Wednesday, March 03, 2010

The most evil villain in a kids' movie?

This choice may surprise. For me it's "Mindy from the network" in Bolt. She only has two scenes. In the first, she warns the director and crew of Bolt's TV show that she will fire everybody in the room if the show loses "so much as half a rating point." In the second, she simulates concern and empathy while she pressures Penny into giving up the search for Bolt and working with a replacement dog, telling her that "people will lose their jobs. Good people, with families". The people that, a few days earlier, she was ready to fire over a tiny ratings slip.

The writers could easily have put those lines in the mouth of another character -- Penny's mother, her agent, or the director, for instance. But they chose to give them to Mindy, and in the process promoted her from being merely a ruthless and efficient executive to being someone who callously and coldly manipulates the emotions of a child while feigning concern, to get the commercial outcome she desires. That's a whole new kind of evil for a kids' movie villain.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

And here my scariest villian was the guy in the top hat that catches children and puts them into cages in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I was mortified of him as a child!

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