How the mighty have fallen?
Warning: the following contains spoilers for Up.
At my screening of Up last week, I was taken by the all-around thoughtful and honest take on the death of a loved one. That’s something families can appreciate, I thought—kids, in particular, can probably benefit from some healthy discussion on the topic, and Pixar handled the whole thing with an admirably light touch. Interestingly, though, there’s one other character death in the movie that may be just as important, in a way, but is far less lovingly rendered and far less carefully dissected: the destruction of Charles Muntz. The bad guy.
At the climax of the movie, in the middle of a harrowing hand-to-hand fight scene, Muntz is knocked off of his zeppelin (don’t you hate it when that happens?), plummeting to his death. He probably deserves it, but that’s it—we don’t see what happens to him. There’s no redemption, no slap on the wrist, and no comment from the heroes about what’s happened. In my screening, a few people in the theater laughed.
Tell me, readers: what do you think about this? Has this always happened in kids’ movies? Or is it a shift away from the classic Scooby Doo-style “and I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you kids!” incarceration scene, or even a grudging chance at redemption for the bad guys? What about villains that aren’t quite human, like in many vintage Disney films? Is it worse for, say, Ursula or Maleficent to bite the big one than it is for Jafar?
Inquiring minds want to know. Or at least consider.
Up, Charles Muntz, death, Pixar, The Little Mermaid, Litttle Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, Scooby-Doo, Scooby Doo
June 8th, 2009 at 11:37 am
I haven’t seen Up yet, but this seems like a major question for fiction in general: how should we depict the fate of the wicked? It seems like the major choices are retribution (karmic or human), impotence (including jail), irrelevance, conversion, or success/survival.
I prefer endings that depend in realistic ways on the characters’ actions in the movie, which to me rules out karmic retribution. I suppose the exception to this would be villains who are undone by their own villainous traits, such as a cruel villain betrayed by a maltreated sidekick or an indiscriminate bomber killed by one of her own bombs. But that gets to be such a cliche after a while.
The trouble is that what works well in one story isn’t necessarily what we want to see in *every* story - it’s important to have a variety of examples to learn from, so kids need to see the villain converting sometimes (as in Return of the Jedi) or getting away sometimes (as in the kids’ classic The Usual Suspects). This same kind of issue - lone example versus broader trend - also comes up in dealing with stereotypes in movies: e.g. there’s nothing racist about the hero being white and the sidekick being black in *this* action movie, but when *every* action movie does it it gets to be a problem.