"You poor simple fools."
Villains in Disney movies tend to fall into two categories --
they’re either exiled outcasts,
"As long as Maleficent's domain, the Forbidden Mountains,
thundered with her wrath and frustration."
or powerful tyrants.
"Anyone who so much as looks at an Indian
without killing him on sight
will be tried for treason and hanged."
And if we look more closely,
we notice a really interesting pattern among Disney villains:
which end of this power spectrum they fall on
is inversely related to whether the hero needs
to embrace their responsibility,
"You're our only hope."
or accept their individuality.
"I want much more than this provincial life."
So let’s unpack that a little more --
if the villain is an outcast,
the hero is a “chosen one” with a grand, usually royal, fate.
The hero has to learn to accept the social responsibility,
even burden, of that fate.
But if the villain is a tyrant, the hero is an outcast,
and the hero learns to stand up for what makes them different.
This patterns makes a lot of sense because the antagonist of the story
is there to oppose the hero -- the yin to the hero’s yang.
Fundamentally, the villain in Disney movies is always going to
symbolize the central conflict in the hero’s life.
The way in which the hero and the villain oppose each other
tells us the deeper moral that we can take away from the story.
So let’s look more deeply at our two categories
of how Disney villains relate to power.
"Magic Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?"
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In the Disney universe,
a villainous outcast has been driven away from a wholesome society
because of the villain's greed, ambition or vanity.
Their isolated evil poisons an otherwise just world.
This is often conveyed visually through a stark difference
between where the villain resides, and the rest of the kingdom.
The landscape itself sequesters the villain away
and keeps the villain separate from the lush world of our hero.
"What about that shadowy place?"
"That's beyond our borders; you must never go there, Simba."
The Lion King, Wreck-It Ralph, Tangled, and Sleeping Beauty
all feature an outcast villain, and a hero with a royal destiny.
In The Lion King, Scar’s otherness shows
he's fundamentally unsuited to the throne.
“Be Prepared” uses fascist imagery of Scar looking down on an army of hyenas,
taken almost directly from Nazi propaganda films.
These visuals make us uncomfortably aware that Scar’s outsider status
stems from his belief in his own superiority.
"I'm surrounded by idiots."
He literally places himself above the crowd,
and he wants to be king to rule over others
whom he doesn’t respect,
whereas a true king leads for the good of his people.
"Everything you see exists together, in a delicate balance.
As king, you need to understand that balance,
and respect all the creatures from the crawling ant
to the leaping antelope."
At the beginning of the film, young Simba thinks being king
means doing whatever you feel like.
"Free to do it all my way!
Oh, I just can't wait to be king!"
Then, after he learns that being king really means the death of his father,
Simba spends most of the film running from his destiny --
thus switching roles with Scar to become the character in exile.
But Simba comes to recognize the selfishness
inherent in putting his own desires above the needs of his pride.
"So why worry?"
"Because it's your responsibility!"
He has to do what he doesn’t feel like doing
and return as the rightful ruler, to save his kingdom.
In Wreck-It Ralph,
King Candy/Turbo seizes control of Sugar Rush
in a Scar-like fashion:
he rewrites the game’s code to make himself king.
"Vanellope was a racer until King Candy tried to delete her code."
"Tried to delete her code?"
Together, Ralph and Vanellope defeat him by understanding their larger duty
to their respective games:
Vanellope as a racer, and Ralph as a scripted “bad guy.”
“I'm bad, and that’s good.
I’ll never be good and that’s not bad.”
Tangled and Sleeping Beauty also have two ostracized villains
who try to interfere with their hero’s right to rule --
Mother Gothel and Maleficent.
"I really felt quite distressed at not receiving an invitation."
"You weren't wanted."
"Not wa--"
In both cases, the villain’s banishment becomes the hero’s.
These girls grow up hidden away from the world,
assuming they’re meant to spend their lives as isolated outsiders.
"I like it in here, and so do you."
But as they overcome their villains, they see that it’s not right
to be apart from society dreaming their lives away,
if they have a bigger purpose and something to offer the greater good.
The Princess and the Frog has a comparable hero-villain dynamic.
Tiana overthrows the greedy, money-obsessed outcast Dr. Facilier.
and comes to see that supporting her loved ones
is more important to her than chasing her personal ambitions.
"It's the only way to get to your dream."
"My dream?
My dream wouldn't be complete without you in it."
The other type of villain is the tyrant villain,
who exploits a position of power.
While an outcast villain exists in the margins of an ethical world,
a tyrant villain exists within social structures
that are evil and corrupt.
Our tyrannical villain symbolizes these evil structures,
and carries out their unjust values.
The only hero to stand up to a villain like this is a rebel,
someone who is fiercely, authentically themselves,
and doesn’t conform to an unfair, immoral society.
"How dare you defy me?"
"You speak of justice yet you're cruel to those
most in need of your help."
So in Disney movies with tyrant villains,
the heroes are the outcasts,
it stands to reason that an unjust world
rejects a hero in the same way a just world rejects a villain.
The tyrannical villain uses power
to hurt and belittle marginalized members of society.
In Beauty and the Beast,
Gaston represents all the hypermasculine, regressive standards
that oppress outsiders like Belle and the Beast.
"It's not right for a woman to read.
Soon she starts getting ideas and thinking."
Gaston’s defeat symbolizes the dismantling of
a rigid, backwards society that can’t accept change.
In The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
Frollo uses his power and religion to spread hatred.
And he keeps Quasimodo, our outsider hero,
locked in a tower.
As a gypsy, Esmeralda is also an outcast who rebels against oppression.
“Silence!”
“Justice!”
She even explicitly sings
“God help the outcasts...”
In Aladdin, the evil power-hungry Jafar represents a society
that punishes Aladdin for being poor,
"You are a worthless street rat.
You were born a street rat,
you'll die a street rat, and only your fleas will mourn you."
and won’t let Jasmine choose who she wants to marry.
"The law says you must be married to a prince."
When Aladdin defeats Jafar, this symbolizes toppling
a corrupt way of ruling --
and it leads to overturning the outdated laws
that have kept Aladdin and Jasmine apart.
"It's the law that's the problem."
In Pocahontas,
Governor Ratcliffe shows us the evil inherent in imperialism.
"But mark my words, Wiggins,
when King James sees the gold these peasants unearth,
success will be mine."
It takes Pocahontas’s act of rebellion --
saving John Smith --
for both sides to see the violence and cruelty
they've been perpetuating.
"From this day forward, if there is to be more killing,
it will not start with me."
In these stories, our heroes are outsiders
because they aren’t allowed to authentically be themselves
within the confines of oppressive societies.
"That stupid law!
This isn't fair!
I love you."
So while the moral of our exiled villain stories
is to put the needs of the community above your own,
these tyrant villain stories present the equal and opposite moral.
If society is wrong in some way,
it’s your responsibility to be a revolutionary
who fearlessly goes against the grain,
and challenges evil in the world around you.
A few Disney villains combine elements of both categories
to better oppose their hero.
The Little Mermaid is the quintessential story
of striving to be yourself in a society that won’t allow it.
"I'm 16 years old.
I'm not a child anymore."
"Don't you take that tone of voice with me, young lady!"
So based on our current theory,
the villain should be one of the tyrannical variety,
bent on suppressing Ariel’s individuality.
But that's not the case: Ursula is an exiled villain.
"And now, look at me: wasted away to practically nothing,
banished and exiled and practically starving."
In Ariel’s mind, her father Triton is the bad guy,
since he’s the one who doesn’t want her
getting close to humans.
"Contact between the human world and the mer world is strictly forbidden.
Because Ariel has misunderstood who the villain in her story really is,
she gets seduced by Ursula, who claims to be like her.
Ursula is supposedly an outcast who helps other outcasts.
"Poor unfortunate souls, in pain, in need."
But in reality, Ursula is an outcast like Scar:
the outsider who wants to rule for selfish reasons.
So Ariel's journey has some elements of Simba’s--
in that she realizes her greater purpose in society;
it’s just that she knows she belongs in a different society
than the one she was born into.
"Wish I could be part of that world."
So in this story, having the “soft antagonist” of her father
allows her to become self-actualized,
while Ursula as the dark outsider villain
is a foil to Ariel and her pure-hearted desire
to be herself for the right reasons.
Mulan also combines elements
of both the outcast villain and tyrannical villain stories.
The villain is Shan Yu, the leader of the Hun army.
He’s an outcast in the sense that he is a rebel force
going up against an established government.
But he does have something of the tyrant’s power --
he’s the leader of a gigantic army with considerable force behind it.
"Tell your emperor to send his strongest armies.
I'm ready."
Mulan herself straddles the same sort of middle ground:
she seems like an outsider hero,
in that she takes her destiny into her own hands
by joining the army.
And she doesn’t conform to her society’s gender expectations.
"Mister, I'll make a man out of you!"
But unlike an outsider hero,
her goal isn’t to assert herself and fight an evil society.
Her goal is to earn honor and take her rightful place
as part of something bigger than herself,
much like our “chosen one” heroes.
Thus her multiple, complex desires
make her both an “outcast” and a “chosen one,”
and her villain is likewise a mix of the outcast and the tyrant.
So what’s the larger lesson we take from all this?
Some of these movies seem to tell us
we should put the good of the community before our own desires.
Others seem to encourage the exact opposite --
to be boldly yourself in spite of society.
But really, these are two interconnected lessons.
We need to stay true to who we are,
no matter what society thinks;
and we also need to accept the responsibility to serve society,
no matter how difficult that is.
In most of our lives,
we’ll probably feel a bit more like Ariel or Mulan --
facing both tyrannical and outcast villains,
living in societies
that are both wrong and right in different ways.
So we need to figure out that balance of
how to express ourselves and challenge what’s wrong,
while also engaging with our community and contributing what we can.
Since that’s all very nuanced and complex and hard to pin down,
we can't help thinking it would be a whole lot easier
if we each got one great Disney villain
to perfectly crystallize our purpose in life.
"Great, now I'm the bad guy."
Hi, guys.
Susannah and Debra here.
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