Is anyone else kind of tired of recent Disney movies having a surprise twist villain? Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen...

Is anyone else kind of tired of recent Disney movies having a surprise twist villain? Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, and Zootopia all had them. It's getting a little tiresome because now people are just going to start expecting every movie they do to have a surprise villain and the supposed villain we see being a fake-out.

Ye. They're overusing the trope a bit. Zootopia's was really obvious about halfway through the film though.

I guess it's because they want to prove a point that sometimes the person you least expect would be a bad person. However, it will reach a point where the audience would be like "He/She is too nice. They must be the real villain!"

The alternative would be making someone so evil that people have no choice but to guess that they are the villain (and they'd be right). What we need are more complex Disney villains.

I still can't get over the fabric textures in this movie.

Expecting Disney to make complex villains is a losing battle, they had too many decades of hero vs the literal personification of evil.

You know who was a great villain? Lord Shen from Kung Fu Panda 2. Not Disney, but man he was original!

I think Wreck-It Ralph had the best twist. I'm usually really good at picking those up but here it caught me by surprise.
Frozen and Zootopia could have done a better job with it.

But with Big Hero 6 it was painfully obvious.

Hans would've been an excellent king.

It's flimsy ass writing for sure. In order to have a good story the conflict needs to be legitimate. If the villain is just some inexplicable exception who corrupts the whole system, it's not a real conflict because the solution is obvious (kill the villain) and comes with no cost. You get to have the cake and eat it too.

He was pure evil and really enjoyable.

I want more of that,

Really he was a pretty good ruler for his short term. His main concern was always the people. His most evil actions really felt shoehorned in so that people would forget that Elsa was the real villain.

Yeah, Big Hero 6 is the only one of the four listed that I saw coming a mile away.

It also deprives Disney of one of the best moments in their movies: the villain song / scene where evil is celebrated as being awesome and good is dumb.

He wasn't 'pure evil', that's retarded. Yes he was a terrible person but he didn't do evil for shits and giggles. He had a bunch of causes for his behavior. He wanted to impress his parents, he became bitter when they rejected him, he was mad about his inadequacy at martial arts, he became paranoid about the prophecy because on some level he believed he was destined for karmic retribution for his sins and so on. One of the obvious clues to Shen not being pure evil is that he kept the goat (?) soothsayer in the palace acting as his conscience for all those years.

Wreck-It Ralph doesn't have a surprise twist villain. Even if King Candy wasn't Turbo he'd still be a villain.

An alternate version of Frozen where Hans isn't evil would be much more interesting than the actual movie.

To be fair, Love is An Open Door is pretty much a villain song in retrospect.

I'm so happy LMM confirmed we're getting an actual villain song in Moana.

Hans was the only actual surprise. Rest were telegraphed as shit.

Turbo did it first.

Turbo did it best.

Double villain fakeout. Have the surprise "twist" villain actually be a scapegoat for the first villain who gets away with all of it.

Hans is & was never really evil. He was cruel to Anna after she made him feel like an ass from wooing her & was going to kill Elsa to end the winter & gain the kingdom. Regicide to save many is far from evil.

You know what they could've done to pull us? Had Tadashi be Yokai.

Hans was more of a fuck you dumbasses to the audience who had no reason to doubt his motives & plenty to support his goodness.

I thought Wreck it Ralph pulled it off well but in Frozen and and Big Hero 6 is was too obvious and pretty lame.

I remember reading in some creator commentary that the Soothsayer basically raised him, as his parents had little time for him while running the kingdom.

The wolves also used to be palace guards whom Shen befriended. Wolf captain dude was apparently his best bro growing up. Which makes Shen's casual murder of him all the more harsh. They had a lot more planned for the development of Shen's backstory but they had to cut it in editing.

The Turbo twist wasn't all that flimsy. It was a surprise, but that the literal point of it all.

Before his reveal, he was just a term for rogue gaming characters, a cautionary tale to those who try to overstep their boundaries as Ralph was doing.

With Frozen and Zootopia, it was definitely just "let's surprise people with a villain after leading the audience to believe this other character was the villain", while in Big Hero 6 the whole thing with Callahan was just weak due to how he decides on a revenge scheme because one of his students made a potential weapon (even though all of them had something that could be weaponized).

Twist villains are a trend I'm sick of. The biggest problem with them is that because all of the effort is put on the twist, the villain himself is not memorable or interesting.

People try so hard to defend it, but Iron Man 3's villain was bad because they replaced a vibrant, larger-than-life villain that was different from Tony's other enemies last minute with a villain with no personality beyond "I'm jealous of Tony," who hit the exact same mold as the villains before him. They sacrificed the chance to have a memorable villain by going for a big twist. I'd rather be entertained than remember a movie for a bad decision.

For what purpose though? Unless he was after revenge for the death of his parents, he had no reason turning evil. And the movie pretty much confirmed Hiro and his parents died in some kind of mundane accident like a car crash.

You don't need complex to be good, though. Jafar, Ursula, Hades, Ratigan, Maleficent , Scar, Mcleech, Sykes, and others were hardly complex, but they were great because of their personalities and the performances of the voice actors. If you stole Jafar's screen time to a fake out villain, then leave us with half of his screen time for it, the movie would have lost a lot of its charm.

Elsa as a reluctant villain would've been more fascinating. Like how the original plan for HTTYD2 was to make Hiccup's mom the antagonist, which would've been so much better than Drago.

But those films were not quite deep. A complex villain compliments deep lore.

>People try so hard to defend it, but Iron Man 3's villain was bad because they replaced a vibrant, larger-than-life villain that was different from Tony's other enemies last minute with a villain with no personality

The exact same can be said about The Dark Knight Rises.

Turbo's twist was at least early enough that he got a personality beyond being bad.

>Implying I didn't dislike that too

I used IM3 because for one, it's defended heavily, and second, it's Disney technically.

I liked TDKR a lot, but once the twist happened it really did start to fall apart. They should have left Bane as Rah's excommunicated son, which while very different from the comics, would've kept the plot tighter and been better than not giving such a prominent character a story.

Frozen wasn't that complex.

More complex than most Disney Princess films. It has potential to really be expanded upon (as long as they don't go down the nature powers route).

I'm tired of Disney movies, that includes Marvel garbage as well.

The only movies that did it well were WiR and Zootopia, especially WiR since Turbo was basically batshit crazy and hijacked a (presumably) NPC and ruined another character's life just to be in the spotlight.

I wasn't implying that, I was just reinforcing your point.

Mother Gothel was a fantastic villain.

Yes.

Wreck-It Ralph did the best because it was foreshadowed well and King Candy/Turbo had the charisma and menace to back it up.

Disney really went overboard due to Frozen twist shocking people a little too well even if they was poorly hinted at, Big Hero 6 and Zootopia twist villain were obvious from the very start.

Moana's seems to going back to the traditional Disney villain, I heard it's was a Lava Goddess who wants to wipe out humans seeing them as a pest to Mother Earth.

"Since when was Disney under the impression they make "good" twist villains?"

They haven't met GOAT of them. pic related.

Disney current villain problem is obvious twist villains that aren't foreshadowed or have a bulleyes on their heads saying "I'M EVIL ALL ALONG!"

Marvel Cinematic villains problems is that they usually disposable rich white assholes or bland undramatic doomsday bringers.

All he had was the twist. Everything after was shit.

It's not. The only line that changes with the context of him being a villain is the "find my own place" line, which isn't even sinister in retrospect. The rest is standard love song stuff.

Really? I don't remember there being at hints that Turbo was actually the Candy King. I never saw the connection between the two. If we knew that the game got fucked up around the time Turbo disappeared then that would've made sense.

No he became stale when he went condom mode and after. But when he did all that mind fucking on Momo and Hitsugaya, was glorious.

He's basically what Hans tried to do/accomplish, but succeed where as hans fail to.

>Hans: "That you-"
>Anna: "And I-"
>Both: "Were just meant to beee."

Was a subtle one.

We got at least one hint that Vanellope was actually the candy monarch and that King Candy had usurped her.

>You sure seem to be a fan of pink..
>Salmon! The decor is obviously salmon..
King Candy was defensive when somebody drew attention to the fact that "his" castle looked like it'd been designed for a girly princess.

Also it's hard to spot and more of an easter egg than a hint, but when King Candy goes to the core of the game or whatever it's called and there are all those floating green icon things, one of them is Turbo's gocart.

There may be a few more. King Candy's design having the same silhouette shape as Turbo is kind of a little hint too.

Oh, I apologize then.

His most evil action was being such an unnecessarily massive dick to Anna as she lay dying, which was slapped in because otherwise some people might have felt Anna was in the wrong to fall for another man while still being engaged to Hans.

The true love Disney romance couple must not seem like an immoral choice, therefore Hans has to be so resoundingly assholish everyone would forget that he was still the perfect responsible fiance when Anna went and got interested in a new man despite their wonderful moonlight duet

It's cool, bro.

Frozen didn't need a villain at all desu

They were okay with cucking a likable character in one of their direct to dvd sequels, though.

I doubted him during first viewing though. I didn't think he'd turn evil, I thought it would turn out that he doesn't really love Anna and falls for Elsa while Anna falls for Kristoff - I thought that the 12 older brothers was a massive "needs to marry money" red flag and his expressions during LIAOD were sort of obviously forced and fake, especially during "that's what I was gonna say", the proposal and engagement announcement

Direct to dvd sequels are different, and besides pocahontas was separated from Smith "permanently" already at the first Movie so it was always gonna end badly

That was one of my favourite things about Mystery Incorporated. The whole show, like every Scooby Doo show, they have the villain be the person you least expect. So in one episode when they encounter the obvious villain and Velma says it must be him they all accuse her of profiling, despite how obviously evil he is.

I know its Sup Forums but the villain in Erased was set up pretty neatly. He was so obviously the villain that he ended up taking everyone by suprise because he HAD to be a red herring.

Hans isnt a villain hes just a political douchebag.

People are still butthurt over that, ignoring how flat of a character Pocahontas & John Smith were or how it restored some historical accuracy. Besides, the heart wants what it wants.

The 12 older brothers is not too unusual when Ariel had 6 older sisters.

Hans's expressions were feigned, but it can be up to interpretation.

So, virtually no foreshadowing.

The castle's pink hues seem uncharacteristic to Vanellope though. Plus, it was funny to have King Candy love the color salmon.

It would take a good eye to find the kart easter egg in first viewing & the similar silhouettes seems more coincidental than actually suggestive.

It's a duet. It would not sound right if each said you & you.

Plus Rolfe was a very charming gentleman. I think Pocahontas made the right choice.

It doesn't sound right when they both say "Anna" and "Anna" either, you just need to pay close attention to realize it's out of place. The meaning is important as well as the rhythm.

Animated movies aren't allowed to have real villains anymore, so they have to have a "nice character" turn out to be evil.

It's partly because they don't want kids to see being evil as fun by having somebody enjoy doing bad, and partly because they want to encourage the idea that anyone can anyone and everyone is secretly evil so you shouldn't trust anybody

Ahahahahaaaaaa

Frozen was insipid as fuck

The very title changes its meaning. To Anna, it means that if you love someone you shouldn't shut them out. To Hans, Anna's love is an open door through which he can get in.

Love is an open door thus holds the two main ingredients to a good villain song: the villain's motivation and his plan.

I still would have liked it more if Hans wasn't actually a villain. Don't get me wrong, all the little details hinting that he's evil are pretty clever. It's just for a movie trying so hard to break it's tradition of love at first sight and having Elsa not turn evil from her exile, they still follow their other villain theme right on the nose.
Since all of Hans's actions could have been explained just by a guy who was overall a good guy, thought he loved Anna but it wasn't true love, tried to give Elsa a chance to reverse the winter but found out she couldn't, then had to make the decision to try to kill Elsa to spare a kingdom from freezing to death.
I just think it would have tied the whole movie together in it's more realistic characterization by just saying "There doesn't have to be a grand evil villain in your way, sometime good people can have good intentions that are still counter to your goals." Make him an antagonist that's not a villain.

>MUH PARENTS

Shen had really good characterization. He's twisted and evil but they still let him have small moments where you can see he could have been something else like sparing the Soothsayer, expressing a little sorrow at times, and genuinely asking how Po was able to do what he can't.

I don't think I've seen an animated kids film with a more complex villain, honestly. At least not one I felt pity for while also hating. KFP2 is a great movie all around

When has that ever been the case? In Zootopia, there was prejudice before the night howlers even came up.

With a straight villain, "defeat the villain ends the conflict" is even more the case.

Its not exactly obvious in hindsight but it is there if you look.

There's a lot of Hans sneaking around trying to grab Anna and whatnot

The song ends with Anna backed against a cliff

Also you do get the impression that Hans is just telling Anna what she wants to hear

That one is pretty well shown during the song. The one that comes to mind is something like
"We finish eachother's..."
"Sandwitches!"
"..... That's what I was going to say!"

He's clearly just leading her on then agreeing to sound like they match.

>Wreck-It Ralph
The King was already a scheming asshole and the movie showed some video game characters can just be assholes for no reason, so being Turbo was just icing.

THANK YOU. This has been driving me nuts.

What happened to the days when they made the villain obvious, like with Scar or Facilier?

Yeah
He was obvisuly a villan it's just that his identity was a twist.
Op is right with the others though

Big Hero 6 was obvious. Not as obvious as Tangled or Princess & The Frog, mind you, but still fairly obvious to anyone who has seen movies before.

Wreck-It Ralph was pretty obvious as well. The exact nature and motivation of the villain remains well hidden, but who is the Evil Genius (or the Mad Hatter) is fairly obvious towards the beginning and shown outright halfway through. So the only twist is exactly who it is and how deep it all runs.

Zootopia was handled really well. Even with repeat viewings, it's more about how the protagonists misassume they have the full information that leads to a "false" villain. Zootopia and Frozen are really the only ones which fall into this category of yours.

Well, we can see if Moana does a proper old-time villain. Given the setup, it seems likely. And if not, then you have some good choices outside Disney: Dreamworks produces the occasional good hit, Blue Sky seems to be doing well, and Laika is really good with an upcoming Kubo movie. Disney is no longer the only kid on the block.

Those subtle hints can be interpreted in a myriad of directions.

"Find my own place" is very similar to what Aladdin sings in the "One Jump Ahead" reprise.

Surprising Anna by picking her up from behind is romantic, not sneaky in-context.

While it is clear to us that Hans was saying & doing whatever Anna wanted him to say & do, most audience members did not. Disney Princes tend to say things that make eyes roll.

But, the point is not too much that there were not some really hidden hints, but the fact the narrative outright contradicted itself to fuck over the audience. People would have been much more suspicious of Hans if they did not include the shot of him grinning underneath the rowboat; it's really dishonest to viewers. Then we had Hans take really good care of the kingdom, Hans forming a search party, &, oh yeah, SAVING THE FUCKING QUEEN FROM DYING AT THE HANDS OF YOUR ENEMIES WHEN YOUR PLAN NEEDED HER DEAD TO SUCCEED. I mean, why would Hans do that? It completely muddies his plan- does he really think Elsa would be an easy murder now that we know she has magic powers?

>Surprising Anna by picking her up from behind is romantic, not sneaky in-context.
There's also the one bits where Anna is popping out of the doors and he desperately grabs for her.

It's getting obnoxious. Wreck-It Ralph was perfect; it made sense with the story and was a legit good twist. Frozen came out of fucking no where and was essentially just a twist for the sake of having a twist. On the other hand BH6 was ridiculously obvious. Zootopia was somewhere in the middle of Frozen and BH6.

I think they've gone from wanting to subvert common expectations to just finding it easier writing a twist villain than a good villain who was bad all along.

He also sounds really bitter at the for 2 years bit

>Callahan was just weak due to how he decides on a revenge scheme because one of his students made a potential weapon (even though all of them had something that could be weaponized).
Fucking this. It means he whipped up his revenge plan the moment he saw Hiro's invention, which is strange considering it would take a ton of preparations to send the school into flames so quickly and successfully fake his own death. Either that or he was planning his revenge for years with the intent to rely on some random invention to help him accomplish it.

He needed the winter to end so the kingdom he was after wouldn't die. After getting her alive he tries to talk her into lifting the winter. When she can't, that's when he changes to murder as the B plan.

I'd just assumed that the set up the whole fair with the intention of stealing the most promising inventions. It's just that Hiro's was the obvious best out of the bunch, enough that he didn't need to bother with the others.

But neither of these details foreshadow Hans's ulterior motive! They can be interpreted multiple ways. Foreshadowing raises eyebrows, but the average viewer dismisses the peculiarity on grounds that it is just a passing line. Think of the twists in Over the Garden Wall, particularly the one involving Beatrice. We went along with the "bluebird code" as she was a talking bluebird in a magical world & never questioned why she was so depressed when she was on the boat, but everything clicked in the end. None of the four most recent WDAS features had foreshadowing that cohesive.

Hans knew that Elsa couldn't do shit about the winter. If she could & was willing to stop the winter, she would have stopped it. No way would somebody pit the kingdom in eternal winter unless if the culprit either intentionally did it out of spite or accidentally. It was safe to assume that taking out Elsa would take out the winter with her as she was definitely the cause of it all. Hans could have killed two birds with one inaction, but no, for whatever retarded reason he developed a hero complex & saved the witch.

If he saves her life and talks her into lifting the winter, then he has really good PR with the kingdom and can assassinate her quietly through poison and still look like the best candidate for king rather than some guy who just hopped in the other day and woo'd the queen's sister.
If Elsa can't/doesn't lift the winter, then he can claim the lesser glory of being the guy who saved the kingdom from winter by killing her and can claim it was even out motivation to avenge Anna's death from freezing. The A plan is safer and makes him look less suspicious so it's best to do it first, the B plan isn't as good but it still involves not letting someone else get all the glory of saving the kingdom.

It worked because of people's expectations. People expected a romantic interest for Anna because she was a Disney princess, and a shared lead of the film. People expected a romantic interest because Anna was singing about it at the beginning of the movie. People expect it because, in the case of Disney princes/princesses, the prince can get unusually close and familiar in just a short amount of time to save on storytelling time.

Looking back now, some of Hans' actions can look particularly creepy - especially how he clearly led Anna on and just agreed with her completely to win over her trust. But pointing out that as being creepy kind of points out some strangeness in earlier Disney films. Are Prince Philip and Snow White's Prince creeps for going after their girls without having even met them? Is Cinderella's Prince a creep for ignoring every other person at the ball and instead focusing on Cinderella - pretty much what Hans did, even going so far as to offer a marriage to her if he could find her again?

I think I lost my point there.

No one actually knew how the winter worked. That's the whole reason Anna ran off to find Elsa. Even Elsa didn't know that the kingdom was still frozen over after she left. For all anyone knew, killing Elsa could mean that the winter would NEVER end because no one would be able to remove it.
It makes far more sense to talk to her first, then if for any reason she doesn't lift the winter THEN you kill her to see if that works. You can't take back the murder so if you do it first and you're wrong then the kingdom's just fucked.

You know I never thought about that, retroactively applying Hans's underhandedness to past characters.
Though I think you can consider it just a case of most stories having two Anna's, both sides falling in love for shallow reasons but not actually intending to be underhanded.

Just because it adverted the public's expectations of a Disney Princess film does not excuse outright deception in writing!

Also his plan required actually marrying into the family. Elsa died and it did stop all the ice magic, Anna would be the sole queen and probably not in the mood for marriage for some time. The way things plan out he makes it more plausible that Anna pledged wedding vows to him before dieing, made him officially King, then can officially charge Elsa with treason to have her executed. Letting her die in the mountains would just take longer and make it look like he failed his mission of only capturing her, letting soldiers under his own charge disobey direct orders.

If Elsa died*

Nothing wrong with the concept, but it's been seriously over-used in the last few years.

No one, not even Elsa, understood the nature of her powers, but an observer can conclude that Elsa is the cause of the winter. There is no prophecy or curse, simply just wherever Elsa goes she takes the weather with her & leaves a trail of ice & snow. If the weather was created intentionally, there would be no reasoning with the person who inflicted it. If the winter was created by accident, then why would one believe Elsa would know how to end it when she does not know how she made it?

>shot of him grinning underneath the rowboat

Could be me seeing what I want to see, but I really think that look was him just being relieved he found such an amazingly gullible sucker to con. Right from when he meets Anna he finds a princess that is clearly thirsty as hell and ready to dive right into his trap. I think before that he might have been a little nervous that wooing either sister would be hard, but Anna gave him a guaranteed backup plan if seducing Elsa wouldn't work.

Hans had Anna spreading her legs. Another family tragedy would have pushed the mourning orphan into the arms of her last remaining loved one.