Wednesday with Walt: Good vs. Evil

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Wednesday with Walt: Good vs. Evil

There is nothing like a good villain, you know, the perfectly evil character to oppose the hero. The folks at Disney know the importance of villains in Disney movies; in fact, they have even started a special show just for them called Villains Mix and Mingle at Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party. What would the Disney movies be without the likes of Cruella, Ursula, Lady Tremaine and the Stepsisters, or the Evil Queen?

To Walt Disney, the villains were a very important part of his fairytales. Although often chastised by mothers and the press alike for including villains in his films because they “scared children,” Walt never changed his approach to the inclusion of witches, ogres, giants and dragons because he felt that they were important to the story. Furthermore, he didn’t really care what they said because what was paramount to him was that the audience left the theater having gotten the point of the story.

Walt did not believe in playing down to children. He was frank with his daughters and when he made his films he stood true to that principle. He said that children are people and there was no point in acting as though there was no bad in the world. The truth is there is and always has been both bad and good in the world. The point of Walt’s movies was that good always prevails over evil.


In an interview with David Griffiths (1959), Walt explained his position very well. He stressed that you must have an evil villain in order to accentuate the good winning over it. Here is what he said,

“All the world’s great fairytales, it must be remembered, are essentially morality tales, opposing good and bad, virtue and villainy, in dramatic terms easily understood and approved by children. Without such a clash of good and evil and the prevalence of goodness – of the good people – fairytales like Snow White, Cinderella, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty long since would have died because they would have had no meaning. Now if you’re going to give goodness something really important to fight for, to conquer, you’ve got to make villainy a worthy foe.”

He then spoke about the psychologists of that day disputing his critics about the use of villains. But besides that, Walt was a man who called it like he saw it. At the end of this part of the interview he said simply, “We don’t pussyfoot with evil; we deal with it forthrightly.”

So, there you have it…there’s nothing like a good villain to bring out the best in a hero, for goodness sake!

Wednesday with Walt: Good vs. Evil

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