Vile Villains in Saccharine Shows in Films — Animated.
- Adventures in Zambezia gives us a ruthless Monitor Lizard named Budzo who loves the taste of bird's eggs and is perfectly willing to betray anyone who helps him. In the past, he tore off Sekhuru's wing and he also killed the main character's mother, one of the founders of the Hurricanes. There isn't a single funny moment whenever he's on screen.
- Balto has the despicable and murderous literal Glory Hound Steele and the rather terrifying-looking bear who tries to kill the heroes at one point, with absolutely no comedic moments from these two whatsoever.
- Barbie movies:
- Barbie in the Nutcracker has the Mouse King, who's voiced by Tim Curry and almost never played for laughs, attempting to chop the Nutcracker to pieces with an axe and then burn him alive in a fire.
- Barbie as Rapunzel has Gothel, who kidnapped Rapunzel to start a war between two kingdoms that almost killed a little girl, is emotionally abusive to Rapunzel and her friends, is powerful enough to enslave dragons, and her magic makes her almost unstoppable and spends the majority of the final battle chasing everyone.
- Barbie of Swan Lake has Rothbart, who's out to kill Odette for a majority of the movie. After rendering the Magic Crystal powerless, Rothbart blasts Daniel and Odette with his magic, killing them both until their love revives them.
- Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus: Wenlock is a G-rated sexual predator. He goes from kingdom to kingdom, forcing women to accept his hand in marriage or face awful consequences. He introduces himself by turning everyone in the kingdom to stone and giving Princess Annika three days to accept his proposal before the spell becomes permanent. Before the film began, he transformed Princess Brietta into the titular pegasus when her parents refused his proposal, and turned three women unlucky enough to actually marry him into mute, goblin-like slaves after getting bored with them. He nearly kills Brietta in front of her own sister, and buries Annika alive in an avalanche when she stands up for her family.
- Barbie: Mariposa has Henna, who poisons the Queen, then talks to the fairy-eating Skeezites and agrees to let them eat as many fairies as they want on the condition that she be allowed to stay ruler. She also manipulates Mariposa and almost everyone else, successfully avoiding suspicion until it's almost too late.
- Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses: Duchess Rowena is a master manipulator and comes the closest to winning out of nearly every Barbie villain. As she slowly poisons King Randolph to death, she plays the part of a loving relative to gain his trust and cut him off from his twelve daughters, until he willingly makes her his successor on his deathbed. In turn, she manipulates the 12 princesses, undermining their self-esteem and capabilities to help their father, to the point that they decide to leave the kingdom for their mother's secret pavilion, believing Rowena's lie that they are the cause of their father's failing health. Before they can realize their mistake, she imprisons them in their place of refuge and steals some of its magic. Upon their escape, she uses the stolen magic to place a Fate Worse than Death curse on Princess Genevieve, compelling her to dance herself to death, which Genevieve only escapes by weaponizing the paper fan Rowena yelled at the girls about earlier. Rowena and her henchman Desmond may well still be trapped in the dance spell to this day.
- Barbie as the Island Princess has Queen Ariana. She plans to murder Antonio and his family, poisons the animals so they'll starve to death in an endless sleep, only had a daughter to serve her own ends, bribes a guard to kill Ro and her friends by knocking them into the ocean, and gained her title through marrying and killing an elderly king with a heart condition.
- Barbie: Princess Charm School has Dame Devin, who is one of the few antagonists to actually murder someone. In her case it was her sister-in-law.
- Barbie in the Pink Shoes: the Snow Queen rules over the realms of ballet, and even other villains bow before her. She enforces the storytelling of every ballet, seeing to it that every story is told exactly right. Since our heroine Kristyn has found herself in the title roles of Giselle and Swan Lake, that would be catastrophic. She freezes the life out of anyone who makes a single step out of place and brings them to her icy palace, where she puppeteers them as her perfect ballet troupe. Her victims include Kristyn's non-dancer friend Hailey, who collapses from the strain once she's free.
- Barnyard is, at least on the surface, an animated comedy about talking farm animals and the silly hijinks they get up to at the titular barnyard. Meanwhile, the main antagonist, Dag, is a vicious, disturbingly sadistic coyote who's basically a serial killer, complete with a pack of coyotes as henchmen and a necklace that has severed chicken's feet from his former victims hanging on it. He openly taunts and threatens to eat a baby chick for calling him a "meaner" and threatens to kill everyone on the farm if the main character, Otis the Cow, breaks their deal (which was made after he murdered his father, no less). Appropriately enough, the comedic tone of the movie falls like a rock whenever he and/or his pack appears onscreen.
- The Boxtrolls is a very whimsical and funny movie. Archibald Snatcher, however, is a genuinely threatening villain, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have his own comical moments. However, when you find that he attempted to kill Eggs, a child no less, you're gonna see that he is more than what he appears.
- The Brave Little Toaster is a cute musical film about talking electrical appliances, but then we meet the Junkyard Magnet, who puts alive cars (and even tries to do the same with a human and the main character) in a Conveyor Belt of Doom that takes them to the trash compactor.
- Dark Heart from the second Care Bears movie is far creepier than he has any business being. A Lucifer-like corrupter who turns children into sadists that wreck a summer camp. He apparently is motivated only by evil, and captures the souls of the Care Bears in a giant ruby chandelier.
- Dark Heart had nothing on the Spirit of the Book from the first movie, which wanted the whole world to stop caring and manipulated Nicholas into doing her work for her. She always appears as just a face in a book, turns green and always uses creepy Ominous Latin Chanting, comes within two people in the entire planet from succeeding, and is never Played for Laughs.
- Coraline is an animated fantasy film about the titular heroine who wishes her busy parents would pay more attention to her and is, for the most part, pretty lighthearted. The main Big Bad is the Other Mother, AKA the Beldam, a bloodthirsty, villainous creature who lures children to the Other World with false gifts and love to feed on their Life Energy. She assumes a more monstrous form as her plan unravels and it's heavily implied that Coraline is the latest in a long line of victims (Three past victims appear) and possibly the first to escape her clutches.
- Despicable Me has Miss Hattie and Mr. Perkins. Unlike Big Bad Wannabe Vector, who ended up getting some punishment of some sort, these two are far more despicable, with absolutely little to no comedia moments, and even manage to get away.
- Despicable Me 2 has El Macho, a presumably dead supervillain who plots to Take Overthe World by brainwashing Gru's minions using a Psycho Serum that turns them into vicious purple monsters.
- Minions has Scarlet Overkill, who personally hates the minions and tries to kill them thinking that they will be the reason why she will be defeated in the end.
- Despicable Me 3 had Former Child Star Balthazar Bratt, who plots to destroy Hollywood as revenge for firing him after he got too old to continue acting on TV.
- Minions The Riseof Gru has the Vicious 6, who personally all hate Gru, his minions, their former leader Wild Knuckles, and try to betray and kill them several times throughout the movie.
- Disney Animated Canon:
- The Evil Queen (Grimhilde) from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. While most of the film is very cutesy and whimsical, she takes her pursuit to preserve her narcissistic self image to dark extremes. She ordered her Huntsman to assassinate Snow White and bring her heart as proof of the deed. When he failed, she took matters into her own hands, becoming a frightening looking hag to trick Snow White into eating a poisonous apple that would've put her into a deep sleep. Her goal was getting her caretakers, the dwarfs to bury her without realizing she was still alive.
- Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. The story was very lighthearted till she showed up and sentenced baby Aurora to death for a petty reason, though it is more likely for the hell of it. All the heroes could do was stall for time, which only worked because her minions thought babies stayed the same age, but once she sends her raven, Aurora is soon ensnared by her powers and is put into a deep sleep by a spindle created by Maleficent. She captures the one prince that could undo the spell and have him wait for a hundred years so Aurora would go mad from the sight of an aged and broken man, implying that even with the counter-curse to her death sentence, she could twist it to something worse. And since she is easily a Reality Warper who was so beyond the heroes in power, that the fairies had to cheat along the way in order to even do her in. She also turns into a scary dragon with power to match that almost manages to defeat the prince, "almost" meaning the fairies had to intervene in order to land a deathblow.
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Judge Claude Frollo for the entire Disney Animated Canon, for being essentially A Nazi by Any Other Name (and a relatively childish one at that). In the first 5 minutes of his movie he kills a woman begging in front of a church for sanctuary, and then nearly drops her baby down a well just for being deformed. He does save the baby, but destroys him over the years with verbal abuse and locks him in a belltower. Later he reveals his plan to wipe out all of Paris's Roma. Then he begins to burn down all of Paris in order to find a Roma woman he has the hots for and lets her choose between sleeping with him or being burned alive.
- The Lion King (1994): Scar. The film begins quite cheerful, but when Scar kills his own brother and takes the power, the film definitely becomes quite dark. He may be this to the whole franchise as he's the first Disney villain to successfully kill a main character.
- The Little Mermaid (1989): Ursula, and for two good reasons, too: one, she's a sea witch who (by borrowing Ariel's voice) disguises herself as "Vanessa" in order to take Eric from Ariel. Two, using Triton's crown and trident, she threatens to rule over the entire ocean and turn all the merfolk into worms. Her minions Flotsam and Jetsam are also much more competent than other Disney henchmen and prove a serious threat themselves.
- Morgana from The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea also counts, as she opens the film by trying to feed a baby to a shark.
- Mulan: Shan Yu and the Huns. Every scene they are in is played very seriously and they are one of the few Disney villains to cause so much destruction in their wake, including invading China's borders and slaying the Chinese armies that stand in their way. One scene that best exemplifies their ruthlessness was during the song "A Girl Worth Fighting For" where the Chinese soldiers were singing a happy song about fighting for the women they love when suddenly, the happy song stops, as does the entire musical portion of the movie, when they arrived at a village that had just been razed to the ground.
- The Jungle Book (1967): Shere Khan. As Faux Affably Evil as he is, his appearance in the original film stops much of the fun and silly mood and makes things more tense and dark. Even moreso where he's concerned in the sequel.
- The Princess and the Frog gives us Dr. Facilier, a voodoo witch doctor willing to sacrifice all of New Orleans to pay off his debts to dark voodoo entities. Although he gets in on the light, jazzy theme of the movie with a cool Villain Song, it's still clear that he's selfish, relentless and bad to the bone. That he murders the comic relief in cold blood on screen cements this. And then there's his Family-Unfriendly Death...
- Pinocchio:
- The Coachman runs an amusement park that magically turns young boys who use the attractions into donkeys. The ones that lose their voices are then sold to salt mines and circuses, and the ones who can still talk... well, they're put in cages, and we don't know what happens to them after that. It seems that none of them are ever human or see their homes again, though. And he gets away with it, too! Which is unique, considering every other villain falls to the hero.
- Though the Coachman is far worse, Stromboli is pretty bad too. Both his and the Coachman's actions can be Nightmare Fuel.
- The Rescuers Down Under: As mean and dislikable as Madame Medusa was in the first film, Percival C. McLeach, a poacher who sadistically enjoys torturing and killing animals and is more than willing to drop an innocent boy into a river full of crocodiles, proved to be far worse.
- Treasure Planet: Scroop is definitely the darkest character in the movie, with a threatening appearance and voice to boot. He heartlessly kills Mr. Arrow and is never played for laughs. His evilness stems from the fact that we need someone to root against when John Silver reforms, and it's done well.
- Oliver & Company is a very lighthearted movie, featuring talking cats and dogs. However, the storyline is a loose Setting Update of Oliver Twist, and its human villain Sykes — the counterpart of the novel's Bill Sykes — is a Loan Shark played utterly straight. There's nothing cool, funny, sympathetic, or even hammy about him. He's just a cold-blooded thug who wants his money now and doesn't care what he has to do to get it. Hell, even Lady Tremaine and especially Frollo, of all people, have a few funny moments and hamminess here and there (and you know, that's saying something).
- Wreck-It Ralph has the Walking Spoiler that is King Candy/Turbo. He becomes even more vile during his Villainous Breakdown in the climax, and more sadistic still after getting assimilated by a Cybug. The worst part of all this? He's ruling over a saccharine world, making him a villain who seems saccharine at first but just gets viler and viler!
- The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, during the "Ichabod" story. Everything is comedy and laughs, until the very scary Headless Horseman shows up.
- Doris the robotic bowler hat and Hyper-Competent Sidekick of the main villain Bowler Hat Guy in Meet the Robinsons. Unlike the laughably incompetent Bowler Hat Guy, she's never Played for Laughs, tries to murder Lewis by dropping a chandelier on him, and the movie takes a dark turn when she betrays Bowler Hat Guy (probably killing him) and creates a Bad Future in her image in which all humans are slaves to bowler hats like herself.
- Yokai from Big Hero 6, is surprisingly dark and menacing for a film that's otherwise so lighthearted and adventurous. Long before he is revealed to be Professor Callaghan, he decides Murder Is the Best Solution to deal with the titular team (who at that point of the film are just a bunch of powerless "meddling kids" that he personally knows) and when he unmasks himself and gives his Motive Rant to Krei he yells "you took everything from me (his daughter), so I will take everything from you". In addition, he admits that he doesn't care that the fire he used to steal the microbots and fake his death also killed Hiro's brother, Tadashi.
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire: Though its non-musical status and period setting already set it apart from the rest of Disney's repertoire, for the first half-hour or so it's still a fun, mostly harmless pulpy adventure story. Then the Leviathan shows up and blows their sub to smithereens, along with something like 90% of the people on board. From that point onwards, it's straight-up action adventure all the way and with a huge death toll to boot. Commander Lyle Tiberius Rourke is also surprisingly dark for regular Disney fare. He kills a man by punching him in the chest and fully intends to let Atlantis die by taking its power source with the intention of selling it for profit.
- Cinderella: Lady Tremaine, who always treats our titular heroine like dirt. Ever her daughters Anastasia and Drizella aren't around to give us a good laugh, ripping off Cindy's dress to prevent her from going to the ball, until, of course one of the sisters later Took a Level in Kindness.
- Bambi: Man. The moment the ominous music hits the screen, every animal panics and flees, with the intensifying music punctuated by the sound of a gunshot. When that happens, something dies, including Bambi's mother. And to make matters worse, we actually never get to see what he looks like, but his hunting dogs that were seen look downright demonic. The hunter's presence is almost something out of Hitchcock in a family feature.
- Tarzan: Sabor delivered the fastest onscreen death in any Disney film; in less than 3 minutes, she killed Kerchak and Kala's baby gorilla. Not long after, she offs Tarzan's parents with a fairly graphic aftermath. She is far more sinister than your typical predator, as she scared the baby gorilla first with a roar, and left the corpses mostly intact, and displays unnerving expressions of glee or rage, making her less of a mindless force of nature and more of a sadistic villain. Unlike Clayton, she has absolutely no amusing moments; Kala and Tarzan are in very real danger of dying, as she proves to be capable of nearly killing Kerchak in a straight up fight. Even as an adult, Tarzan had to fight for his life, and no other villain in the films or TV series were as effective as she was.
- Frozen has Hans, one of the most chilling depictions of a sociopath in any Disney movie. He is the embodiment of Villain with Good Publicity even towards the viewer. He appears to be a classic Prince Charming acting out of love towards Anna, but nobody realizes he's actually plotting to usurp the Arendellian throne until it's almost too late.
- The sequel has King Runeard, whose campaign to weaken a magical tribe triggered a chain of events that led to the near destruction of his own kingdom.
- FernGully: The Last Rainforest takes place in a forest filled with fairies and wildlife and copious amounts of scenery porn. The main villain is Hexxus, the spirit of destruction who first takes the form of a smoke monster and later looks like a demon straight from hell.
- Hey Arnold!:
- Hey Arnold! The Movie: Alphonse Perrier du von Scheck is the descendant of a commanding redcoat during the Revolutionary War. As a land developer, Scheck has the power and influence to have the neighborhood where a significant battle occurred that the colonists won against his family demolished so that he can put up a mall complex on it and thus reclaim it in the name of his family. He also seeks to have Arnold and Gerald locked up when they get too close to exposing that he's covering it all up, and later on when he's defeated and about to be arrested, attempts to run them, and the rest of the angry mob, over with his car, only to find his tires were stripped. And this was a movie to a show that involved ordinary (and occasionally strange) things only happening in this city.
- Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie: Lasombra is a greedy river pirate who abducts Arnold and his entire class, lets his own men get killed in booby traps and nearly leaves Helga and Gerald to fall off the edge of a cliff. He does it all in the name of achieving the Green Eyes' gold artifact the Corazon. He takes immense glee in being evil and is willing to threaten or dispose of any threat in the way of getting what he wants. Once he sees only the children in the tribe are unaffected by the sleeping sickness, he plans to steal all their treasure, leave the adults all in eternal rest and when the Corazon falls off a cliff, he violently picks Arnold up and tries to throw him off said cliff.
- How to Train Your Dragon (2010) has the Red Death. While most of the film is a heartwarming spectacle about Hiccup befriending Toothless and learning that dragons are not truly evil, this character shows up and immediately takes the film in a darker direction, since it explains why the dragons are constantly attacking the Viking village, drives a wedge between Hiccup and his father Stoick, and comes very close to killing a lot of Viking warriors.
- How to Train Your Dragon 2 has Drago Bludivist. Unlike the Red Death, Drago is a human being who is fully aware of his actions, and manages to rapidly push the film into Darker and Edgier territory, even taking the Big Bad of the previous film into account. His introduction via flashback involves him burning down a hall full of Viking chiefs and killing them, with only Stoick surviving. Two major characters die, one on screen, as a result of his actions. Nothing about him is remotely funny, even his Large Ham tendencies, and the mere mention of his name causes the goofy, heartwarming side of things to stop more or less instantly.
- And since third time's a charm, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World brings us Grimmel the Grisly. Despite the events of previous installment, the movie starts quite light-hearted, but when he appears, it becomes much darker. The fact that Night Furies are almost extinct? You know, about the only dragon species having The Dreaded status among the Vikings in the first movie? He's the reason. He also drugs the dragons into obedience by their own venom, is not above backstabing his former contractors, and is very smart, able to outwit Hiccup multiple times. He also likes to give Sadistic Choice and using Honey Trap in his plans.
- Ice Age:
- The first movie is one of the forerunners of the family-friendly CGI comedies. Its villain is Soto, a sabertooth tiger who wants to murder a human baby.
- Cretaceous and Maelstrom from The Meltdown are a pair of aquatic reptiles freshly sprung from their icy prison and ready to hunt down whatever creature they find particularly tasty. All the little details surrounding them, from the very visible spite in their eyes when they find Manny and company again to their Scare Chord heavy theme, give them a vibe far more in line with a slasher flick villain than that of a silly animated movie's.
- Rudy from Dawn Of The Dinosaurs is a towering, stark white Baryonyx whose roar alone terrifies even Mommy T-Rex and is the one who clawed out Buck's eye prior to the events of the film. As if his physical presence wasn't monstrous enough, he's smart enough to not only remember who Buck is, but hold a grudge over the fact that he's down a tooth because of him. If Cretaceous and Maelstrom were designed like slasher villains, then Rudy is pretty much a prehistoric Kaiju.
- The fourth movie has Captain Gutt, an evil pirate ape with jagged sharp claws for um...gutting his victims. He has a sick and twisted sense of humor. And he holds a grudge against Manny, a grudge so powerful that Gutt eventually resorts to trying to kill Manny's family just to get back at him.
Manny: Alright, let them go!
Gutt (chuckles darkly): I don't think so. You destroyed everything I had! I'm just returning the favor. - Katy the Caterpillar is a sweet little cartoon about a caterpillar exploring the world and meeting wacky characters. Its sequel, Katy Meets the Aliens, focuses on her children doing the same thing—except it throws in a sinister alien who can turn into anything it sees, and zaps the cute little animals away to a prison where it will drain their energy.
- Kung Fu Panda 2 gives us Shen, an Ax-Crazy banished prince who's hellbent on conquering China at all costs. Though he is relatively funny, he's ultimately the villain who comes the closest to killing Po, thanks to the cannons he invented from his parents' fireworks, kills many characters throughout the film, one of them on-screen, and outright commits genocide in the opening sequence of the movie.
- The Sharptooth from the original The Land Before Time. Beyond simply being outright terrifying, he causes the movie to get much darker after he appears when Littlefoot's mother dies from the injuries he inflicted on her.
- Lord Business from The LEGO Movie, while played for laughs at times, is a serious villain with powerful scope and endless resources. His plan is essentially to freeze the entire Lego universe in order to achieve "absolute perfection", he erases Good Cop's personality and forces him to demonstrate his superweapon, the Kragle, on his parents, all while sporting a Psychotic Smirk, as well as abandoning him in the think tank along with the heroes when he no longer needs him. He also personally kills Vitruvius on-screen by decapitating him with a thrown penny. Then it turns out that he was based upon the father of the child who created the whole world, who has a Heel Realization when he realizes his son views him as the bad guy, and promptly undergoes a Heel–Face Turn that extends to Lord Business as well.
- Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland has the Nightmare King suddenly show up in a world that was just plain Sugar Bowl till then, ruling over a section of Slumberland known as Nightmareland, the place where nightmares come from.
- The Loud House Movie, despite being for the most part on par with the show's lighthearted tone, has the caretaker Morag, who proves to be far darker than previous antagonists from the show since she's more than willing to brainwash a dragon, terrorize a whole town, and try to kill the Loud Family, which mind you, includes a baby, just to have peace and quiet.
- Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted follows a parade of colorful animals, some escaped form the New York zoo, others part of a circus. The villain, Chantelle DuBois, ostensibly an animal control officer, is out to murder the protagonist by any means necessary. Even after the escaped lion in question is safely contained in the zoo, she still tries to kill him (and an innocent sea lion!) and steal his corpse so she can add it to her collection of trophies.
- My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) has the Storm King, a comical yet ruthless and insane dictator who has conquered much of the world outside of Equestria — the Hippogriffs turned themselves into Seaponies and fled to Seaquestria to evade conquer — and has set his sights on the magic of the Alicorn Princesses to give him the power to control weather and live up to his name. His field commander, Tempest Shadow, an embittered unicorn with a broken horn, appears as the more direct and serious threat, having effortlessly disabled three of the four princesses by petrifying them with Obsidian Orbs, and actively on the hunt for the escaped Twilight Sparkle with her friends, but then, we learn that as a filly, she lost her horn after an Ursa Minor attack, and was shunned by her friends due to her unstable magic sparks, making her believe that friendship is meaningless. Later, at The Climax of the film, after the Storm King finally takes the magic of the Alicorn Princesses, then creates a huge tornado that engulfs all of Canterlot, Tempest asks him to restore her horn to fulfill his end of the bargain, but he backs out of the deal, reveals that he only used her and attempts to kill her. But Twilight saves her, leading to her Heel–Face Turn in risking her life to defeat the Storm King once and for all.
- Oogie Boogie from The Nightmare Before Christmas. The movie is dark, the residents of Halloween town scare people because that's what Halloween is about. None of them are Serial Killer cannibals and the movie gets darker when Oogie Boogie tries to murder both Santa Claus and Sally by dipping them in his snake and spider stew.
- Osmosis Jones: For the most part, this is a lighthearted parody of Buddy Cop movies with copious amounts of Toilet Humour for the kids all set inside the human body. Enter Thrax. He's portrayed as a mix between a supervillain and an international terrorist who travels between human hosts (which in the context of the movie are self-sufficient city/nations for countless micro-organisms) and destroys them, for no other reason than fame (if he can kill a human in less than 48 hours he'll get a chapter in every major medical text). Also, the slightest touch from his claw is enough to kill other microbes in a spectacular and horrible fashion, burning them from the inside out until they finally explode. Then, just to ratchet up the Nightmare Fuel even further, at one point he counts out his previous victims; one of them is a child who "didn't like to wash her hands." It says something when the inspiration of the villain comes from "The Masque of the Red Death".
- Agatha Prenderghast from ParaNorman. After her reveal, the movie turns from a fairly lighthearted Black Comedy to a much darker, more serious and more dramatic film, which is even acknowledged in the director's commentary.
- Pixar: Despite the bright colors, the comedy, and the cheerful nature of Pixar, they actually have some very dark and malicious villains that are straight-up evil. Obviously, this type of villain contrasts absolutely with the cheerful nature of the movies.
- Hopper in A Bug's Life is a ruthless tyrant who delights in the fear he instills in the ants, and was fully prepared to publically execute their queen to keep them compliant. He even admits to his minions that they don't even need the food the ants provide, implying his actions are motivated purely by sadism. His henchman Thumper, on the other hand, is even worse.
- Finding Nemo: The film is filled with a colorful cast of characters—virtually all of the villains are either mindless predators, oblivious to their own wrongdoing, or turn out to be not so bad after all. However, there is a dead-set example in the first five minutes, in the shape of the barracuda that kills Coral and every one of Marlin's children except Nemo. It appears for only a minute, but that minute is often regarded as the darkest in the movie. The mood instantly darkens when it appears, it's one of the few creatures not anthropomorphized, and the rest of the scene is just heart-breaking. It's in effect for the rest of the movie, too; the barracuda triggers a lifetime of mental trauma for Marlin and leads to his violent overprotection, driving Nemo to abandon Marlin and get captured as a result. In a sense, this thing is responsible for the entire plot and all the dark and sad moments within. Not bad for one scene.
- Charles Muntz in Up, though Carl's childhood hero at one point, is a delusional and sociopathic murderer who kills anyone who he even thinks threatens his discovery.
- Toy Story is a lighthearted series where the main conflict is usually within the heroes as opposed to external. Villains tend to be either Obliviously Evil or relatively harmless. Until Toy Story 3, that is, where we meet Lotso, a sadistic teddy bear overlord of a day care center who subjects new toys to being broken by toddlers, tortures, brainwashes, imprisons, and attempts to murder the heroes, and when they save him, he repays them by leaving them to die in an incinerator.
- Cars 2: While the villain of the first Cars film is an arrogant and obnoxious green racecar, the sequel's villains are an organization of evil, beaten-up cars led by a German microcar and a malfunctioning British SUV who commit multiple on-screen murders, torture, sabotage, and attempt terrorism.
- Brave gives us a sweet mother-daughter bonding story...with a villain, Mor'du, that happens to be a red-eyed, twelve-foot-tall bear with a taste for human flesh. As well as plenty of scenes that could have come right out of a horror movie, such as Mor'du watching a young Merida in the forest, Merida going into a castle and having Mor'du sneak up behind her after she's learned his gruesome origin story, and the end fight, where absolutely nothing hurts him except a bear of similar size and a multiton rock.
- Coco takes place in the vibrant, party-filled, music-laden Land of the Dead, which is populated with fondly remembered skeletons and colorful alebrijes. At first, the conflict seems to be that Miguel’s passion for music conflicts with his family's ban on music and he needs to resolve those two in order to get home. However, we discover that Miguel's hero and best chance to get home, Ernesto de la Cruz, murdered his homesick songwriter partner simply to get famous off the songs he wrote. He then goes on to try and murder Miguel because He Knows Too Much which also puts Miguel's friend Héctor at risk of being Deader than Dead.
- Rattlesnake Jake from Rango, whose appearance instantly stops the funnier bits of the movie. This serpent with a Gatling gun for a tail is considered to be one of the most dangerous outlaws known, and the only reason he’s been avoiding Dirt is due to a large hawk preying on the town. With the hawk dead, though, Jake’s got no more reason to skip town.
- Recess: School's Out: Dr. Phillium Benedict, in contrast to the typical jerks the Recess gang deal with, is a straight-up supervillain plotting to send the Earth into a new permanent Ice Age (believing that the countries with snow have the highest test scores and doing so will improve those of the United States).
- Rise of the Guardians is an animated adventure film focusing on a team of Santa Claus, The Sandman, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Jack Frost as they bring joy to children. They also fight Pitch, the living embodiment of fear and darkness, who gives children nightmares, commands an army of Hellish Horses, kills Sandy with a triumphant Evil Laugh, mindrapes Jack, and, in the finale, attempts to murder a child.
- The Road to El Dorado is a wacky, hammy, screwball comedy with two antagonists who are two different flavors of this trope. Tzekel-Khan is about as light-hearted and comedic as the rest of the film, but is a murderer, a traitor, and is into human sacrifice. Then there's Cortes, who isn't particularly active but seems like he came from a completely different movie, as he has the terrifying ability to kill all of the comedy and all the light in every scene he appears in.
- Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island: The werecats, Simone, Lena, and Jacques are some of the most terrifying Scooby Doo villains ever, having a humongous (off-screen) body count achieved by sucking men's souls to sustain themselves, trying to do the same to the Scooby Gang and dying a nightmarish death.
- The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie: While the series is lighthearted with an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain, The Movie introduces Dennis, a somewhat comedic but still surprisingly terrifying hitman hired to kill SpongeBob and Patrick using sharp spiked boots. Meanwhile, Plankton turns out to be a Not-So-Harmless Villain, framing Mr. Krabs for stealing Neptune's crown and getting him frozen, coming back in anticipation of seeing Mr. Krabs get burned to death, and proceeds to brainwash and enslave all of Bikini Bottom. And there's the cyclops diver, who captures sea creatures and painfully kills them using the heat of a bright lamp, then sells the dried-out remains as knick-knacks. (Whether or not he knows the fish are sapient and screaming is left as an exercise to the viewer. Though he does laugh evilly when SpongeBob and Patrick are running around their fishbowl in a panic, so whether he knows they're sapient or not, he's obviously enjoying what he does in a sadistic way.)
- The sequel has Burger Beard. Despite being more Laughably Evil than the other examples, he steals a reality-warping book and uses it to steal the Krabby Patty Secret Formula and turn Bikini Bottom into a post-apocalyptic hellhole (with no care for its residents), for no other reason than to open his own restaurant, using the Krabby Patty recipe to guarantee success.
- Sing has a more low-key example with the bears that hunt Mike down for most of the movie. The bears are introduced when Mike cheats them out of a large sum of money by cheating at poker. They then proceed to hunt Mike down with the intent of either getting their money or outright killing him. When they find out that Buster has the money in the form of prize money, they barge into the theatre and choke Mike until Buster opens the chest. Near the end of the movie, The bears are seen on the back of Mike's car... and then Mike is never seen again, implying that they killed him.
- The sequel has another example in Jimmy Crystal, the CEO of the entertainment company hosting Moon's show. He also has a Hair-Trigger Temper and tries to throw Buster off a roof. Twice. He becomes increasingly more unstable as the movie's final act goes on. He also emotionally abuses his daughter Porsha, calling her a "talentless loser."
- Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is, for the most part, a comedic deconstruction of its parent show. However, the Big Bad is Slade, who, despite being portrayed as a Laughably Evil Deadpan Snarker, can be just as menacing as he was in the original show when The Gloves Come Off. For one, he retains his expertise in combat, as evidenced by his first battle with the Titans, showing that he was going to kill them for the Titonium crystal he's trying to get. For another, he's also an expert in Mind Manipulation as shown in his plan to mind control the world that puts a deeper meaning behind the film's importance of the superhero movie genre. Even in the world of Teen Titans Go!, Slade maintains his Knight of Cerebus attitude.
- The Soviet adaptation of Treasure Island is mostly a Denser and Wackier take on the source material filled with slapstick comedy, where deaths are either left out or are Played for Laughs such as being punctured like a balloon. However, almost every time this version of Long John Silver is on screen after he reveals his true colors, the movie becomes more serious and closer to the text. Although he doesn't look very intimidating, his low, gravelly voice befits a pirate of his reputation, and his more Affably Evil aspects from the book like his fondness for Jim Hawkins and his boisterous personality were removed, seemingly to make the contrast between his cold demeanor versus the comedic tone of the rest of the two-parter more pronounced.
- Chef from Trolls is bound and determined to have all the trolls eaten and killed, has very few comedic aspects, and has no redeeming features whatsoever.
- We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story is a cutesy film about dinosaurs being sent to our time to make children happy. Nothing scary about that at all. Well, except for the creepy old Mad Scientist Professor Screweyes, who runs a Circus of Fear, has children sign a contract in their own blood, and is eaten by birds at the end of the film.
