The 10 Lamest Cartoon Movie Villains
Posted at 5:02 AM Jun 17, 2008
By Todd Ciolek
Creating a good villain for an animated film is a delicate balancing act. For children’s fare, a villain needs to be imposing and memorable, but never so demonstrably evil as to upset the youngest viewers and the 700 Club. Even in seemingly adult-aimed movies, it’s often hard to establish a distinct, original antagonist within the 90-minute running time enforced on many cartoon flicks. There are, of course, animated films with no actual villains, but they’re just pretentious.
The films that do have villains often screw it up, spitting out some unmotivated pushover to be swept aside by the heroes. In one way or another, these ten are the most lame, the most disappointing, and the least likely to impress viewers of any age.
10) Edgar from The Aristocats
For many, it’s a challenge to remember that The Aristocats actually had a villain. In fact, movie’s biggest contribution to the Disney canon seems to be the white kitten Marie, one of the company’s most-merchandised characters in the Japanese market, believe it or not. No one recalls Edgar, the bald, inept butler who tries to murder a bunch of cats in order to claim their inheritance. He’s a bargain-basement Cruella DeVil.
Yet it’s almost easier to feel sorry for Edgar. Resembling a haggard, fiftyish office drone more than a scheming murderer, he’s clearly been beaten soulless by years of servitude to a woman so obscenely wealthy and myopic that she’ll leave a fortune to her pets, while the poor starve in the streets of early 20th-century France.
9) Prince Toma from Ranma 1/2: Nihao My Concubine
It’s not Prince Toma we’re attacking so much as it is the cliché he represents. Whenever a popular younger-audiences anime series becomes a movie, that movie needs a mediocre and utterly disposable villain who, like the movie itself, will be swiftly forgotten and have no effect on the overall storyline.
The use-once bad guy of the second Ranma film, Prince Toma fulfills his duty of creating conflict by kidnapping Ranma’s strong-willed fiancée Akane and threatening to marry her (which was also the plot of the first Ranma movie, but hey). Thing is, he’s not even much of a one-off villain; he’s just a spoiled brat whose mommy issues have him falling for the first woman to smack him around.
8) Blackwolf from Wizards
Wizards was Ralph Bakshi’s attempt to depart from his sexualized urban farces and make a fantasy film, meaning that it’s about semi-naked fairies instead of semi-naked hookers. Seeming like some fusion of David the Gnome with Triumph of the Will (and the aforementioned not-quite-naked women), Wizards plays it obvious with the names: the squat, gruff-voiced hero is Avatar, while his evil brother is Blackwolf.
We’ll admit that Blackwolf actually sets himself up as an acceptable foe, brandishing skeletal arms, a library of Nazi propaganda and a Reich-scale army of stormtroopers and robots. Yet when it comes to cartoon ne’er-do-wells, he goes down like a punk when his brother confronts him.
It is an allegory for the two atomic bombs that ended World War II? A statement about the interplay of magic and science? A sign that Bakshi just got tired of making his own movie? It’s up to you.
7) Sauron from The Return of the King
Sauron was perhaps the world’s first famous literary cocktease: three books of hobbits and wizards and elfery build him up as a powerful, near-omnipotent overlord of pure evil, and he never actually shows the fuck up. This was easier to get around in the books, but it’s a cardinal sin in the world of movies, particular those that kids might be watching. Peter Jackson understood this, and opened up his first Lord of the Rings film by showing Sauron smashing through phalanxes of human soldiers, Dynasty Warriors-style.
Rankin-Bass, however, didn’t quite get it. Their Return of the King movie has an aptly bleak tone, but the baddies are lacking: the orcs are singing, semi-goofy cannon fodder only half the size of an actual human, and Sauron’s only represented as his big ol’ all-seeing eye. Yes, it’s true to the books and to Tolkien’s vision, but it’s the most disappointing thing in the world when kids wait over an hour for some demonic Darth Vader to roll out, and the closest thing they get is this guy, “The Mouth of Sauron.”
That doesn’t count.
6) Alf Dolf from Garaga
Garaga may not be the worst film ever produced by Japan’s animation industry, but it’s a leading contender for the most boring. A meandering sci-fi clunker directed by The Last Unicorn character artist Hidemi Kubo, the movie slaps clichés from Star Wars, Akira and Planet of the Apes around an exhaustingly lame cast, topped off by a boring android evildoer named…Alf Dolf.
Garaga’s story involves a frontier planet full of monkey-men, telepaths, government conspiracies, terrorist vendettas, and secret agents, and somewhere in this mess is Alf Dolf, who just wants to use some military weapon to destroy the human race, making even genocide seem drab. The bland-looking Alf meets his end at the hands of the movie’s almost-as-dull hero, Jay M. Jay (yes, really), but not before spouting some canned lines about robots being superior to humans because robots learn faster. Maybe so, but they apparently can’t learn how to be interesting. And really, Alf Dolf?
