There’s a theory that Gaston did it.
I’m going to vote for Shan Yu in Mulan. He (and his troops) destroyed a village, leaving behind some child’s little doll, which Mulan finds. I thought was the only Disney moment sadder than when Bambi’s mother dies.
In an early draft of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it’s Judge Doom who killed Bambi’s mother.
That’s The Rescuers, and the lady’s name was Madame Medusa.
:chin scratch: I may have to re-evaluate my assessment of Judge Doom. Here I thought he was a bad guy, maybe even worse than Bambi’s mom, yet now I learn he might have killed her, and brought an end to her reign of terror over the forest and her tortured son? Hmmm…
This is the kind of moral gray we need more of in children’s animated films!
Well, the Iron Giant drove Bambi’s mom straight to the hunters…
Wait, that’s not Diz-nee.
Never mind.
Director James Algar’s mass slaughter of lemmings in White Wilderness to fake a “mass suicide” claim has always stuck with me.
Now, let’s be honest. Before his epiphany, Kuzco was both a terrible ruler and person.
Yzma taking a shot at the big chair was, frankly, not a villain’s action. An argument could be made that she was attempting a coup that might have resulted in the betterment of all in the kingdom. She didn’t seem to rule for evil, she just wanted competence - herself over bad Kuzco - in the decision-making position.
Part of what undercuts Jafar’s villainy is that a lot of his evil actions are at least partially mirrored by other characters in the film. His big plan is to use the lamp to force Jasmine to marry him, thereby gaining control of the kingdom - which is basically Aladdin’s plot after he gets out of the cave, except Aladdin uses the lamp to appear noble to win the girl, while Jafar wants to use the lamp to marry the girl to make him noble. And Jasmine’s own dad is trying to marry her off to someone for political advantage anyway, so Jafar’s action aren’t that heinous, and IIRC, he’s pretty much only interested in her for her political connections. He’s not (IIRC - it’s been a while since I’ve seen it) drooling over her like Frollo does over Esmerelda in Hunchback.
Concur.
Jafar, for all his moustache twirling, wasn’t interested in Jasmine sexually or personally. He didn’t even make it weird that way until she’d turned on the sex appeal to distract him.
I consider myself fairly well Disney-educated, but wow. This thread is amazing!
We are watching all the Disney animated classics on Disney+.
So far just Snow White for us, but damn, that Queen is messed up. I guess real people do terrible things to be the prettiest in real life, which is kind of depressing.
As an aside, the creepy Prince kissing wasn’t quite as creepy as I was expecting it to be. They meet early in the film and had already fallen in love.
How about Ratigan?
His plan was to kidnap the Queen and replace her with a robot duplicate so he could take over the country. That’s already pretty evil.
But there’s also the details of his plan. After he kidnapped the Queen, he planned on killing her by feeding her to a cat. To get his robot duplicate built, he kidnaps an inventor and his young daughter gets the inventor to co-operate by threatening to kill the child. And after this plan is thwarted, he doesn’t go quietly. Instead he tried to kill the hero as revenge.
It’s worth noting that they are, right now, filming a live-action “Cruella” film (in the same mold as “Maleficent”) in Greenwich. So we may get a more in-depth motivation (or at least backstory) for her evilness.
Nasty but not evil.
Maleficent and Evil Queen are pretty up there, along with Jafar.
Walt was not a racist, not a misogynist, nor credit stealing. He did hate Commies, but wasnt a McCarthy-ite. He hated only that one Union boss who was a admitted Commie and called a strike even tho Walts employees were better paid than others in the field.
Yep, that one is pretty evil. I can’t figure out the economics of that one, honestly tho, donkeys are not that expensive.
Um. Song of the South? The NAACP repeatedly tried to get him to not do such a racist movie and he refused. Plus scenes in other movies that the black centaurs serving the white centaurs, stuff in Dumbo. Etc.
He deliberately underpaid his female animators less that his male ones since they were merely women.
Credit stealing? Ask any animator who worked for him back in the day. Lots of plotlines of movies were stolen without crediting the source.
Etc.
Meant to mention this earlier, but…
Iznogoud! I loved those books as a kid. Always wondered if they held up at all, or if they’d come across as cringingly racist nowadays.
Add Gaston to my list. He had no redeeming value and was another straight-up evil (I’d say incel, but I suspect quite a few of the village girls would be happy to sleep with him–he just wanted the one he couldn’t have).
All this talk of Gaston, while I don’t disagree that he was a villain, I can’t help but feel it overlooks the real villain of the story: the sorceress (or whatever) who cast a spell on the Beast. Not just the Beast, but all his servants, as if they were mere chattel, and should suffer with their master for all eternity if he couldn’t guilt-trip someone into loving him before the petals fell from the magic flower.
What an awful, awful witch. She didn’t kill anyone, so she’s definitely not at the top of my list, but she’s way worse than Gaston in my mind for her literal objectification of the Beast’s servants. One of them was just a child, for Christ’s sake!
Jonathan Chance:
No way. Remember when she was sitting on the throne before Kuzco caught her and fired her? “Your family has no food? You should have thought of that before you decided to become a peasant!” She was no better than he was to the kingdom.