Note: this was originally supposed to be The Snarky Quill’s first post but somehow, it kept getting pushed back until now. Don’t ask me why. It just did.
Disney is a word synonymous with many people’s childhoods in different parts of the world largely in part to the revolution of VCR, VCD and DVD. While Disney had been around as far back as 1938, it can be argued that the Mouse House company regained both its footing and dominance in the very animation industry it had helped revolutionise with a Second Renaissance in the final decade of the twentieth century. The creative spark burst into flame with The Little Mermaid and died around with Tarzan. That’s not to say it’s completely dead— it has enjoyed yet another resurgence that triumphed in 2013 with the rabid success of Frozen, culminating a total gross of over a billion dollars and a recent win for Best Animated Feature at the 86th Academy Awards.
A film isn’t different from a meal. Both require various ingredients to be skillfully and artfully brought together in a concoction that would be unimaginable without the contributions. Disney’s animated features tend to follow a standard recipe that is changed and modified to a certain degree to suit the film without too much deviation to make it unrecognisable. What ingredients, I hear you ask from across the screens that separate us? Oh, it’s easy: catchy musical numbers, a good-looking (white) hero and heroine, the mandatory sidekick usually voiced by a famous person and… the villain.
If you were to put these bad people on a spectrum… you might find that they tend to share some commonalities that make them a classic Disney villain.
1. Red/Black/Purple coloured attires
The dress code in invitations sent to Disney antagonists: “The theme is either black, red or purple.”
Maybe it’s part of some unspoken code in The Villain’s Bible or How To Be Evil 101 (a popular favourite with the bad guys of today) but the Colour Triad of Black, Red and Purple— black, namely— has remained an inexplicable standard of popular fashion choice for Disney villains. Don’t believe me? Take a look for yourself.
I get it: with most of the running time devoted to song-and-dance sequences, only a limited amount of screen time is given over to the evil doers. Clothes symbolizing characters’ natures aren’t novel and the use has been around for centuries. Disney villains, on the other hand, can be classified as either: (a) black- malevolent and brooding (b) red- flamboyant (c) purple- in pursuit of getting grandiosely drunk with power and being the alpha of whatever. If you scrutinise each villain’s nature with their choice of fashion, you’d start to notice the parallels. The rule, of course, doesn’t always apply. But I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find a Disney villain in other colours which the heroes haven’t taken.
2. Cool sidekicks
Everyone in a Disney film needs a sidekick to stop us from waking up to realise how empty the stories can be. Their primary purpose is comic relief and yet they tend to be the best marketable merchandising characters for children. When they side with the heroes, they. When they side with the villains, they provide moral support, encouragement, humour and sing catchy songs… and give the villain someone to conspire with in secrecy. Though these sidekicks are meant to be one-note (as is the fate of most Disney characters), some tend to display more depth to them than would be expected. The most prominent example actually takes place in a direct-to-video sequel (sadly enough) in which Jafar’s parrot, Iago, attempts with the greatest difficulty to prove his loyalty to Aladdin— a task not made any easier when Jafar returns in… The Return of Jafar.
3. The traits of smooth and cool villainy
After the sidekick, you know who the coolest character is? If you guessed “the villain”, you earn a prize of self-congratulations and the imagining of me giving you a proud pat on the back.
Pardon the cliché: but every story does need a great bad guy. The eccentric flamboyant ones are all the more charming and glib to the audience it is performing before (I can’t speak for the others but I loved the villains and wasn’t the least frightened of them). Smooth-talking antagonists laced with evil are still trending even today— one look at the popularity of Loki in The Avengers or Moriarty in BBC’s modern interpretation Sherlock is all it takes to confirm this. The guys admire their tenacity and debonair Machiavellianism and girls simply go crazy for them. They are ultimately the sort of people you’d invite to a party if only for the sole reason that they capture your attention more than the oft-vanilla yet handsome hero. I say the hero is good-looking in comparison as the Disney antagonists are slightly off-degree in the looks department.
And yet, despite all that…
4. Disney villains are single
Ain’t no rest for the wicked and no time for courtships! When was the last time a Disney villain started off the story a) married or at least b) in a relationship? Certainly, all the world domination/evil plans getting in the way of libido being put to good use but it’s a crafty lesson in teaching children that evil never gets laid— which promptly confuses hormone-raging teenagers in later years to question why the girl of their dreams is perpetually interested only in the aloof bad boy archetype instead of a nice guy like him.
The Snarky Quill 