![]() The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts Spencer Kornhaber, Shirley Li, and Lenika Cruz discuss Turning Red and the state of the animated villain on an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast, The Review. While films such as Raya and the Last Dragon create fantasy-pastiches of cultural context, Turning Red follows a real 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl living in Toronto in 2002-who just happens to turn into a giant red panda sometimes. Turning Red is the latest and certainly among the most culturally specific animated works. And with Moana and later films, children’s animation shed predictable tropes of hero/villain plotlines while also centering cultures that don’t have much representation in the depths of the Disney vault. ![]() Early iterations in the trend, such as Frozen, had classically good-and-evil setups, but subverted them as the films went on. But while the 1989 Disney movie ends with behemoth Ursula skewered on a ship, the 2022 Pixar film finds its dramatic peak in a quieter moment of mother-daughter understanding.Īnimation didn’t do away with villains all at once. ![]() Turning Red, like The Little Mermaid before it, arrives at its climax with the antagonist blown up to kaiju proportions. The conflict in both films involves a broken relationship with a loved one, made cinematically epic by way of magical metaphor. Recent movies such as Turning Red and Encanto certainly have drama, though instead of defeating a cackling evildoer, the main character now typically has an internal battle made external. (Quick: What is the princess’s name in Sleeping Beauty?)īut despite their prominence in classic films, animated villains have slowly disappeared from screens over the past decade. Sleeping Beauty’s haughty sorceress, Maleficent The Little Mermaid’s operatically campy sea witch, Ursula The Lion King’s melodramatically evil Scar-each one so charismatic they tend to obscure their movie’s protagonist. Few characters are as strikingly memorable as a classic Disney villain.
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