Being part of Disney’s trajectory since the launch of the studio’s first animated feature film, villains play important roles not only in building the plot by strengthening the good guys vision of the main characters, but also, to exemplify which behaviors and actions should be avoided by those who are watching the stories.
With that in mind, the first malevolent figure of Mickey’s house: the Evil Queen, villain presented on the big screens in 1937 through the film ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, where, guided by her narcissism and vanity and using magic as fuel, she almost took the life of her own stepdaughter after the young girl to be considered the most beautiful in the kingdom by the Magic Mirror.
Soon after her, the second villain of the studio appeared, Lady Tremaine, also known as the Evil Stepmother, who appeared for the first time in ‘Cinderella’ (1950) — which leads us to wonder: who was the first male villain of the Disney universe?
The answer can be found if we go forward more than fifty years in the productions starring princesses and idealized by the company of walt disneyas the first man who emerged to disrupt the life of a crown holder was introduced in 1991.
first male villain
According to Disney, until the 90s, the company’s films had male presence in situations that harmed the good guys, however, they only appeared as henchmen or assistants to the great villains.
With that in mind, the first male villain produced was Gaston, a character who first appeared in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ under the animator’s designs, Andreas Dejaa professional who also created other great figures belonging to the ‘dark side of the force’ such as Jafar, from ‘Aladdin’, and Scar, from ‘The Lion King’.
In the plot, Gaston is the strong and handsome hunter who wants at all costs to marry Belle and fulfill his desire to build a beautiful family where, in his deepest dreams, they will become a couple and have “six or seven beautiful boys “, as he himself mentions in the film.
His ambition is driven only by vanity, as he wants to join Beauty because she, like him, is considered the most beautiful in the city. But, as if that weren’t enough of a problem, the character has several macho behaviors, exposing how much he thinks women are inferior to men in their attitudes towards the princess, since he disrespects her countless times, even making fun of his passion: books .
However, Bela does not accept being treated in such a way, and soon the princess rejects him. But, used to being hailed as a local hero and having beautiful girls around him in the blink of an eye, Gaston can’t accept the no and tries to invest again in romance, devising a plan that should lead them straight to the altar.
He fails again and ends up humiliated in the mud. But it doesn’t take long for him to create new steps to win Bela’s heart, as he tries to make a deal with the owner of the hospice to arrest Maurice, the father of the girl who claimed that his daughter was trapped with a beast in the palace, so he could blackmail the princess into marrying him in exchange for the poor lord’s freedom.
But after being freed from the Beast’s castle, Bela does not accept the deal and decides to expose to the whole city that a beast lives in the palace, stating that the large and hairy being is actually a good-hearted man who was the victim of a curse. However, the population despairs, causing Gaston to see one last opportunity to take revenge on Bela.
Gaston assembles a mutiny to kill the Beast, but, again proving that his vanity would get him nowhere, he ends up falling from the top of the castle while trying to strike the Beast, meeting his own end.
Source: Recreio
