Post by Deleted on Apr 28, 2009 16:29:28 GMT -5
To be honest, I haven't seen Beauty and the Beast in over fifteen years, but it was one of those Disney Princess Movies type deals for me back in the day, and I have very little motivation to go see it again now XD
But, I dunno. At the risk of sounding like the 'zomg grit is bettar' niche of fanboys, the traditionally-animated Disney movies were really dark. Not oppressively so, not like a Frank Miller comic, but very subliminally and awesomely. While I won't argue that Disney has some rocking villains that transgress all eras, I feel like the ones from TLM on back were a lot more personal:
- Ursula steals Ariel's voice and convinces her to try and woo Eric, serving as an epic revenge scheme against King Triton, rather than outright killing him; she not only steals his daughter and her voice to obtain those means, but blackmails him into replacing Ariel's name with his own on the contract, forcefully (and cleverly) usurping him.
- Cruella DeVille wants to kill and skin puppies so she may personally own more fur coats[/i].
- Elmo St. Peters, though not really a villain, can be viewed as such for his job as a parts salesman; in The Brave Little Toaster, where the protagonists are all animated household appliances, watching somebody take apart another appliance, screws, wiring and all, is sorta like a guy watching another guy get murdered and cut to pieces. Kinda fucked up, right? ;D To make the imagery even better, the parting shot of that scene is oil from the appliance in question dripping down the vice used to hold it in place as it was taken apart, a very sly allusion to blood.
- Also in The Brave Little Toaster, the magnet in the garbage dump repeatedly goes after the protagonists after they escape the crusher, eventually going to such lengths as to put humans in physical danger in order to see the appliances destroyed.
- Captain Hook hates Peter Pan for feeding his hand to the crocodile - something Peter caused himself!
- The coachman in Pinocchio turns children into donkeys after letting them drink beer and smoke cigars. And if the resulting donkey can still speak, they're thrown into a pen with other talking donkeys and threatened with physical violence. He sells them to hard labor work in salt mines. THAT is fucked up, my friends.
- Shere Khan and Kaa aren't really villainous either, like Elmo St. Peters - Shere Khan is just incredibly territorial, as tigers are, and Kaa is a ssssssneaky sssssnake. Kaa also has the advantage of being a bumbling dope ;D
- Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham from Robin Hood are also delightfully idiotic buffoons; John is trying to usurp his brother's power in his absence, and meets a foil in the humble and pure Robin Hood, constantly reduced to sucking his thumb and clinging to a security item, while the Sheriff of Nottingham is just a gluttonous doofus.
- If you want me to go this far, Sark and the MCP from Tron (which is not animated film but come from the same era) are corporate tools that are intent on preventing Flynn and Tron from re-obtaining the legal copyrights to the game Space Paranoids, which Flynn had designed and made and had stolen from him.
- The hunter, Amos Slade, from the Fox and the Hound! Man, you want a psychological crotch-kick, come to this guy; he repeatedly forces Copper to hunt down Tod, even though the two become best friends. Eventually, though, Amos forces the hunt on in earnest, and shatters the friendship because of that.
Now, I look at those villains and I tip my hat to them; they're imperfect and for the most part they operate on a small scale, and a few of them (The Coachman) are genuinely unbalanced psychopaths. While I like Jafar, and Hades, and Scar, and most of the rest of the post-Aladdin lot, they're all the same song and dance; too-perfect villains with cardboard-cutout personalities and motives. Those three in particular are following Prince John's footsteps in trying to usurp a higher power, but at the same time their only flaws are uncovered only at the countdown of the movie, making them seem impervious otherwise: Jafar's greed, Hades' ambition and Scar's cowardice. Not bad traits to have in a character, but at the same time, an enjoyable or believable villain (the two do not necessarily go hand in hand) can appear flawed from the start.
And if they're like Prince John, an object of ridicule that can actually bring out the big guns when necessary, then they're insta-win.
But, I dunno. At the risk of sounding like the 'zomg grit is bettar' niche of fanboys, the traditionally-animated Disney movies were really dark. Not oppressively so, not like a Frank Miller comic, but very subliminally and awesomely. While I won't argue that Disney has some rocking villains that transgress all eras, I feel like the ones from TLM on back were a lot more personal:
- Ursula steals Ariel's voice and convinces her to try and woo Eric, serving as an epic revenge scheme against King Triton, rather than outright killing him; she not only steals his daughter and her voice to obtain those means, but blackmails him into replacing Ariel's name with his own on the contract, forcefully (and cleverly) usurping him.
- Cruella DeVille wants to kill and skin puppies so she may personally own more fur coats[/i].
- Elmo St. Peters, though not really a villain, can be viewed as such for his job as a parts salesman; in The Brave Little Toaster, where the protagonists are all animated household appliances, watching somebody take apart another appliance, screws, wiring and all, is sorta like a guy watching another guy get murdered and cut to pieces. Kinda fucked up, right? ;D To make the imagery even better, the parting shot of that scene is oil from the appliance in question dripping down the vice used to hold it in place as it was taken apart, a very sly allusion to blood.
- Also in The Brave Little Toaster, the magnet in the garbage dump repeatedly goes after the protagonists after they escape the crusher, eventually going to such lengths as to put humans in physical danger in order to see the appliances destroyed.
- Captain Hook hates Peter Pan for feeding his hand to the crocodile - something Peter caused himself!
- The coachman in Pinocchio turns children into donkeys after letting them drink beer and smoke cigars. And if the resulting donkey can still speak, they're thrown into a pen with other talking donkeys and threatened with physical violence. He sells them to hard labor work in salt mines. THAT is fucked up, my friends.
- Shere Khan and Kaa aren't really villainous either, like Elmo St. Peters - Shere Khan is just incredibly territorial, as tigers are, and Kaa is a ssssssneaky sssssnake. Kaa also has the advantage of being a bumbling dope ;D
- Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham from Robin Hood are also delightfully idiotic buffoons; John is trying to usurp his brother's power in his absence, and meets a foil in the humble and pure Robin Hood, constantly reduced to sucking his thumb and clinging to a security item, while the Sheriff of Nottingham is just a gluttonous doofus.
- If you want me to go this far, Sark and the MCP from Tron (which is not animated film but come from the same era) are corporate tools that are intent on preventing Flynn and Tron from re-obtaining the legal copyrights to the game Space Paranoids, which Flynn had designed and made and had stolen from him.
- The hunter, Amos Slade, from the Fox and the Hound! Man, you want a psychological crotch-kick, come to this guy; he repeatedly forces Copper to hunt down Tod, even though the two become best friends. Eventually, though, Amos forces the hunt on in earnest, and shatters the friendship because of that.
Now, I look at those villains and I tip my hat to them; they're imperfect and for the most part they operate on a small scale, and a few of them (The Coachman) are genuinely unbalanced psychopaths. While I like Jafar, and Hades, and Scar, and most of the rest of the post-Aladdin lot, they're all the same song and dance; too-perfect villains with cardboard-cutout personalities and motives. Those three in particular are following Prince John's footsteps in trying to usurp a higher power, but at the same time their only flaws are uncovered only at the countdown of the movie, making them seem impervious otherwise: Jafar's greed, Hades' ambition and Scar's cowardice. Not bad traits to have in a character, but at the same time, an enjoyable or believable villain (the two do not necessarily go hand in hand) can appear flawed from the start.
And if they're like Prince John, an object of ridicule that can actually bring out the big guns when necessary, then they're insta-win.