Tom Smyth at Vox asks a good question: what happened to Disney villains? Why have the company’s recent offerings shied away from the sorts of scenery-chewing baddies that audiences love to hate?
“It’s been quite some time since Disney has produced an antagonist as brazenly wicked as Ursula” from the original Little Mermaid, Smyth writes. “That kind of unbridled villainy has become a relic of sorts in the animation studio’s latest original storytelling, which might have you wondering: Where are all the bad guys?”
He cites as an example Frozen II, a movie whose plot flaws I wrote about as an illustration of the corrosive effect that wokeness and left-politics have on the creative mind.
As Smyth frames it:
The docuseries Into the Unknown: Making Frozen II follows the last year of the film’s production, and the challenges that the creative team faced in crafting a clear narrative. With only months to go until the film’s release date, they were still unsure of who the voice was that was calling Elsa, and feedback from repeated test screenings highlighted the story’s lack of clarity. In this case, fighting the abstract concept of “the elements” paired with the internal journey of finding one’s place proved very difficult to clearly depict on screen. It’s in an instance like this, where the story becomes muddled, that the value of having a villain is really seen.
Of course, the movie’s plot wasn’t about “the elements”; Disney ended up going with an anti-colonialist fable about how the main characters’ civilization was morally compromised and should be destroyed. You can make a good Disney film without an explicit villain (see Finding Nemo), but contrary to what Smyth suggests, the best Pixar films have mostly had memorable villains, as in Up or the Incredibles films.
Smyth, however, can’t seem to put his finger on the actual culprit: “why exactly did this change come about? Disney’s storytelling patterns have always evolved over time, but typically that evolution has been guided by (and can be traced back to) previous successes and failures.”
So close to getting it, and yet so far.