Stephan Sokolow's Blog

Since rediscovering and posting my little essay on the problem with having a big bad, I’ve been thinking on how this relates to the problems in Disney “cheapquels” and their more modern animated works like The Princess and the Frog and Tangled.

The Princess and the Frog has pretty much the same flaw as I already explored in Don Bluth’s Anastasia, but Tangled is a little more interesting.

For those who haven’t seen the film, Tangled is Disney’s take on the fairy tale, Rapunzel. It’s a 3D-animated film and they do it with a degree of panache and flair that makes me think of the second Shrek movie and, in some ways, makes it a candidate for their best animated feature ever… except for one small thing: Mother Gothel (the witch who kidnaps Rapunzel)

While the movie’s characterization is excellent everywhere else (Including Rapunzel doing a pretty good job at being clever, resourceful, and not being a damsel in distress more than her circumstances would demand), Mother Gothel is conspicuous by how uncomplicated her character is.

In fact, compared to Lady Tremaine (Cinderella’s wicked stepmother) who has two daughters of her own to care for (and who, it’s possible, harbors some sort of personal resentment for Cinderella) or characters like Maleficent or Ursula who not only have no reason to care for the heroine, but are also inhuman enough to at least get the benefit of the doubt, Mother Gothel is so circumscribed by the needs of her role that, for someone used to seeing nuance in entertainment, the shallowness of her character can be downright grating compared to the rest of the cast.

Despite raising Rapunzel for 18 years and, supposedly, spending that time alone with her, Mother Gothel is still portrayed as caring only for the youth-giving magic of Rapunzel’s hair. Now, while there are certainly many people in the world that sociopathic, casting one as the villain in a story that is otherwise so well-polished just doesn’t work.

Rather than (admittedly very clever) lines like “You want me to be the bad guy? Ok. Now I’m the bad guy” and Disney’s signature cliché “villain falls to their death” scene, a more fitting end could have at least involved some sign of raising Rapunzel alone in the woods having affected her.

But, in the end, the plot calls for an evil witch of a villain, so Mother Gothel is forced to remain nothing but a “big bad”. She can’t grow as a character; she can’t have a “rock and a hard place” moment where her fear of age and death battle with a desire for the happiness of the girl she raised and unintentionally grew attached to. She can’t even hesitate or show regret that things could have played out differently. She’s just an evil old witch, hurting and lying to others for unexplored selfish desires because, if she’s human, then the viewers might not want her to die… and obviously a villain’s only purpose is to be defeated in a dramatic fashion (and serve as a blind attempt at continuing a pattern that worked in the past).

This interpretation becomes even more obvious with all of the themes and twists which feel borrowed from other Disney successes, like the post-death save by an admission of love from Beauty and the Beast. I worry that, if this trend continues, Disney may take the dubious honor of being the first studio to not just milk a franchise dry, but combine so much character talent and so little talent for plots that they milk an entire class of plots dry. (Their excessive investment in female royalty, as one person put it, and the associated preconceptions about what plots to use don’t help)

Fundamentally, Disney’s big problem seems to be that their skills lie very firmly in the ground-level details like how to write entertaining characters and good comedy while, when they have to construct plot details on their own, they fall flat.

This is most clearly shown in their “cheapquel” sequels like The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride or The Little Mermaid 2: Return to the Sea. When borrowing a good, time-tested plot, they can enhance it to classic status by replacing the traditionally simplistic characters with more entertaining, personable ones. However, when they need to cook up their own plots or, as with Tangled or Peter Pan 2: Return to Never Land (more on that in a moment), expand an existing plot too simple for a feature film, their efforts fall flat.

This may be because they put up a wall between their high-level plot and their low-level details through which ideas can only flow in one direction. They do an excellent job on the little details and characters can affect plot points that are unimportant… but when push comes to shove, the plot has veto power over the characterization. If you look at something like Lion King 2, there’s almost a direct inverse correlation between a character’s importance to the plot and how interesting they are… The less the plot is yanking the character around, the more interesting they are.

Peter Pan 2 is actually an interesting example because, while it is a “cheapquel”, like Tangled, it wasn’t created from whole cloth. Rather, a few years after the original Peter Pan play had gained success, J.M. Barrie wrote an additional scene titled An Afterthought (essentially an epilogue) in which Peter Pan returns when Wendy has children of her own. It is that scene which, like the Rapunzel fairy tale, Disney inflated into a feature-length film and, with only the budget of a cheapquel behind it, Return to Never Land feels as if the Disney magic is going “putt-putt sputter, putt-putt cough” as the mix of borrowed and created plot elements constantly changes.

I’m very happy to see that Disney is still very capable of producing good films and I’m also happy to see them receptive to the idea of realistic female leads for the 21st century, but a truly good story has to be character-driven, with a free flow of influence back and forth between the plot and characters, not locked-down so the characters become little more than marionettes. If Disney wants to continue their tradition of casting a nasty, selfish woman as their main antagonist, they’re going to have to work at least as hard on her as they do with everyone else in the cast.

Note: The portions of this regarding Peter Pan 2: Return to Never Land were originally written near the end of October of 2009 and were rediscovered alongside my previous two posts on writing, but weren’t complete enough to be posted on their own. Thankfully, my brother’s less wordy commentary several months ago on Mother Gothel’s motivations and death scene came to mind and, once I’d pulled out Tangled and watched it, the rest was easy.

Update 2011-08-21: The Noah’s Ark segment of Fantasia 2000 is  a good, simple example of how the Disney magic works when it really works. A proven plot which is spiced up with distinctive, memorable art, characters, and music as appropriate to the type of project.

Note: I originally wrote this in April of 2009, but I forgot about it until recently when I started tidying up my notes on how to write better fiction.

Many of the most iconic Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons were produced in the 1930s through 1950s. However, there’s a subtle, but often very noticeable difference in how these two sets of cartoons feel and a very simple reason for it. Warner Brothers cartoons primarily center around basic, adversarial slapstick. The problem with this is that, as we grow up, we start to notice the flaws in this approach, illustrated by this hypothetical conversation:

“These two thinking, self-aware characters don’t like each other. They fight amusingly.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean _why_?”
“Why don’t they like each other?”
“That’s just what rabbits and hunters (or cats and birds or whomever else) do. Stop over-thinking things.”

By contrast, Disney generally based their cartoons around caricatures of daily life. When adversarial conflict did occur, it felt more natural. Everyone knows dogs often don’t get along with smaller furry animals like chipmunks and cats and who hasn’t felt like Donald Duck getting into a fight with an inanimate object at some point?

We can enjoy both kinds of cartoons, but Disney’s approach doesn’t tarnish as we grow up. Pluto is still a dog, but Bugs Bunny is a person in different clothes, just like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Why, then, should we expect it to feel natural to see Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam chasing him with a gun?

Of course, this isn’t to say the classic-era Warner Brothers writers were bad at what they did. The originality and variety seen in their gags makes them highly memorable. (eg. Wile E. Coyote’s tiny umbrella, portable holes, Roadrunner’s ability to run through painted scenes to outwit Coyote, and the elevation of anvils from “just another heavy object to be used for gags” to an icon of cartoon slapstick, just to name a few.) They simply didn’t realize the importance of certain cartoon design decisions.

This perceptual shortcoming (possibly stemming from successive generations of animators learning by “getting a feel for it” rather than by analyzing the “why” of prior successes) is in no way limited to one company or one time period. On Disney’s “The Chronological Donald, Volume 4”, Leonard Maltin finishes by introducing a modern Donald Duck cartoon which he presents as evidence that Donald Duck is still going strong. However, my first impression was that it was disappointingly boring. I later realized that this was because it felt like Donald didn’t deserve what he was receiving. In the modern cartoon, the Aracuan bird relentlessly torments Donald Duck who just wants to take a picture for Daisy. In the classics, whether by having Donald throw the first punch (eg. smashing Huey, Dewey, and Louie’s snowman or putting lit firecrackers in their trick-or-treat bags and then pouring water on them) or by having him fight an inanimate object, the impression is given that Donald is in the wrong… or at least an innocent victim of bad luck with no thinking entity behind it.

I think this is also why I always enjoyed Road Runner and Coyote cartoons more than other types. As with Donald Duck, many of Wile E. Coyote’s failures are his own fault and, for the rest, the guy’s just obsessed. Go eat some easier food for cryin’ out loud! It certainly also helps that Wile E. Coyote draws on the same fount of humor via expressions without speech that have proven so successful with Pluto.

Note: I originally wrote this at the beginning of December of 2008, but I forgot about it until recently when I started tidying up my notes on how to write better fiction.

Update 2011-08-14: I now also have a more instance-specific post which touches on this in the context of Disney’s Tangled as a side-effect of exploring Disney’s biggest weakness as a source of creative endeavors.

A big bad is a character, usually poorly defined, shallow, and explicitly evil, whose quest for power/revenge/evil/pizza dominates and drives the story, forcing character development and any other subplots to fit themselves in around it.

These days, having a “big bad” has almost attained cliché status. While you can still get away with it, it takes a great deal of skill and, as such, should not be attempted by amateurs. (Sadly, the people who do it most) Doing so will most likely cause your story’s perceived quality to take a nose-dive. (Especially if the “big bad” isn’t introduced until part-way through the story, because it causes the reader’s first impression of the story to be disproven after they’ve gained an emotional attachment to it. I often find myself feeling a twinge of resentment when authors do this.)

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that all fiction is, more or less, the same stories being re-told with different details. Regardless of personal taste, the core of the matter is that people read stories for the characters and the ideal story for a given reader at a given point in their life is a story which provides them with just enough depth (both of characters and of plot) to comfortably entertain them and no more. (I say “comfortably” rather than “effectively” because even if a reader *can* follow the plot of an overly complicated story, their taste in complexity will vary with their mood. At some points, they may feel like challenging themselves to a brain-bending mystery story while, at others, they may just want to rest their fatigued mind in the company of a good book)

Keep in mind that not all complexity is the same. A complex plot with simple characters will be easy to write, but not very satisfying to read. A simple plot with complex characters will be difficult to write but, all other things being equal, will satisfy the readers very well. This trait is also what helps to distinguish classic fiction like Frankenstein from pop culture. Society changes and technology changes, but human nature remains eternal¹. It takes practice to write truly deep characters, but just keeping this in mind should help you to quickly find an acceptable mix of complex characters and complex plot for your current skill level.

To illustrate how others have achieved this as well as the importance of avoiding the lure of a “big bad”, I’ll compare several popular animated feature films and deconstruct the tendency for Disney films to have higher-quality plots.

A good place to start would be Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. At its core, it’s a romantic story of two characters who are unsatisfied with their lives and end up finding the solution in each other. The plot is very simple, made more so by the limitations of presenting a story as a film, yet the end result definitely earns the title of “animated classic”. Cursory examination is all that’s needed to conclude that “memorable characters” play a large part, but you can’t add them as icing on the cake and, as a crucial tell, you can’t immediately point to one character and say “that’s the bad guy.”

For example, Belle isn’t just your ordinary female lead. She’s a literate woman in the pre-industrial french countryside, misunderstood by everyone but her father, and she dreams of living beyond the bland existence of country life. The beast is a prince, spoiled and immature, who will mature and learn kindness throughout the course of the story. He also provides a crucial tell as to the story’s quality in that, in his initial appearance, one could easily mistake him for a villain despite his status as the lead male protagonist.

Gaston is probably the most telling character though, because he’s the closest thing the story has to a villain. Selfish, egotistical, and popular, Gaston is every bit a pre-industrial, country-bumpkin jock and, most importantly, nothing more. At most, his subplot shares the story equally with the developing relationship between Belle and Beast.

The lesson to be taken from this is that, unless you’re either writing an epic, or skilled enough to not need advice at all, you shouldn’t use a “big bad”. They’re two-dimensional, boring, and tend to make for simple, predictable stories. Also, keep in mind that “epic” is a commonly misunderstood word. In common conversation, it can be used merely to mean impressive or grand (eg. an epic voyage), but in the context of literature, it refers to a tale where events on a grand scale (eg. the fate of middle earth) are determined by small, seemingly ordinary protagonists. (The heroes. eg. Frodo Baggins and friends)

Now, let’s contrast this with Don Bluth’s Anastasia, produced by 20th Century Fox. As with Beauty and the Beast, there are two subplots and one is romantic, the characters are memorable, and the production quality is high. However, in this story, the non-romantic subplot is being driven by a madman (Rasputin) bent on killing the main protagonist (Anastasia) and this is to the detriment of the story because, despite some clever character design work, his motivations are suspect and his personality falls flat. Most importantly, despite attempts to change him to a “basket-case wanting out of limbo”, Rasputin never overcomes his role in the prologue as a cookie-cutter “madman out for revenge” whose reasoning was neither explained nor justified. However, in all fairness, solving that problem would require a prequel of its own or it would do more harm than good to the story as a whole. Hence, my argument that, except in very special circumstances, the problem of using a “big bad” is a Catch 22, and the only solution is not to do so in the first place. More significant to this instance however, is Rasputin’s role in the story: the happy ending can only occur once he’s dead, and that means that his subplot is dominant, hence his status as a “big bad”.

Finally, to clarify the importance of that, I’ll examine a slightly more subtle case. Disney’s Aladdin. At first glance, it would seem to disprove my argument, since it has a big bad (Jafar) and the story can’t end until he’s defeated, but his role is key. In Anastasia, the romance is subordinate, dancing to the tune of Rasputin’s plot; In Aladdin, the romance is dominant. The main conflict has always been that Aladdin is a commoner and Jasmine is a princess and, despite his best efforts, Jafar’s subplot merely places additional obstacles to their love, rather than commanding the flow of the story as a whole. This distinction between the villain’s plot being dominant or subordinate can be illustrated further by analyzing the sequels: In “Return of Jafar”, Iago’s subplot dances to the tune of the dominant “Jafar, the big bad, returns and must be defeated for good” story and, in “Aladdin and the King of Thieves”, the “Aladdin and his father reunite and reconcile” subplot is driven by Cassim’s greed and eventual defeat. If it weren’t for the quality of characters like Genie and the emotional connection to them already developed by the original film, the story would be ordinary, un-exceptional Saturday morning cartoon fare.

In essence, in a good story, it’s the characters’ story and the bad guy is in the way; In a bad story, it’s usually the bad guy’s story… and not in a good way. You can write a good story about a bad guy, but then it’s the characters’ story and the (good) bad guy is in the way.

^1. For example, there is an ancient greek play where a father complains of how his teenage son loves to sleep in and lay around all day listening to the bards. If that doesn’t convince you, I doubt anything will.