Where Are the Disney Villains of Yesterday?

When I was growing up in Turkey, I obsessed over Walt Disney movies even though I

couldn’t really see them: We had no VCRs — hell, we barely had one TV channel — and
theatrical rereleases didn’t make it to our shores. So instead of seeing the movies, I’d listen
to soundtrack LPs and pore over1 their covers, which featured images from the films. But
among those LPs, there was one cover I couldn’t bear 2 to look at. It
featured Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, seemingly mid-flight, her massive cloak
aflame; too scary for my 6-year-old eyes.

Actually, I’m lying. I did look at that LP cover, repeatedly. But then I’d turn it over and
try to keep it away from me. I was probably worried that at some point it might come alive,
that Maleficent might jump off the cover and … well, do what to me, I don’t know, as I
hadn’t seen the movie yet. There was a magnetism to her, even confined to that one still
image.

Years later, I did finally see Sleeping Beauty, and the real thing didn’t disappoint. Here
was a fearsome, elegant, terrifying villain. The film didn’t dare to humanize her, but you
could get lost trying to plumb the depths3 of her sadism. At one point, she reveals to her
captive Prince Phillip that she intends, a hundred years from now, to release him — so that
he can, as an old, dying man, finally go and wake up his betrothed4, the still-young and
slumbering Princess Aurora, thus putting the lie to the notion that “true love conquers all.”

Maleficent was special, but she also belonged to a long line of classic Disney villains who
were really villains. Whether wizards, pirates, evil queens, or animals, these characters
wallowed in5 their depravity. Some of them actually summoned the forces of darkness.
Others just snarled and connived6 as they hatched their evil plans. The Evil Queen in Snow
White asks that Snow White be killed and her heart brought back as proof. Captain Hook
makes little children walk the plank. The Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland is a mad,
unpredictable tyrant fond of beheadings. Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmatians wants to skin
puppies for their fur. Puppies!
1
pore over something: leer cuidadosamente
2
can’t bear: no poder soportar
3
plumb the depth: sondear, explorar en profundidad
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betrothed: prometida
5
wallow in: complacerse, regodearse
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connive: complotar

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 Walt Disney and his writers usually didn’t dream up these villains: people like the
Brothers Grimm and Lewis Carroll did. But the Disney folks did, once upon a time, have a
special understanding of how to turn these villains into characters that could haunt your
dreams — whose pictures kids might turn away from, even while nursing a strange
fascination with them.

Quick, try to remember: who was the last great, genuinely terrifying Disney villain? It

seems like it’s been a while. Frozen has a duplicitous7 Prince and an opportunistic Duke of
Weselton, but they don’t really count; if anything, one of that movie’s strengths was that
the character who might traditionally have been the villain, Elsa the Snow Queen, was
actually one of the film’s heroes.

Meanwhile, the apparent bad guys in many films of recent date have tended to be more
multi-dimensional. Pixar villains, like Lotso from Toy Story 3 and Syndrome from The
Incredibles, often come armed with backstories: they’re less forces of evil and more like
broken souls who went astray8. On the non-Pixar front, Doctor Facilier from The Princess
and the Frog was a forceful attempt at an old-fashioned villain — a variation on Jafar
from Aladdin, it seemed — but he didn’t feel particularly threatening. Unlike Jafar, he was
more of a goofball.

Now, to be fair, Disney Villains are still a thing. In fact, they’re a whole franchise, not

unlike the Disney Princesses, fueling games, theme-park attractions, short films, etc. But
unlike the princesses, who have been going pretty strong of late with Elsa and Anna and
Rapunzel from Tangled, the villains have had a marked drop-off9. Who has nightmares
about the Duke of Weselton?

There are many reasons for this. Disney has embraced reinterpretation in many of its
recent films, and has done well by it. And much of this reinterpretation is welcome, and
long overdue; Frozen’s upending10 of clichéd romantic love stories being a prime example.
And one way to reinvent and modernize these stories is to try to understand the villains,
sometimes even to redeem them. Consider Mother Gothel in Tangled: she’s there in the
original fairy tale, of course, but in the film, she’s more a selfish, manipulative, bad-mom

7
duplicitous: falso, hipócrita
8
go astray: perder el camino
9
drop-off: caída, desmoronamiento
10
upend: cambiar drásticamente

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type than a real witch. Indeed, part of what makes Tangled so captivating is this bizarre
relationship — a kind of abusive co-dependency — Gothel has with Rapunzel.

So Disney’s recent move away from classic villains is, on some level, a good thing, in that
it allows them to delve11 into some heretofore12 unexplored types of relationships, and to
find psychological complexity where once there was none.

But I can’t help but feel like something has been lost as well. The Evil Queen, Maleficent,
Shere-Khan. We didn’t spend a lot of time getting to know them. They were mysterious,
elemental, totemic. And so, we could fill them with our own fears. They were charismatic
enough that we brought our own complexity to them. These bad guys also put our heroes
into sharper focus: try to imagine Snow White without the Evil Queen, Peter Pan without
Captain Hook.

Maybe a good example of what I’m talking about can be found in a Disney movie that
tries to borrow its power from a movie Disney didn’t make. Watching Oz the Great and
Powerful, didn’t you sometimes just miss the Wicked Witch of the West? Did learning her
backstory in the prequel — that she was an innocent driven to desperation and revenge by
the romantic coldness of a man and the manipulations of her older sister — make her more
or less terrifying?

Indeed, the best part of the trailers for Oz the Great and Powerful was the shot where we
briefly saw the form of the Wicked Witch appear in a cloud of smoke. She might have been
spectral, incipient, but we all knew who she was; even those of us who hadn’t seen The
Wizard of Oz in decades recognized that form instantly.

And similarly, Maleficent would be nothing if not for, well, Maleficent. If that character

hadn’t been so compelling once as a villain, she wouldn’t be compelling now as a
protagonist. In fact, after coming back from Angelina Jolie’s movie I felt compelled to put
in my DVD of Sleeping Beauty to see the old Maleficent, the terrifying one. There she was,
sneering, proud, summoning the forces of evil and cackling her way through this beautiful
fairy tale. I have just watched an entire new movie about her, but I missed her more than
ever.

11
delve: ahondar, profundizar
12
heretofore: hasta este momento

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Reading comprehension
Answer the following questions about the article:

1. Who inspired fear in their childhood days according to the author of the article? ______
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2. What is this villain like? ___________________________________________

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3. Which Disney villain held the title of "most terrifying" during your childhood?_______
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4. Where can we find two villains that aren't really accounted for due to being irrelevant to
the plot? ________________________________________________________
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5. What is happening with villains nowadays? ______________________________

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6. Why is Frozen considered to have set a precedent for Disney villains to come? _______
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7. How does the lack of mystery surrounding the villains affect the perception we have of
them now? ______________________________________________________
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8. Why is Maleficent the protagonist of a movie nowadays? What are the author's
impressions about her evil personality? ___________________________________

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Writing
Write a short paragraph about your experience with former Disney villains. What do you
think of Disney villains as of now? Do you consider interesting to know their backstories or
do you prefer them to be a little mysterious?

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