DISNEY AND THE DEATH PENALTY – IDENTIFYING A THEORY OF JUSTICE IN DISNEY ANIMATED FILMS

Disney has often been interpreted in black and white, particularly when it comes to villains. In the middle segment of the archetypal Disney film, when the villain prospers and all seems bleak, the environments literally darken. When evil is vanquished, light returns.

Take the Lion King where the bright sunlight of Mufasa’s Kingdom is contrasted with the ashen barrenness of Scar’s domain. Or how the threatening red volcano Te Ka transforms into its serene green alter ego, Te Fiti when Moana returns her heart. In Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty, dingy, decrepit castles are returned to their former glory when good prevails.

It is easy to interpret Disney’s sense of justice in the same light. Heroes thrive. Villains either die, are banished, or otherwise removed as threats. Surely the morals are clear and obvious, with little room for doubt.

It is not quite so simple. Only occasionally is it protagonists who strike the final blow. Hercules punching Hades into the river Styx, Eric impaling Urusla with the bow of his ship or Prince Philip stabbing Maleficent in dragon form, these are exceptions rather than rules. If there is no formal punishment, how does Disney deal with justice?

Judge, jury and no executioner

Disney tends to remove from its heroes and heroines the agony of sentencing and execution. In the original fairy tales that so many of the stories are based on, the villain’s fates are substantially more unpleasant, and the heroes much more involved. Snow White’s wicked queen is made to dance in iron shoes that have been heated on the fire until she dies. In a 17th century version of Cinderella, our heroine kills her evil step-mother by breaking her neck.

Yet, at the same time, Disney also spares many of its heroes and heroines from having similarly brutal fates inflicted upon them. Arial, in the animated edition, gets the prince instead of the rejection and suicide that are her rewards in Hans Christian Andersen’s original. The smouldering, Rapunzel rescuing Eugene gets his happy ever after (and presumably a royal pardon), a breezier fate than the blindness that awaits him in the original. Mowgli does not team up with Colonel Hathi to tear down the village as Kipling has him do.

Since Disney spares its characters from villains as much as it spares them becoming villains, it stands to reason that this airbrushing represents more a desire to avoid horrifying its audience than a codified statement on justice. Certainly it is hard to see children around the world enjoying a version of Mulan where rather than fighting the Hun, she is summoned as a concubine to the court of the Khan and commits suicide.

This softening of the stories has another effect. Because heroes have largely been spared the need to discipline their nemeses, in the Disney canon, organised death penalties are the preserve of villains, an evil from which plucky protagonists make a last-minute escape, usually with help from others whose lives they have changed for the better. In fact, the number of innocents who are unjustly sentenced in Disney should be enough to put children off the death penalty for life. Heroes escape, but only because of their and their friends’ efforts, not the flawed system.

Aladdin resurfaces from the sea, Esmeralda and Robin Hood escape the gallows. Nowhere is this clearer than at the denouement of Beauty and the Beast, where the beast spares Gaston rather than let him drop, telling him “I’m not a beast”.

To understand Disney justice therefore, we need to look not at what happens, but why and how. It is mostly falling that saves our heroes from having to get their hands dirty, a deus ex machina, or should that be chameleon ex machina (looking at you Pascal) to hurtle us towards a happy ending.

Falling in death

We associate Disney with falling in love – Aladdin and Jasmine, Beauty and the Beast, Ana and Elsa’s sisterly love, Brave’s maternal love. But falling is also Disney’s go to tactic to make the bad guys go away. Think Gaston from the castle ramparts, Captain Hook from his mast, Ratigan from Big Ben, Charles Muntz from the balloon. Frollo from the towers of Notre Dame. There are plenty of exceptions, a whole cast of non-fallers. Edgar is parcelled off to Timbuktu, Mulan’s Shan Yu fizzles out in a painful looking fireworks explosion, the bug tormenting Hopper is eaten by baby birds. Often though, even the non-falling deaths are preceded or heavily linked to descent. Scar falls rather than climbs into the pit of Hyenas that ends him, Hopper descends to the chicks, Ursula and Maleficent are stabbed or impaled, but then fall too just for good measure. Falling is a clear archetype.

In part this is because falling conjures classic images that go back far beyond Disney. Falling is metaphorically inseparable from sin. The fall of man in the garden of Eden. A fall from grace. Icarus flying too close to the sun, only to fall. In European mythology, darkness often comes from deep in the ground, from those digging and falling too far and releasing an evil like the Balrog or a Cauldron with dark powers. Falling ties Disney’s villains into this context, and reinforces the two part moral message that choices can make a person fall into darkness, and falling into darkness earns physical, tangible punishment.

“If you fall as Lucifer fell you fall in flame”. The words are not Disney but Victor Hugo and his dogged policeman Inspector Javert. For those not au-fait with Les Miserables, Javert believes so totally in Manichean justice, a world divided into law givers and law breakers, that he fails to recognise that his dogmatism can become villainy. Disney villains share Javert’s unfortunate habit of thinking themselves good. Frollo in particular, like Javert a Hugo creation, and one who in Disney’s version of Hunchback of Notre Dame falls literally into hellfire from the top of the cathedral, pays for this mistaken philosophy. Disney, like Hugo, does not believe in black and white.

Falling also has another advantage in that it allows a young audience to understand that someone cannot survive without alarming film classification boards or parents. Fear of falling is among the most hardwired and animalistic of human phobias, which is why it wakes us from a dream, a mechanic that Inception used so cleverly. It therefore feels like an adequate punishment whilst also communicating quickly and effectively to children that the villain is gone.

And ‘gone’ is the apposite word, for rarely in Disney do we get confirmation of death. We do not pan down to earth to see Charles Muntz strike the ground. Even Mother Gothel, among the rare characters whose entire fall is shown on screen, does not splatter on the grass that she denied Rapunzel for so long. She vanishes from her cloak before her body hits the floor, presumably dead of old age, but conveniently gore free.

Two strikes and you’re out

If it is safe to say that Disney is anti-capital punishment that doesn’t mean it is anti-punishment. Villains get their comeuppance. Importantly, they do so on the same pulley that brings heroes their reward. Their trajectories become mirror images, and so too do the reasons for their fates.

Crucially it is not when antagonists sin for the first time, but when they turn their back on second chances that the sentence is carried out. It matters that the tower crumbles after Gaston wastes the second not the first chance to turn away from evil. So too is it important that in Aristocats, Duchess and her litter returned to Paris, only for Edgar to attempt to get rid of them a second time.

The main difference between heroes and villains in Disney is not where people are born, or what they look like, but how they react to making a mistake. Heroes err, flee, waste talents, sometimes even sin, but all come to realise the error of their ways. Villains double down. It is for that that they are punished.

If it is tempting therefore to view Disney’s morality as simplistic, dualist, good vs evil and nothing in between, it does not bear scrutiny. At no point does Disney more clearly signal its aversion to this judicial code than the scene in Cinderella when the cat, called Lucifer, falls from the window. Falls do not always have to mean falls, for what else are cats famous for if not landing on their feet. Even Lucifer gets a chance reappear in Cinderella 2 and be given a chance to restore his soul and his reputation.

Is it possible then to distil a theory of justice from Disney? If so, it is that to err is human, but to do so again is evil.

It is the rejection of a second chance rather than a first sin that usually leads directly to a villain’s punishment, even where this is seemingly inflicted by fate rather than by a protagonist. When Gaston is saved by the beast, only to then fire at him again, he must fall. When imprisonment as a genie cannot contain Jafar in Aladdin, the lamp must be destroyed in lava in the sequel.

Disney believes in second chances, but perhaps not third ones.