Toward a Science of Disney Formulas

In a random conversation last night I found myself making the unfounded generalization that Disney villains all but universally fall off cliffs. Since this is, in fact, a topic I return to fairly frequently, I decided to do some actual research to back this sweeping statement up. It turns out that it's very close to entirely accurate -- or at least, of the Disney villains who die, falling from a height is by far the most common fate.

This little study accomplishes nothing, save that now when I make this generalization, it will not be unfounded.

The sample here is of the list commonly referred to in Disney's own promotional material as 'the Disney Classics', as cited on Wikipedia. It does not, therefore, include direct-to-video releases such as Return of Jafar, or any of the TV-show related features such as Duck Tales: the Movie. I departed from the Classics list to exclude Disney's in-house CGI films (Dinosaurs, Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons and Bolt) because I don't feel like dignifying that twaddle, although I have included several rather floppy conventional animations like The Black Cauldron and Home on the Range despite the fact that nobody cares about them. It's my blog and I'll be arbitrary if I want to.

Several of the Classics are collections of vignettes rather than feature-length stories: Fantasia, Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music, Fun and Fancy Free, Melody Time and Fantasia 2000. While some of these vignettes do have villains, going through and analysing all of them is just a tiny step beyond my level of obsession, so these films are also off the table.

With all of those caveats dealt with, the Disney animated canon falls into a surprisingly short list of categories when sorted according to 'what happens to the villain':

1. Stories With No Particular Villain

These films certainly do have antagonists in them, but no singular Bad Guy instrumental to the plot in the way that, for instance, Captain Hook is central to Peter Pan or Jafar to Aladdin.

• Dumbo. The 'villains' in this story are basically human indifference and unexpected prejudice on the part of elephants. These abstract principles do not fall off a cliff.
• Bambi. Technically the major villain, Man, does survive, but it's a little hard to take seriously an entire species as antagonist outside of a Gremlins or Starship Troopers kind of scenario.
• Lady and the Tramp
• The Sword in the Stone. Mad Madam Mim, while a memorable villain in her own right, doesn't serve any particular purpose in the plot of this film except to fill out about twenty minutes two-thirds of the way in. If one chooses to regard her as the real villain of the movie, it should be shelved below in the 'Villain survives' category.
• The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
• Special Mention: Pinocchio. Technically this film also lacks any central villain, but it features two menaces so imposing (and frankly terrifying) that I think it qualifies for category 2.

2. The Villain Survives

This is actually the most common fate of Disney villains. Although the sometimes rather graphic and striking violent deaths tend to stick more in the mind, by numbers most Disney villains are alive at the end of their films, albeit often under conditions of humiliation that might make them wish otherwise.

• Pinocchio. As mentioned above, this film doesn't technically have a central villain, but Stromboli and Monstro are definitely classic villains deserving of mention. However, Pinocchio does not defeat either of them; his victory is merely in escaping.
• The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Technically this is a vignette film, but with only two sections it's not quite so much bother to look at them separately. Mr. Toad's major antagonists are merely driven out of Toad Hall, but the Ichabod Crane segment has the interesting distinction of being the only Classic in which the villain survives but the protagonist dies! (Or at least, vanishes from mortal ken; we're certainly not given much reason to be optimistic about his fate.)
• Cinderella. In this film the Wicked Stepmother escapes one of the nastier fates in the history of fairy tales.
• Alice in Wonderland. It's debatable whether dissipating as part of a dream qualifies as 'dying' or not, but in any case, nothing happens to the Queen of Hearts on her own plane of reality.
• 101 Dalmatians
• The Jungle Book
• The Aristocats. Edgar the evil butler gets shipped to Timbuktu in a crate, which probably wouldn't be healthy for a non-cartoon middle-aged man, but in the context of the film it hardly seems lethal.
• Robin Hood
• Aladdin. Being trapped for eternity in a small vessel with the voice of Gilbert Gottfried certainly qualifies as a fate worse than death, but as the DTV sequel Return to Jafar both implies and demonstrates, the villain in this movie does not die.
• Pocahontas
• Hercules. Hades is last seen being dragged into the depth of the River Styx by screaming vengeful souls, but as a God he's probably not going to die of it.
• The Emperor's New Groove. Yzma has the distinction of being the only villain on this list to fall down a waterfall and survive.
• Lilo & Stitch
• Home on the Range. Haven't actually seen it, but according to the Wikipedia summary, the villain is arrested rather than killed.
• Special Mentions: Peter Pan and The Rescuers. In both of these films the villain is technically alive when last seen, but in immediate danger of being eaten by crocodiles. I suppose the viewer is free to imagine either that Hook and/or Madame Medusa eventually escape, or that they are messily devoured, as it pleases one.

3. Villain Falls From a Height

• Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It's rather a deus ex machina ending, in that the ultimate downfall of the Witch (no pun intended, though it is both symbolic and literal) results from no action on the part of the heroes whatsoever -- nor really, from any action of the villain, either, except inasmuch as she chose to stand atop a promontory during a rainstorm.
• The Fox and the Hound. Sort of. The actual central antagonist, the hunter Slade, survives the film with no worse than a broken leg. However, the climax of the film features a battle with an imposingly violent bear, who is driven off a cliff by Tod the fox.
• The Great Mouse Detective. Ratigan falls off a clock.
• The Rescuers Down Under. McLeach goes over a waterfall -- after escaping being eaten by crocodiles, as if to show that he's badder of ass than Captain Hook or Madame Medusa (editor's note: he is not).
• Beauty and the Beast. Gaston falls off a castle.
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Frollo falls from the roof of Notre Dame, despite having been rescued from the roof edge only moments before by Quasimodo. Note that given the animate nature of the gargoyles in this movie, Frollo's fall may be the result of deliberate action by one of the statues, but this is left ambiguous in the film.
• Tarzan. Technically Clayton doesn't die from falling, so much as from having a vine wrapped around his neck at the time, but he does both fall off a thing and die. In the innocent-hero vein, note that Tarzan makes a strong effort to warn this cretin of the danger he's in.
• Treasure Planet. This film comes very close to having no central villain, since Long John Silver is the central antagonist but far from being a clear-cut Bad Guy. However, the lead among the mutinous pirates, Mr. Scroop, is both thoroughly dastardly and unnervingly menacing, and with his fate, this film shows the unusual variation of a villain tumbling upward into the depths of space. 'Upward' relative to the ship's usual plane of gravity, that is.
• Special Mention: The Lion King. The fate of Scar presents two ambiguities -- one of them, whether he counts as a villain dying by a fall, and the other, whether his death can be considered a deliberate act on the part of the hero. Simba does, quite deliberately, flip Scar over the edge of a cliff, but it's not a very high cliff and the fall itself is nonlethal...it just so happens that at the bottom there is a pack of angry hyenas ready to rip the old creep to shreds. For my current purposes, I'm not going to score Lion King in either the 'dies by a fall' or 'dies by other means' categories.

4. Villain Dies by Other Causes

This would be a simple catch-all category, except that it contains the only completely unambiguous, entirely certain acts of murder on the part of a heroic character in the entire Disney Classic canon -- and those two acts have some peculiar similarities.

• Sleeping Beauty. Murder Number One. Prince Charming throws a sword into the heart of Malificent after she transforms herself into a large dragon. No ambiguity here; the Prince kills the villain. I'm certainly not saying that he's wrong to do so -- she is after all both a villain and, at the time, a motherfucking dragon -- just that it makes him close to entirely unique in the Disney Classic collection.
• The Black Cauldron. A little bit of ambiguity here. Clearly the actions of a heroic character -- Gurgi, not The Hero but definitely a Good Guy -- lead directly to the destruction of the Horned King, but it's kind of a 'destroying the guy's magical power' rather than a direct physical attack on his actual body. I have to be honest though: I don't actually remember the ending of The Black Cauldron and nobody online seems prepared to discuss it in the kind of detail that would answer the question "What happens to the Horned King?". Readers who do remember the end of this third-least-popular of all Disney films are welcome to correct my error in the comments, but for the moment I'm going to count it as a simple 'Villain Dies of Other Causes' and have done with it.
• Oliver and Company. Sykes crashes his car into the front of a train. No possible blame attached to our heroes.
• The Little Mermaid. Here's where this gets interesting (sorry to wait till this far down on a long post to do so). The second of only two villain deaths in the entire Disney Classic canon that are, without any question or room for debate, deliberately the result of an heroic character taking action with the intent and result of causing death, and the situation is nearly identical: the female magic-user has transformed herself into a giant monster, and the Prince stabs her in the heart.
  Okay, kiddies, the symbolism of the villain falling from a height is pretty damn obvious. Thing is, so is the symbolism of a Prince stabbing the female villain through the heart with a long thin stabby thing. It's just hard to wrap the mind around the notion of someone personally equipped to apply that symbolism directly ever getting into a position to make serious decisions regarding the ending of a Disney movie. I mean, really?
  Sure, The Little Mermaid is quite probably the single most sexually charged Disney Classic, but still...really? It's hard to see how that got through any meeting of more than four adults in position to authorize these things.
  Okay, anyway. Onward.
  
• Mulan. It's open to debate whether Mulan deliberately kills Shan Yu here, but she certainly does lure him into a position to be blown up by some imposing damn fireworks.
• Atlantis: the Lost Empire. Okay, I've watched the end of this several times and I'm still not sure what exactly happens to the bad guy.
  There's a villain who falls, but she doesn't appear to die from it, unless maybe her final badass line in the movie is supposed to be her last words. Then the main bad guy is somehow turned into a blue statue, by direct action of the protagonist, except that seems to be less a killing stroke and more of a give-the-guy-superpowers move. Then the bad guy hits some propellers and...I guess blows up...I'm just going to score this as a 'Villain Dies By Other Means' and have done with it, save to note that this film is just plain different from the rest of the Disney canon -- in the same sense that it would be weird if Reservoir Dogs were a Spielberg production. The Hispanic woman's lips appear to be an independent character in their own right, she seems to have snuck in from a Bakshi film, it's unclear why Father Guido Sarducci is here, and...I'm through talking about this movie.

So there you have it. By a score of 9 to 6 -- among the non-survivors -- Disney villains show a marked propensity for falling off of things, usually as victims of their own clumsiness-slash-hubris. If you want to conclude that the Disney Classic corpus as a whole has a 'message', it might be rendered as "If you have problems with a bad person, just concentrate on surviving until they fall off of something tall. Unless it's a sorceress, in which case wait for her to turn into a giant monster and then get a Prince to stab her in the heart."

5. P.S. I Don't Know

For the sake of completeness I must admit that I'm not too sure of the fates of the villains in these movies, since I haven't seen them and the Wikipedia summaries are not entirely clear on what happens to them. If you happen to know which category either of these films ought to go into, feel free to drop a comment and clue me in.

• Brother Bear
• The Princess and the Frog
  UPDATE 12-29-10: I have seen this movie since composing the article, and in fact it's rapidly shot up onto my favorites list. The fate of Dr. Facilier is moderately ambiguous, in that one hopes, for his sake, that he's dead when it's done -- because otherwise he's trapped in a statue for all eternity, and his sculpted face sure looks unhappy with the prospect. In any case, the heroine's actions lead directly to his failure, but she neither intends nor enacts his (possible) death.
  There is a very interesting note here, however: after Mulan, this is only the second film on the entire list in which the heroine, not her male love interest/platonic friend, takes the action which defeats the villain. Tiana just plain works harder to achieve her happy ending than any other female lead in the Classics list, and when she does fall into the clutches of the villain she rescues herself, which damn few women in the entire history of film -- or even in the history of literature -- have ever done (she is briefly imprisoned earlier in the film by lesser villains, but she is an active agent in making her escape; she has the help of the Prince in that scene, but it's hard to believe that she wouldn't have come up with something if he hadn't been there).
  Including her in the 'Princess' marketing line borders on insult; Tiana's proper place would be sitting those other fluffheads down and giving them a good sharp lecture on the value of hard work, self-sufficiency, and not waiting for some man to come along and fix everything for the sake of her pretty face.

Note also that throughout the above article, these conclusions are based entirely on memory, supplemented by Wikipedia summaries. I may be wrong about some of these scenes.