Disney's Twist Villains: Worst to Best

so Disney had a thing with twist villains for a while that they seemed to have mostly gotten over a trend that audiences have rolled their eyes at for years that I think gets a little bit too much flak but is understandably frustrating on the one hand a lot of movies that contain twist villains were mostly pretty good movies however in many of said movies the villain ended up being the least compelling part of it but it's not a problem as long as they serve their role in the story but twists are touchy as narrative devices when they work they're fantastic but when they're not they can suck all the energy out of a film especially if a plot or scene relies too heavily on them for impact like that con scene from into darkness is embarrassing and the reception can vary wildly and sometimes unfairly on factors aside from the actual film like audience age and film knowledge plus things like trailer spoilers or seeing movies in particular order isn't going to affect future generations as much as it does for people who saw it on first release okay that's true of like all films regardless and a twist doesn't live or die on whether or not it's guessable a good writer or filmmaker can take efforts to make it less so but it's not gonna be surprising onry watches anyway so it's way more important to have proper narrative setup and thematic cohesion something certain modern writers should be reminded of I mean the villain could be secretly revealed to be mr. Rogers that would be surprising but it wouldn't exactly make it a good twist there's also a little bit of leeway as to what counts as a twist villain like does gaston count because he's initially just irritated that slowly builds his way up to full-on monster does otto from wall-e counts it is a reveal but more in the plot than the character as he doesn't have much of one what about Gaby Gaby as a reverse twist villain or work from Atlantis because he's presented as an ally but he's also a linebacker in a military uniform on an archeology mission so of course he was gonna be the bad guy and even says as much halfway through heck when the team reveals that they're mercenaries the protagonist himself says that he's an idiot for not figuring it out syndrome sometimes gets put into this category which not sure about it is technically a reveal of a character to whom we were previously introduced but the prologue is more of an origin story of someone who grows into a villain rather than revealed to have been the one the whole time that might be splitting hairs though either way it's a very minor aspect to what is still one of Disney's best villains like the fact that they keep that fanboy enthusiasm throughout the whole movie is brilliant basically you can make cases for a variety of characters but I'm just gonna talk about the characters that I want to talk about like no one wants to talk about miles Axelrod and with what better formula to dissect it with them with a completely subjective ranking list and if you're wondering if I'll be ranking this by how good the villain as a villain is or how good the twist is yes meet the Robinson is possibly the best example of the villain being the worst part of the movie I don't think it's the weakest villain twist or in this case twists around a villain but a solid contender for Disney's worst villain Disney has made much more successful comedic villains not that there aren't a few funny lines but for as silly as this movie already is when it's focusing on the main cast bowler hat guy as he is most often presumed as he just takes the few extra steps into pure ridiculousness to be taken seriously as a threat to the point where revealing that the flying hat was the true mastermind all along is both the only answer that makes sense while also being extremely anticlimactic I like this movie more than most but this entire finale is basically a dream sequence that I just kind of wait to be over but then there's the movies other time-travel character reveals and for Disney's still only time-travel film they're fine for what is basically time travel 101 the two mysterious adult characters turn out to be the two major child characters one of the best twist tactics is disguising foreshadowing as something else or at least distracting from it with something like comedy the gravity falls premiere and Avengers 2 oddly are some of the best examples of this but to the scene where adult goob takes an interest in young goob is not funny nor provides any essential plot information so all I was thinking was why is this scene here other than to remind us that these characters exist as though they're gonna be important the set up of Louis's twist between hiding his identity from the family and never seeing the father and the reaction when they find out who he really is oh my god that scene is devastating altogether may appear to be too obvious but there are things they do to keep her mind away from it like a very casual way he talks about his father to Lewes without any sense of discomfort the funny blinkin you'll miss it brush away of what his dad looks like it was actually voiced by him holy crap I didn't know that also the fact that his dad has a different name not to say that this works perfectly in this film but another twist tactic is laying out all the clues and foreshadowing but withholding that one piece of information that makes it all fit together in this case the thing that distracted me from fully connecting the dots was just not knowing exactly how far into the future we were but once they laid out that bowler hat guy was goob yeah that narrowed down the timeframe a bit and what I can say about bowler hat goob is that he is still relevant to the themes his character is constantly preoccupied and obsessed with the past when the entire movie will absolutely not shut up about keep moving forward still probably Disney's weakest villain Calahan from big hero six is pretty much the villain that people point to when they talk about how much they don't like twist villains it's pretty clear to anyone who's seen even a handful of scooby-doo episodes when the person is behind a mask it's most likely going to be someone that you've already been introduced to so the candidates in this movie were pretty much one of two people and when everyone was absolutely positive that it's one of them big shock it turned out to be the other one okay he's presumed dead but we don't see a body so that's only a deterrent for so long another major factor will frequently reference as to how satisfying or believable a twist villain can be is character consistency callahan is initially presented as a caring attentive teacher but after the twist he just goes completely supervillain and doesn't care that one of his students died because of him or that he's continuing to attack and hurt children now part of this extreme personality shift plays into the movie's themes about handling grief Callahan is the shadow of our protagonist Hiro and what he could become if he lets his grief consume him though this shift would be slightly more viable if his daughter had died during the expo rather than some years ago but this is also a big hook on why twist villains are appealing from at least a message perspective it's showing that bad people don't always go around announcing how evil they are either in speech or in their look many of them look and act like average everyday people showing that any average person is capable of doing terrible things with the right motive and emotional imbalance and at least with the mast it's a really cool villain design that's something by Incredibles to the Disney twist villain trope had long since been established and mocked so it was also well expected and like big hero 6 it's another villain with a mask so guess who scooby-doo and Evelyn Devers was a pretty solid bet just from a couple of subtle bits of foreshadowing like contrasting her brothers literally wide-eyed innocence with her narrowed suspicious eyes how her brother was always standing in bright light and she was always in the shadows that her clothes gradually accumulated more black-and-white patterns as the movie went on right before the reveal she monologues basically exactly what the screen slaver just said and also the small fact that her name was Evelyn Dever however more than the fact that this twist wasn't a surprise the biggest complaints against her as a villain tended to be around the fact that her actions were somewhat contradictory if her goal was to tear supervillains down she put in an awful lot of legwork to build them back up again when she could have just jumped on the collateral damage argument it was also that the lengths of her plan feels a little bit extreme for her intentions again villain but this felt less like I just don't want us to rely on them that much then it was the much more prejudicial fear of they're too dangerous we have to kill them before they kill us this was basically bellwethers plan but in different paint also felt like the glasses were a bit of a dead giveaway however Evelyn is engaging and interesting as a character this is good personality consistency she does feel like she's the same character all throughout and she has a great look with a great voice who has great banter with Helen and an interesting philosophy in regards to a superhero society that again my hero is doing just a bit better give this a bellwether at least no one saw it coming that the criminal mastermind would be Mona Saperstein and not because there isn't any lead up though there is very little we see her being put upon whenever we cut back to her her various comments to Judy about little guys sticking together and of course when we see those RAM underlings that should have been a clue but this is another instance where the personality pulls a complete 180 this is reflected in her look showing how even a cute small sheep can be a stone-cold killer it's just it's a little easy to just go and then this character was secretly Hitler but that's selling it a little short plenty of people have risen to positions of power by exploiting hate it's just that most of them do it by stating it outright rather than this very elaborate conspiracy that she worked way too hard on if all she wanted to do was start a race war but in this case she was trying to prove that predators were inherently bad but bellwethers real crime as a movie villain is just that she's the least interesting thing about the movie she's in Nick and Judy's chemistry and banter is fantastic to the point that when the final act turns into an action scene it's a little disappointing but also that this is a movie about racism but we can't solve racism but we also still need to end the movie somehow with a victory so this will work bellwether is purely functional sets the mystery in motion provides a climax and otherwise we forget she exists the story's not about her Hanz I feel is the one people are the most mixed on kind of like frozen but even people who don't like him tend to agree with the idea of him frozen is a movie about addressing a number of princess tropes and here's a solid reason for why getting married to someone you don't know after one day may not be such a great idea the arguments against him is that his actions sometimes feel out of place with his ultimate goal and at worst feel like intentionally misleading the audience so that the twist is exceptionally shocking I don't think this is completely untrue and that his setup and foreshadowing could have been done better but I don't think it's terrible either one popular argument is if he just wanted to become King and kill Elsa it seems like there were numerous opportunities to do so and honestly I think that he came to arendelle with a relatively simple plan that was instantly derailed by the unexpected appearance of a potentially apocalyptic snow witch so from then on there were too many on certain variables for him to make any concrete moves without knowing the status of each sister how dangerous Elsa might be and with the Duke of another country also vying for control currently his best bet is still to marry Anna so for most of the movie he's playing it safe to achieve that goal that probably won't happen if he goes out on a recruitment mission that results in else's death it's not until the very end where Elsa is in prison and Anna is dying that he finally feels like he's in a secure enough position to make a move now did he himself need to go in the recruitment mission maybe not nor did he have to say lines like absolutely no harm is to come to the Queen and don't be the monster they fear you are and then there's the shots to which there was no reason for him to even go that far unless it was to deliberately screw with her or in this case the audience so this moment does come off as a bit self-aggrandizing there are some moments that come close to cheats but I also think there are moments that are done quite well and not just for the-- find my own place line like this shot where it looks like he's saving her it's actually the shot where he incapacitate her when anna complains about Elsa he responds with lines like I would never shut you out and I don't want her to hurt you this is a very sneaky manipulation tactic that real abusers use on their victims where they subtly draw lines between the victims and the rest of their support system in a way that casts doubt on them and makes him seem like he's the only trustworthy one and he's the only one that could understand her this is a great tactic even if it doesn't work also Elsa says she can't marry a man she just met and once they've dropped that trope awareness you know something has to go wrong but though I do have some leniency because the entire point of him is that he is a liar he is one of the worst members of the personality 180 club because it is just so exaggerated going from a maybe idealized but believable human character to a cartoonish monologuing supervillain just short of growing a moustache where before he was 110 percent committed to his bit now he's suddenly willing to half-ass it and bold prematurely because I guessed the idea of kissing Anna wasn't that repugnant to him I guess he didn't even want to risk reversing the curse or the writers just thought it would have been too much like what they did an enchanted okay I guess I'm just gonna trust the fact that no one else is gonna come check on her and also that no one will want to see the body once I tell everybody that she's dead you know what somewhat unimportant detail made this particularly disappointing to me Hans has way better chemistry with onna van Kristoff does let me clarify whatever chemistry Anna and Kristoff might have had because bickering equals chemistry and BS Movieland was doused in gasoline and set on fire by fixer-upper by doing the thing that terrible movies do and force two characters together by using outside characters to pressure them whereas hans and anna meet at a party and get along with each other that's a reasonable way that real relationships get started and yet despite all that I do think the general idea of giving him enough screen time so that the audience grows to really like and care about him so that they'll in honest sensation of blindsighted betrayal when he turns out to be a puppy kicker for the sake of drama and the message isn't invalid but only for this specific message all about how people can mislead you while also believing that if slightly more ingenuity had been put into his setup that sinking negative feeling that many came away with could have been balanced out with a slightly more satisfying payoff and true for the sake of the message he didn't necessarily have to be Joffrey a mere disagreement on how to handle Elsa could have accomplished the same just fine and but then I guess the finale wouldn't have the same punch so yeah mixed is the appropriate takeaway what's kind of fun about King candy is that you can argue that his art technically has three twists not terribly mind-bending ones but seeing him go through so many phases is part of what makes him so memorable at first King candy seems to just not like Penelope for the same reason the other racers don't like her because she's a glitch and they're all racist trash but then he has the in-depth talk with Ralph and explains how it's really for her good and the game overall and what's great about this scene aside from the fact that the scene is just amazing is that we're still pretty sure that he's up to something because we saw him access the cheat code we're just not entirely sure what but his explanation is so convincing that even if the audience doesn't fully believe him we can believe that Ralph believes him without us thinking that he's an idiot for doing so and then suddenly oh no he's secretly been a manipulative cracker-barrel this whole time again I don't think too many people are shocked that he turned out to be the bad guy but like in sports movies where you're 90% sure who will eventually win it's not the not knowing it's the not knowing how and it doesn't stop there because then he's revealed to be turbo from the other racing game granted at this point completely superfluous twist that does virtually nothing at this stage in the game aside from providing another surprise as well as systemic connection to row a bad guy that's really a good guy and a good guy or protagonist that is skunk well there is virtually no buildup to vanilla pees real identity feels like the build-up to this was a little on the nose as we needed an entire backstory for it to it do very little but it does provide another interesting layer to the general video game world and then he turns into the creepy giant bug hybrid which isn't really a twist it's just kind of nifty that King candy has now become Disney's Frieza so the twists here weren't exactly mind-blowing but they did make complete sense and king candy was an exceptionally enjoyable character that has a lot of presence in this film he's honestly one of my personal favorites now Moana is a bit of a different breed this time instead of an ally being revealed to be a villain it's a villain revealed to be a destination Petka is honestly more of an obstacle than a character but this twist is one of Disney's best ones mostly because it doesn't involve full characters it is brilliant in its simplicity the only thing that was really needed to set up this double take was to allude to the audience that's a fede and taka were two different entities which the prologue does expertly and then spend the rest of the movie hiding the spiral on her chest and that's all that they needed to do for the audience to fully comprehend what had happened plus ticka as a design is just spectacular now that's a villain you can make a 3d model of take notes children this is how you do a 180 turn face when it's properly prompted by something at first Charles Muntz seems to be a good-hearted man who's just happy to have company because in this moment that's how he actually feels it doesn't reveal how unstable he is until he believes his guests might be hiding the very thing that he spent his entire life searching for and this isn't his character being suddenly possessed by the ghost of Skeletor this is the same character reacting to a trigger and the other characters realizing just how long he's been going insane the only thing about this that's mildly questionable is that Karl looks older than he does and he watched him as a child but that is the definition of pulling hairs Charles in Lotso are different from the others because the reveals come much earlier so they spend more time as the film's actual villains so their effectiveness as villains isn't dependent on how unexpected they were and in lots those case it's aided that it's not this sudden drop it's a slow burn realization that there's something off about the whole daycare first it's the kindergarten room then it's the other toys and then after a quick breath of relief where it seems like Lotso might be reasonable he reveals his true colors when he feels he has no other option this also isn't him being stupidly overconfident like some he is in complete control at this moment and the tone of his voice barely shifts at all his before and after character consistency is not perfect there is a threat of difference between his huggable side and his psychopathic side the only thing that's a little bit off is that there's no significant connection between the nature of his past trauma and the need to be in complete control of the daycare just the very broad idea that someone treated me like garbage so now I'm going to treat everyone else like garbage that's not nothing though and hey one of the very few times a good guy helps a bad guy that doesn't yield an instant change of heart Ernesto de la Cruz is certainly what not what I would call the most unexpected twist but it is definitely one of the best executed because there's nothing in this film that gives away the true identity of Miguel's great-grandfather until the moment but that Miguel makes the connection to de la Cruz is completely plausible but still leaves all of the ambiguous doors open by never mentioning names no one in the family knows what he looks like because they don't have his photo and even the real grandfather doesn't fully understand what happened to him like with a lot of these villains the main giveaway is just the fact that the movie has to have a climax and when Miguel meets arnesto we still have a third of the movie left so something has to go wrong and hey this other guy who's also a musician is acting much more like a caring family member he's also a good example of having a comprehensible face turn yes afterwards he becomes a bit of a child murdering get bag but like with months this doesn't come out of nowhere or for the sake of being a dick he starts becoming more aggressive because he's desperate to contain his secret and just as important his before personality isn't a fake or a cover it's him being exactly who he is a complete egomaniac whether he had any knowledge of whether he had a great-grandson or not he was a musician so it was definitely likely like he did before he was just willing to take credit for something he had absolutely no pardon by claiming a connection to the living boy musician everyone was talking about that night and yeah even a perpetrator of premeditated murder would rush to the age of a random child especially if it made him look cool but it's also a pretty decent mislead the only parts that are a bit questionable is that a who makes a movie with the exact details of the time they actually killed someone oh right a complete egomaniac does that and be the photo is a little bit of a hack showing a body that's more on the stockier side so we deliberately think it can't be the skinny guy and even when we put the head on at the end it still doesn't look right but other than that one detail Coco is basically a perfect movie and what other movie can you say that about one that pulls the secretly broadcast the villains evil speech cliche unlike a lot of these there is genuine surprise in the prospectors reveal for the main reason that he's presented as mint in box with no suggestion that he's ever been out of it and throughout the entire movie were preoccupied by Woody fighting with Jesse so we're barely paying any attention to the prospector and from the first movie to most of this one we expect that most of the struggles including the climax will largely be obstacle based so we're not expecting an actual villain we do have the fight over who turned on the remote but don't tell me that you remembered that that happened even a little by the time this scene came up what's clever is that we know what his goal is from the start what we don't know is how badly he wants it because he does such a good job at sounding reasonable especially in comparison to Jesse his about face is a little extreme but it's still comprehensible here's a guy who has been on his last straw after a long string of careful calculations and just can't keep it in anymore and of course he's not swayed by Woody's offer because he's never been held by a child before this is the first time anyone has ever considered him to have values so he does tend to be on the lower end of memorable villains but in this film he's still a decent threat and a major shock oh no I already gave away that I thought mr. waternoose was the best twill villain in my Pixar ranking video now the entire video is ruined because some people saw the ending coming and I guess it's just a coincidence the two best twist villains came from before the twist villain pattern really manifested but that also means they technically can be the ones to blame but yes waternoose is the best twist villain for checking off most of the boxes that we've already covered there is proper buildup of his motivation with the company going under in his dedication to keep it going but we don't suspect him because of how generally friendly and affectionate he is with Sully but the best reason for why this works and why it's so surprising is utilizing one of the best twist tactics by not suggesting that there's any twist or mystery to get at all we already have the villain in Randall with no illusions that he's working with a partner in addition were distracted at the moment of the reveal because we're emotionally distraught by Sully's guilt over traumatizing booth and in tune with retaining his character as well as him being a CEO he is one of the most realistic villains in that he does not see himself as a bad person while justifying his horrific actions no I still like Sully and I feel bad about this and what a brilliant design to make a crab spider look like in one scene like a loving grandfather and another scene to look like something that boo probably still has nightmares about granted they do similar to Lotso by making a pink teddy bear look like such an intimidating villain but let's face it it's way harder to make a crab spider look cuddly at the end of it all I'd say that more of these villains worked rather than didn't and even the ones that weren't perfect weren't so terrible that they completely trashed their movies I know I'm one of the top people that complains about tropes and that predictable patterns can infect your enjoyment and that creators can stand to be different and more innovative but sometimes they have good reasons for making the choices they do and I understand somewhat how they became such a trend so to basically Bri cap my Disney old versus new video the most significant factor was to put less emphasis on villains so they could focus on developing their leads as in early Disney films the villains often out shown their protagonists no but that's much of an excuse for the 90s because they were able to do both and as fun and theatrical Disney's traditional villains were this very strict binary perception of evil some found a little bit too simple and not how real evil works twist villains revealed how some of the worst people are liars and manipulators but still present themselves as trustworthy people which is a good thing to discuss with a young audience but I also think that at this point they probably get it it's nonetheless an okay thing for the studio's to come up with some different formulas so Animaniacs what twist villains do you think work or not and do you think we should bring back the old theatrical evil villains comment like subscribe etc and you stay incredibly shiny Animaniacs [Music] greatest nice business story behavior I sort of brain lazy emoticons magic of pegasus device

Channel: CellSpex

Views: 4,686,894

Rating: 4.9129233 out of 5

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Id: vUYQceTNdZQ

Length: 27min 54sec (1674 seconds)

Published: Sun May 10 2020