Let Cruella Be Bad

Photo credit: Disney

by Arezou

This week the trailer for the new live-action Cruella de Vil origin story, entitled Cruella, dropped on social media. The upcoming film, starring Emma Stone, caught a lot of attention for its aesthetic and fashion, as well as the vague details of what the story would actually entail. But the one major question that surrounded the much buzzed-about trailer was simply: how do you humanize the puppy-killer?

I would argue that you don’t. And perhaps you shouldn’t even try.

Disney Villains are a force unto themselves. They are a character group that is so omnipresent in the public imagination that they have been marketed as a separate collective for years, much in the same way the Disney Princesses are. They managed to outlast the short-lived Disney Heroes line, an attempt to recreate the Princess phenomenon but with male characters. For that matter, does anyone else even remember this line?

It’s not hard to see why they’re so popular. There are plenty of variations on the phrase “everyone loves a villain” circulating out there. Especially as we get older (and crankier), there’s something relatable about these world-weary adults who just want to be left to their own devices. Not to mention, their overall aesthetic is far more adult-friendly and adult-catered than things aimed at the Disney Princess crowd.

Beyond the merchandising side of it though, there is something of a consensus that villains are usually better written and more compelling. Heroes are often driven to do good and to be heroic either through love, some outside force compelling them, or simply because it’s the “right” thing to do. All perfectly valid reasons. But there is a lot of interest, both as a consumer of stories and as a storyteller, to take a villainous character and try to figure out what makes them tick. Why are they the way they are? Because no one is ever evil for evil’s sake, right?

Any villain we can think of from the “Classic Animation” era - which is, granted, a very broad timeline - has some reason to be the way that they are. It could be something as simple as wanting more power, like Jafar does, wanting a material item of some kind, like Cruella DeVil or Madam Medusa (from The Rescuers), or just being really petty, like Maleficent. These villains are a lot of fun, and with the exception of Madam Medusa, remain very popular today. 

Many of them are driven by some form of resentment for loss of power, like Scar, who loses his position in the line of succession to Simba; or Ursula, who in early drafts was meant to be King Triton’s banished sister. 

There is Lady Tremaine, Cinderella’s stepmother, who resents her stepdaughter for being the living embodiment of any resentments she had towards her late husband, be it her relocation to his country home or his inability to move past his first wife. While I’m here, I would like to point out that the best Cinderella adaptations retain this element, from the 2015 Disney remake, to Ever After, to the Brandy-starring Rodgers and Hammerstein version. In adding this element, it elevates the stepmother from a cackling villainess to someone the audience might actually feel sympathy for.

The sympathetic angle, however, was never exactly made explicit in the old animated films. These are interpretations that we have come to have as adults with added life experience and increased media literacy. With the recent trend of Disney live-action remakes, we’ve seen this desire for humanizing the villain made more explicit, and - with the exception of Lady Tremaine - these attempts are always fumbled. 

It is also worth noting that they take very distinct routes when it comes to their male villains versus their female ones. With Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, they tried to give him a sort of wartime PTSD that manifested in an enjoyment of violence that was not handled with the kind of grace that a subject like PTSD would require. In doing so, they also went against the central thesis of the character, that a conventionally handsome man could be a monster on the inside. Equating PTSD and monstrousness is probably not the route anyone wants to take. 

For Jafar in Aladdin, there were steps in the right direction, by making him almost of an age with Aladdin and Jasmine, and a surrogate son to the Sultan. There could have been a lot to explore in the idea that this orphaned street rat had found a home in the palace of Agrabah and feels he is losing ground and power because he was never fully accepted by the family, or something of that nature. But no. They made it a sexism thing, because Middle Eastern men, amirite?

Though they missed the mark spectacularly with these two, I will point out that the one thing I did enjoy was that the antagonist of the story was given the freedom to be unrepentantly evil. Motivated, yes, but evil all the same. This is a grace that has not been offered to the female villains of the live-action remake canon. We see this most prominently in the 2014 film Maleficent.

When Maleficent was first announced, the star Angelina Jolie spoke at length about how excited she was to bring a new humanity to this classic villain, that perhaps she was more complex than the cartoon had led us to believe. I was absolutely on board for this. I’m all for more backstory. But instead of added dimension showing how someone could be driven to the point of gleefully referring to herself as the “Mistress of All Evil”, what we got instead was a mess. 

We have a completely defanged villain who curses a baby and regrets it 10 minutes later and spends sixteen years as a loving mother figure to Aurora. We have a film that motivates our villain by making her a victim of a kind of horrific allegorical violence that the film does not address with the necessary care. We have a climax that teaches the lesson of “romantic love isn’t the only kind of true love” mere months after Frozen did the same thing. Even the tagline for the movie, “Evil has a beginning”, is questionable given that they spend a lot of time trying to hammer home the idea that she isn’t actually evil. 

Which was such a waste.

I hope they don’t take this route with Cruella. Never mind that it’s nearly impossible to humanize someone whose primary motivation was to skin 99 dalmatian puppies. Cruella is very much like Maleficent. She is one of the few villains who is not motivated by personal tragedy, or societal expectation. She is a spoiled, wealthy woman who wants a spotted coat made of dalmatians and she wants it now. The television series Once Upon A Time attempted to make her more than what she appeared, writing in an abuse storyline that, once again, was not handled with the required grace. If nothing else, I implore them not to take this route again.

This is not to say that they shouldn’t try to make her more than what we saw in the animated film. By all appearances, they are filling in her backstory to make it a little more tragic. There is already concern that Disney will not allow their villain to remain purely evil, but I would like to point out that there is precedent for such a thing, and when it’s done well, it becomes truly memorable.

The example that comes to mind is Claude Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I would argue that this is probably Disney’s best villain from a writing standpoint. Not only is he the most like a person you might actually meet in real life, but he carefully walks the line between motivated and unrepentant, the two becoming so intertwined that it is impossible to separate them. He is the product of a deep-rooted self-loathing and guilt, which are things we can pity him for, but he is also a cruel, bigoted, abusive man who goes to his grave believing he was right.

I am not suggesting that they kill off Cruella. What I am suggesting is that they’d be best served by taking this example, and humanizing her while also allowing her to remain unrepentantly evil. My hope is ultimately that as she descends into villainy, she be allowed to stay there. Let Cruella be a villain. I promise we can handle it.