Ghibli film: unnecessary villains and villains with no interesting, admirable, or sympathetic traits. Rather than villains being humanized and fleshed out and multifaceted, the villains are the opposite -- hollowed out, empty, flat. They look like real people and act like real people but there's nothing else to them except sociopathy.

And the experience of watching such a character is the opposite of a Miyazaki film. Rather than the humanistic outlook of his films that forces people to understand and value the human parts of their enemies, what we get is the opposite: a cartoonification of the real world and seemingly realistic people therein into pure good and pure evil people with no interiority. The only thing we are meant to feel for them is delight when they are punished. It's creepy.

In making villains, I'd much rather Disney aim EITHER for pure fantasy with villains who are over-the-top, completely unexplained, and fun to watch, OR for the full Miyazaki treatment, of villains who you can care for, who have interesting things going on in their lives, and whose (sometimes intimate) relationships to the main characters are respected. For example, even though Frollo is a deeply evil and chilling villain, there is something there to the character. He is sincere in his faith and in his goodness, and his flaw (in his mind) is his falling in love -- something that the viewer can see as a humanizing trait rather than a flaw, but which Frollo can't. He manages to be interesting and sympathetic even while being a genocidal murderer. In addition, his relationship with Quasimodo is respected: despite the fact that he's a genocidal maniac, he is also to Quasimodo a father and someone he trusts. Even as Frollo goes off the rails, Quasimodo is able to work up the courage to rebuke him, but not to betray him or use violence against him. Even when Frollo is at Quasimodo's mercy -- dangling from the top of Notre Dame by a cloth that Quasimodo holds in his hand -- Quasimodo's instinct is to hold on and not let go. And there are no comedic aspects to Frollo's death, just high drama.

I'd rather Disney pick between one of these options and lean into it, because, if you try to go for something in between the "pure fantasy villain" treatment and the "villains as actual people" treatment, you end up with something uncanny, where the villain seems outwardly like a real person except inwardly they are in fact an extremely flat, inscrutable villain who has nothing going on other than being evil (as is often the case with the many, many plot twist villains we've gotten under Lasseter).

So to summarize, the way a film handles its villain's narrative (the villain's backstory, motivation, characterization, and fate) shapes not only what people think of the villain as a character, but it also shapes (1) what people think of the heroes (especially when there is a reason for the hero to care about and want to help the villain but they inexplicably don't) and (2) the morality of the world depicted in the work as a whole -- for example, whether the work encourages people to empathize and understand their enemies, or whether it portrays the world and people as black and white, where the bad type of people have nothing else going on other than they're bad, and/or any amount of punishment to them is justified and gleefully undertaken, no matter how cruel or unusual.


* It's also odd that Pixar has struggled with having women protagonists, given that is another distinctive feature of Miyazaki's movies that is hard to miss... That's completely unrelated to the topic of this post but it adds to my confusion whenever I see a Pixar director cite Miyazaki and Ghibli as a huge inspiration: I'm like, "But... then what are you taking from his movies??" It's also interesting that the main two exceptions to Pixar's "unredeemed villain" tendency are also exceptions to Pixar's "male protagonist" tendency...

† Toy Story 4 spoilers: Pixar finally managed to create a sympathetic AND redeemed villain in Toy Story 4. It's also the first Pixar movie that does not list John Lasseter as an executive producer. 🤔

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