When Disney Teaches Us to Uphold Death more than Justice or Mercy

(via disneyprincess wikia)

I love Disney movies. They’re a nostalgic staple of my childhood, but like almost everything, when viewed from an adult perspective, they are far from perfect. One worrying trend that I see in childhood films is the idea that death is the same thing as justice. Disney is hardly the only company at fault for doing this, and this trope does show up in media designed for older audiences as well. But my experience with Disney was really the first time I was exposed to the idea that villains deserve to die awful horrible deaths. Even if the heroes initially want to show their villains mercy, the mercy will be misplaced, and very rarely will actual justice be done.

This of course begs the question: do villainous characters truly deserve to die, especially in such awful, violent, and painful ways?

Oh, My Pop Culture Jesus: Positive Portrayals of Catholics

So not too long ago, I was watching The Colbert Report and was treated to something awesome: an interview with Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who is the current head of the United States Catholic Council of Bishops (USCCB). Colbert and Dolan seem to actually be pretty good friends and did a talk at Fordham University called The Cardinal and Colbert: Humor, Joy, and the Spiritual Life. This has nothing to do with anything geeky, so why am I bringing it up? Stephen Colbert hasn’t hidden the fact that he’s a devout and proud Catholic. And, in my opinion, he is one of the most positive examples of a Catholic on TV today.

So watching Colbert got me thinking: are there any Catholic characters, particularly in geek culture, that show a positive portrayal of Catholics?

Who is ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ and what makes her so special?

So there’s this musical I’m currently obsessed with, and it goes by the name of Notre Dame de Paris. This musical, based on the Victor Hugo novel of the same name, opened in Paris in 1998 and took France by storm–quite a surprise for a country in which musical theatre is not a popular medium. Though the story is better known to English-speaking audiences as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the title actually translates to “Our Lady of Paris” and can be interpreted with a double meaning. It refers to the famous cathedral of the same name which is dedicated to the Blessed Mother and is the setting of the novel, and it can also refer to the character of Esmeralda, who exists at the center of the story.

The reason I say Esmeralda “exists at the center of the story” rather than calling her the central character of the story is because she is more of an object than a character. As the title implies, she is important to the story because the men around her feel possessive of her (“Our Lady of Paris”) and though she does have some amount of agency in the musical, most of her time on stage consists of things happening to her, rather than her making things happen.

[Warning: Spoilers for a nearly 200 year-old story ahead]

Oh, My Pop Culture Jesus: Disney’s Divine Intervention

Disney movie heroes and heroines are good people. Like really good. I mean, like, woodland creatures help them do chores, for cripes’ sake. And so it would be really out of character of them to start straight-up murdering people, even if those people happen to be the bad guys.

So how do the bad guys get dead then? Well, in a lot of Disney, movies it seems as though some sentient force of nature itself reaches out and snuffs them out. Whoever’s running these universes really has a habit of picking sides, and it’s pretty clear who they’re rooting for. Let’s look at a few (I’d warn for spoilers, but seriously, you guys you should have seen these movies already):

In Up, the bad guy Charles Muntz catches his foot on some balloon strings while trying to attack our heroes and falls to his death.

In The Incredibles, Syndrome is sucked into a plane engine by his cape.

In Beauty and the Beast, Gaston loses his balance and falls off the Beast’s high balcony.

In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the evil Queen is struck by lightning, falls off a cliff, and is crushed by a boulder as she runs away from Snow White’s cabin.

In Oliver and Company, Sykes’ car is hit by an oncoming train and he dies.

In Tarzan, Clayton falls from a tree and is strangled to death by hanging vines.

Ratigan from The Great Mouse Detective gets caught up in Big Ben and falls to his death.

(Dang, that’s a lot of falling to death. Crappy way to die.)

It’s interesting that, in universes where, for the most part, there are no actively acknowledged gods or God, (save Hunchback, where they talk about God and damnation a lot), that divine retribution or intervention via uncannily timed accident seems to be the go-to way to get rid of a bad guy. Is it that bad for a Disney hero/ine to get some blood on their hands? Most interesting is that this handy plot device isn’t something that’s gone away with age—it spans movies as early as Snow White to as recent as Up.

There are plenty more examples—feel free to name some in the comments.

In Brightest Day: Quasimodo and Frollo

I love Disney. I think that Disney is a huge influence on my own pieces. The wide range of stories that Disney has cranked out, whether it be animated, live-action, or Disney Channel shows, has stayed strong throughout the years. While there are some bad Disney movies out there (I’m looking at you, The Black Cauldron,) the majority has withstood the test of time.

For my money, my favorite Disney movie is The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The fact that this movie is underrated is a crime. Quasimodo is one of the warmer-hearted protagonists out there, and Judge Claude Frollo is in the top 5 of “most evil Disney villains.”