Evangelicals Now
<< April 2010 >>

Monthly arts and media column

Were Disney villains always this evil?

When I was about 12, my mother took us to see Snow White at the cinema and my younger sister, aged seven, was so scared by the evil stepmother that we had to leave.

I’ve not forgotten it. I didn’t blame my mother for taking us — it was my sister who shouldn’t have been so sensitive. The tables were turned at our half-term-trip-to-the-flicks the other week. When we returned to daylight, this time it was the mother and father who were a bit overwhelmed by the scary baddie.

Mother in the cinema

We had been lured to see the film partly because the girl adores princesses and the boy likes frogs. We thought it would be a winner. The whimsical poster of a classic princess character with a frog in her hand, the excitement of seeing Disney break the mould with a black protagonist, an animation that was drawn, not computerised, the idea of seeing the beauty of New Orleans put back on the map post-Katrina — it all appealed to us.

About 20 minutes into the film we were being treated to psychedelic drug-like visions of evil shadows, totems and demons with scary eyes and claws, skeleton masks and blood-filled talismans. I protectively clutched the infants next to me but they were still happily munching their popcorn. It wasn’t quite how I remembered the other princess movies. Or is that just the way I have been conditioned into accepting Disney’s previous representations of evil?

A worthy opponent

Many reviews have raved about the creation of Dr. Facilier, who they see fitting entirely into the tradition of the Disney villain. ‘A worthy hero requires a worthy opponent’ is the most popular blogspot validation. With a cold, dark beauty and an elegance in form and language, he already reminds us of Snow White’s and Cinderella’s respective evil stepmothers. He is beguiling and enticing, drawing his victims under his spell with promises of instant fixes. His solutions to your problems are ‘easy’, as his French name suggests. He promises beautiful and enticing money, while Snow White’s stepmother had offered a beautiful and enticing apple.

With a staff summoning the powers of evil, he echoes Sleeping Beauty’s wicked fairy. When a shadow of his own takes on life and form, he reflects the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia, trying to take control of the supernatural forces of the cosmos without having the wisdom to know what to do with them.

We should know immediately that the villain will face a sticky end because of his malevolent intentions. Dr. Facilier lures his victims under his spell, playing on the same emotions of greed and desire that have him in chains himself. He has sold his own soul to the dark side and pays the price with a truly Faustian end.

Absent framework

It is not the first time that the occult has been portrayed so vividly in a Disney film. The 1985 release, The Black Cauldron, was a morality tale akin to The Lord of the Rings, in which a young boy must destroy a possessed cauldron that can give ultimate power. The Christian critic Perucci Ferraiuolo wrote on its release that this film was ‘a melting pot of voodoo, black magic, Satanism and witchcraft, an exaltation of sorcery’. Mark Pinsky, author of The Gospel according to Disney, says of the same film, ‘The Judeo-Christian construct that frames most of Disney’s animated features is wholly absent in this pagan fantasy, rated PG’.

The Princess and the Frog, rated U, shares this absence of any traditionally religious-based framework. The universe seems to be controlled by dark spirits alone, with goodness and hard graft as the only good available to fight against them, until, that is, they meet in the deepest, darkest part of the Bayou (hints of Pirates of the Caribbean), a blind but ‘good’ voodoo queen, Madame Odie, who marries the two frogs and overturns the curse that they are under. She is the benevolent rather than malicious controller of spirits who quite literally takes to the pulpit with her catchily-sung philosophy to search within yourself and ‘dig deeper’ for the strength to achieve your dreams (the Disney mantra). It is annoying, though I suppose predictable, that the filmmakers use a gospel song, the only reference to Christian tradition in the film, to represent a pagan philosophy.

Who do you trust?

I think that our response to this villain stemmed from the fact that the portrayal of evil spirits and the road to hell was so close to the spiritual truth. It also brought to mind other frightening associations. Dr. Facilier’s skeletal facemask and top hat reminded us of the voodoo scenes in the Bond film Live and let Die (1973) and his sinister ‘friends on the other side’ were creepily similar to the 1992 film Ghost (cert. 15), in which the baddie also gets dragged off to hell by shadowy demons.

The much more genial character of Merlin in The Sword in the Stone is also seen indulging in black magic, but warns Arthur about its limitations. He says, ‘Don’t you get any foolish ideas that magic will solve all your problems, because it won’t’.

The overriding question in The Princess and the Frog is: ‘Who do you trust? Are they really trustworthy?’ This leads the makers of the film and the humanist traditions of Disney to fill the vacuum with the reply: ‘Trust only yourself and your ability to change your fate’. Yet it also opens up a way for us to answer from our own reality. ‘We trust the Lord Jesus Christ, the King over all things, who defeated evil and death when he died on the cross and rose again.’

Eleanor Margesson