The Post-villain Era of Animation
Few characters are as strikingly memorable as a classic Disney villain. Sleeping Beauty’s haughty sorceress, Maleficent; The Little Mermaid’s operatically campy sea witch, Ursula; The Lion King’s melodramatically evil Scar—each one so charismatic they tend to obscure their movie’s protagonist. (Quick: What is the princess’s name in Sleeping Beauty?)
But despite their prominence in classic films, animated villains have slowly disappeared from screens over the past decade. Recent movies such as Turning Red and Encanto certainly have drama, though instead of defeating a cackling evildoer, the main character now typically has an internal battle made external. The conflict in both films involves a broken relationship with a loved one, made cinematically epic by way of magical metaphor. Turning Red, like The Little Mermaid before it, arrives at its climax with the antagonist blown up to kaiju proportions. But while the 1989 Disney movie ends with behemoth Ursula skewered on a ship, the 2022 Pixar film finds its dramatic peak in a quieter moment of mother-daughter understanding.
Animation didn’t do away with villains all at once. Early iterations in the trend, such as Frozen, had classically good-and-evil setups, but subverted them as the films went on. And with Moana and later films, children’s animation shed predictable tropes of hero/villain plotlines while also centering cultures that don’t have much representation in the depths of the Disney vault.
Turning Red is the latest and certainly among the most culturally specific animated works. While films such as Raya and the Last Dragon create fantasy-pastiches of cultural context, Turning Red follows a real 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl living in Toronto in 2002—who just happens to turn into a giant red panda sometimes.
Spencer Kornhaber, Shirley Li, and Lenika Cruz discuss Turning Red and the state of the animated villain on an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast, The Review. Listen to their conversation here:
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The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.Turning Red
