You know, I’ve noticed something lately as I watch Disney movies with my family:

In Disney’s Frozen II (2019), the villain is the imperialism of a previous generation which caused a senseless conflict between two otherwise peaceful peoples.
In The Little Mermaid (1989), the villain is a sea witch who kind of looks like Divine and is just, like, evil for some reason. Sure, it’s not explained why she’s the way she is, but she’s clearly having a blast, so whatever.

In Encanto (2021), the villain is unresolved intergenerational trauma which has increased the level of anxiety in each successive generation and created a pressure on all of Abuela Alma’s descendants to be “perfect” even though this is only creating further pain and tension within the family.
In Sleeping Beauty (1959), the villain is a sorceress who’s mad she didn’t get invited to the titular princess’s christening. Sure, it’s not explained why she’s the way she is, but she’s clearly having a blast, so whatever.

In Turning Red (2022), the villain is a constrictive cultural norm in which women entering puberty have to suppress their feelings (particularly anger) and limit their self-expression.
In One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), the villain is a selfish fashionista whose name vaguely sounds like “devil”. Sure, it’s not explained why she’s the way she is, but she’s clearly having a blast, so whatever.

In Strange World (2022), the villain is shortsighted political leadership and societal anxiety resulting in an inability to come up with creative solutions to a lack of resources.
In The Emperor’s New Groove (2000), the villain is Yzma who… you know what? Never mind. No complaints here. Yzma’s freaking awesome. Great villain. Hilarious performance from Eartha Kitt. Five stars. Anyway though…

Brave, Moana, Luca, Finding Nemo, Inside Out, Onward— with the possible exception of Prince Hans in 2013’s Frozen (and we’ll get to him later), Disney movies haven’t utilized classic scenery-chewing villains since Mother Gothel in 2010’s Tangled. And I find myself wondering why.

A Quick Disclaimer
I didn’t grow up with many Disney movies. According to my mom, I watched Robin Hood and Sleeping Beauty religiously, but once those VHSs wore out, that was kind of it. My first visit to Disney World was a high school band trip, and I was in my mid-20s before I ever went back (primarily for alcohol purposes). The last Disney movie I saw in theaters was 1994’s The Lion King, and I only vaguely remember watching 1997’s Hercules once in school. My first true deep dive into Disney came with marriage, as my wife and in-laws have a longstanding love of all things Disney, and they’ve been very gracious in educating me. So yeah, I’m not writing as a nostalgic Disney Adult; I’m writing as a cripplingly over-analytical parent with a liberal arts background trying to understand the corporate media juggernaut influencing my child’s nascent worldview.

What Makes a Disney Villain?
I’m going to use the shorthand “Disney Villain” regularly in this breakdown. For the uninitiated, a Disney Villain is an over-the-top, scenery-chewing baddy whose motivations are usually some mixture of power, fun, and evil for the sake of evil. Every Disney Villain is an antagonist, but not every Disney movie antagonist is a Disney Villain. More on this later.

What makes a Disney Villain stand out is their dramatic flair, but there are other hallmarks too. While most heroic Disney characters feature bright colors and soft edges, the Disney Villain designs tend to be very angular, and their color palates are usually black and white with maybe one accent color: Dr. Facilier’s green-tinted magic, Ursula’s purple tentacles, Cruella’s scarlet accessories, and so on. Also, just as Disney Princesses have their animal companions, Disney Villains usually have a comedic lackey of some kind (often but not always an animal) as well: Jafar has Iago, Scar has the hyenas, the aunt from Lady and the Tramp has her racially problematic cats, and so on. Lastly, the Disney Villains almost always get a big show-stopping musical number that sometimes upstages the heroes’ songs: “Gaston” from Beauty and the Beast, “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from The Little Mermaid, “Friends on the Other Side” from The Princess and the Frog, and so on.

So there’s our basic criteria: monochromatic design, lackey(s) of some kind, big musical number, but most importantly, dramatic flair. While not every Disney Villain fits these criteria, most do. And even within the huge number of Disney Villains (127 at last count), a handful have become a sort of unofficial high pantheon:

The Evil Queen- Snow White (1937)
Lady Tremaine- Cinderella (1950)
Maleficent- Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Cruella De Vil- One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)
Ursula- The Little Mermaid (1989)
Gaston- Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Jafar- Aladdin (1992)
Hades- Hercules (1997)
And a surprising latecomer: Dr. Facilier- The Princess and the Frog (2009)

These nine appear everywhere on Disney Villain merchandise (and yes, the Disney Villains have their own merchandise line). Whenever the theme parks have a special “villain takeover” event, these nine are always present. Whenever a movie or show focuses on the villains (such as the Descendants series of films or any number of Halloween specials), it’s usually some iteration of these nine. Why? Well, in addition to ticking almost every box from our Disney Villain checklist, these nine most typify Disney’s fun, campy style of evil, so they’re everywhere.

Though not as prominent as the Big Nine, other major Disney Villains include Scar (The Lion King), Yzma and Cronk (The Emperor’s New Groove), Captain Hook (Peter Pan), The Queen of Hearts (Alice in Wonderland), Oogie Boogie (The Nightmare Before Christmas), The Headless Horseman (The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad), Pete (various Mickey Mouse properties), Shere Khan (The Jungle Book), Mother Gothel (Tangled), Shan Yu (Mulan), and former CEO Bob Chapek. Also, even though they’re live action, the Sanderson Sisters from 1993’s Hocus Pocus have honorary Disney Villain status for meeting every criterion from above.

Oh, and for the record, I’ve seen people try to group Chernabog from Fantasia and Tomatoa from Moana in with the Disney Villains, but I disagree. After all, Chernabog was just trying to throw a dance party, so unless you’re his neighbor or his landlord, he’s no Disney Villain. As for Tomatoa, while he’s certainly an obstacle to Moana, he’s not even the movie’s central antagonist —hot take: Maui’s the real villain—, so Tomatoa’s out of the running too.

The classic Disney Villains have a diehard following. They’re constantly referenced in other media. They have merchandise, spinoffs, and conventions. There are even rumors of an entire villain-themed amusement park in the works. But take a look back at our list above, and you’ll see another pattern: with only one exception (Dr. Facilier), these Disney Villains all come from more than a quarter century ago. In fact, as noted earlier, the last Disney Villain to fit every criterion is Mother Gothel from Tangled (2010), and that was more than a decade ago. For a while there in the 80s and 90s, we got a new Disney Villain every year, so what’s with the dry spell? Where have all the Disney Villains gone?

The 90s and 2000s: From Disney Villains to Antagonists and Issues
In the 90s, we see a shift in the Disney Villains. While earlier villains like Maleficent, Cruella, and Ursula are largely evil for the fun of it, the 90s Villains start to show more nuance, and it seems like the real turning point here is Gaston from 1991’s Beauty and the Beast.

Compared to his more black-and-white forebears, the bigoted Gaston flips the script visually and has more complex motivation. Gaston has the softer edges and bright colors of a Disney prince, yet he’s constantly trying to prove himself. He has to be the strongest. He has to be the most popular. He has to marry the most beautiful woman in the village (even if she can read and doesn’t like him). All this drives him into a pretty depraved place, and he becomes the perfect foil of the film’s second title character. While the Beast is repulsive on the outside and tender on the inside, Gaston is physically attractive and a bloodthirsty monster inside. Gaston still fits every other Disney Villain prerequisite though: a big musical number second only to “Be Our Guest”, a dedicated if bumbling sidekick (LeFou), and of course, the essential dramatic flair. Still, Disney chose to sacrifice their usual Villain iconography (stark lines, black and white, etc.) so they could contrast Gaston to the Beast.

The Disney Villains post-Gaston have even more complicated motivations. The ambitious Scar wants to be king, but he and the hyenas have also been outcasts for years, and this seems to drive his ferocity. Hades wants power, but he’s also looking to settle some longstanding family conflict with baby bro Zeus. Yzma wants influence and wealth, but she’s also trying to overcome years of humiliation at the petulant Emperor Kuzco’s hands. And then there’s Count Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame; you could write a whole book about that guy!

Furthering complicating matters, in the 90s, Disney began to introduce movies with no true villain at all. The closest thing Toy Story (1995) has to a villain is the next-door neighbor, Sid, who doesn’t know the toys are alive, so it’s hard to fault him for his developmentally-appropriate destructive streak. Disney doubled down on this approach in the 2000s; Lilo & Stitch and Finding Nemo have no true villains. And, while movies like Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles, Meet the Robinsons, Ratatouille, Up, and WALL-E certainly have antagonists, none rise to the level of true Disney Villains. While this era still has a few true Disney Villains —Dr. Facilier and Mother Gothel fit every criterion: monochromatic, big musical number, lackeys, and dramatic flair—, they’re more the exception than the norm.

Also, during this era, we see a shift to themes or concepts being the true “villains” in lieu of a classic dramatic Disney Villain. For example, Up‘s true villain is the bitterness of growing old alone. Ratatouille‘s real villain is critic culture, and the Toy Story sequels’ real villain is the passage of time. Monsters, Inc.‘s real villain is capitalism, and WALL-E‘s real villain is also capitalism— hey, do you think 2000s-era Disney was trying to tell us something?

And with the 2010s and 20s, we get many of the villain-free movies from the introduction to this post. In Inside Out, the villain is toxic positivity. In Zootopia, the villain is the caste-like social structure. In Onward, the villain is unaddressed grief. In Encanto, the villain is unprocessed intergenerational trauma. In Raya and the Last Dragon, the villain is isolationist politics.

Now, special mention here goes to Prince Hans in 2013’s Frozen. Early story treatments of Frozen from the 90s and 2000s famously make Elsa more of a traditional Disney Villain— monochromatic design, big campy musical number, the works. But somewhere in the production process, Elsa was softened into a protagonist, and Disney shoehorned in Prince Hans as a more traditional villain. Sort of a Gaston-lite, Hans seems like a great guy at first (even caring for the people of Arendelle amid the ice crisis) before making a surprise heel-turn in the film’s third act. Because of Frozen‘s long pre-production time from the 90s to the 2010s, Elsa’s metamorphosis and Hans’s late introduction give us a window into the company’s changing mindset about their heroes and villains during this time period. Unlike its predecessor, the far superior Frozen II (2019) didn’t chicken out and add a last-minute villain, with that film’s closest thing to a true villain being Elsa and Anna’s deceased imperialist grandfather.

So Yeah, the Disney Villains Are Vanishing, But Why?
There are a number of possible explanations of the decline of the Disney Villains. Here are just a few theories:

The Threat of Dreamworks
In the mid-90s, under the guidance of ex-Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg and others, Dreamworks Animation opened up shop with a handful of poached Disney animators. Dreamworks turned out a few modest successes like Antz and The Prince of Egypt before releasing their 2001 mega-hit Shrek, which constantly pokes fun at Disney. Sure, the House of Mouse could initially laugh off Shrek as a few ex-employees having some fun at the old boss’s expense, but when Shrek won the first ever “Best Animated Feature” award at the Oscars, the white four-fingered gloves came off. Shrek soon spawned an entire franchise including a record-breaking 2004 sequel, and Dreamworks launched other franchise films like How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda. For the first time in forever, Disney had a true competitor on their hands, so the creative team had to step up the depth of their movies to retain the attention of children and adults alike.

With this in mind, 2010’s Tangled starts to feel like a response to the Shrek franchise. Rather than the heartfelt unabashed musical numbers of films past, Tangled is remarkably self-aware, with deuteragonist Flynn Rider even explicitly asking at one point, “Why is everyone singing?!” Similarly, Frozen (2013) has an entire arc critiquing the love at first sight trope common to early Disney films; 2016’s Moana has a whole exchange of dialogue about Disney Princess stereotypes; and Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018) prominently features what can only be described as a Disney Princess support group. In response to Dreamworks (particularly the sting of Shrek), Disney has embraced making jokes at its own expense before someone else can, and the Disney Villains don’t always fit into this style of humor.

Changing Social Context
Look, with the possible exception of some despots and dictators, there just aren’t many real-life Disney Villains out there. For people who grew up in World War II and the Cold War, a more stark heroes-and-villains style of thinking may have been comforting, but increasingly, our modern “villains” are not so much individuals as ideologies. For a lot of people who grew up in the 80s and 90s (i.e. the Ursula/Gaston/Hades generation), much of our childhood media pitched a stark contrast between good and evil that didn’t quite square up with the society we entered as adults. In most movies with a Disney Villain, everything turns out okay once that Villain is ousted, but in real life, societal problems are much more deeply engrained.

Disney Villains aren’t the only popular fiction affected by this trend either. Consider the increase in relatable comic book villains like Loki and Killmonger and Thanos (some of whom even develop into antiheroes) and the popularity of shows like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad where the lines between heroism and villainy are constantly blurred. While most of us can still enjoy a good campy Disney Villain (as evidenced by the popularity of their merchandise), I think it’s fair to say these characters no longer speak to larger cultural outlooks. In fact, Disney has even attempted to rehabilitate some of these characters (most notably Maleficent and Cruella) through sympathetic origin stories told in live-action prequels.

A New Creative Generation
The children who grew up with Maleficent and Lady Tremaine created Ursula and Gaston and Jafar, and the children who grew up with Ursula and Gaston and Jafar created Luca and Turning Red and Encanto. As the torch passes from one generation of creators to the next, it’s only natural that newer creative teams would pick apart and reconsider the work of their predecessors. As discussed earlier, Gaston is a successor to more traditional Disney Villains like the Evil Queen, but in many ways, he’s also a commentary on them— an argument that evil is usually more subtle than what we saw in past Disney films.

It only makes sense that, for creators who grew up with characters like Gaston and Frollo, Disney Villains (while campy and fun) might start to feel unnecessary by comparison to more insidious forms of evil like prejudice and unresolved trauma. A similar —and perhaps more obvious— phenomenon has happened with Disney Princesses. In the wake of all the flawless fairytale Cinderellas and Belles, characters like Tiana (The Princess and the Frog), Moana (Moana), Merida (Brave), and Mirabel (Encanto) openly push back on the standard Princess cliches. It seems Disney’s newer creatives are very much in the trope-deconstructing business.

It’s Hard to Add to an Already-Strong Canon
Yeah, Mother Gothel seems like a shoe-in as a Disney Villain, but there’s not a ton of Mother Gothel merchandise; she just didn’t catch on quite like her predecessors. Hell, even Dr. Facilier and Hades struggled to gain their spots in the Big Nine, and they still don’t have the wide acceptance of mainstays like the Evil Queen and Maleficent. Simply put, the Disney Villain canon has been pretty firmly set since the mid-90s, and getting new characters to rise to Ursula levels of popularity is a near-impossible undertaking. Recognizing they have their core Villains established, Disney may be hedging their bets by giving these characters prequels rather than trying to introduce new Disney Villains.

Animation isn’t the only area where Disney is struggling with this. Look at the challenge they’ve faced at finding a successor to Thanos in the Marvel movies, and “No one can replace Darth Vader” is even a major plot point in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It’s hard to make lightning strike twice, and honestly, it’s amazing Disney has managed to pull off this many beloved Disney Villains.

Summing Up…
So what’s the real reason for the drop-off in traditional Disney Villains? It’s probably some combination of all these theories along with plenty of behind-the-scenes creative and financial decisions we’ll likely never know about. As someone without a lot of Disney nostalgia, I’m really enjoying the direction of the newer movies (if the slew of Encanto posts on this blog didn’t already give that away). Regardless, the classic Disney Villains maintain an ardent following, and while they may not be showing up in movies as they once did, they’re still hard at working lining Mickey’s pockets through merchandise, remakes, prequels, and various specials.

Questions remain though: Will we really see a Disney Villain theme park one day? Who knows. Will we ever see a new Disney Villain who can stand toe-to-toe with the likes of Ursula and Jafar? Hard to say. Perhaps, as all good melodrama villains do, the Disney Villains have simply retreated into the shadows for a spell to await the opportune time to make their dramatic returns, preferably with a show-stopping musical number…