62 Votes in Poll
I always found Rourke sort of interesting in that for a Disney villain and unlike even the other three, he doesn’t act much like one at all; if it weren’t for his genocidal degrees of greed and neglect, he would’ve seemed like a fairly normal human being (or a typical military officer at worst), and mundanity always adds to believability. I might even say he oftentimes comes off more as a snarky action movie hero than as a flat‐out PE villain.
Even following his reveal as the antagonist, he never acts too cartoonishly; he never engages in maniacal laughter or grandiose monologues, he hardly shouts or sneers or gloats or verbally abuses, but instead he goes about everything he does rather casually and militaristically—somewhat similarly to how an actual psychopath would. His most overtly, blatantly “villainous” behavior is when he threatens to kill the King of Atlantis for information, punches him and then the nerdy protagonist guy before taunting the latter, and I guess during the climax, but that’s about it. Oh and he never sings, thankfully.
It’s not often Disney achieves that level of subtlety, so my vote goes to him with Shan Yu as a close second.
Tab Murphy himself said that they wanted to do something different with Rourke in terms of a villain. Instead of making him the usual mustache-twirling bad guy, they wanted to give him complexity by not making him inherently evil, but rather greedy. The idea is that they wanted a three-dimensional character as opposed to a two-dimensional villain.
Well, ironically enough that only served to make him one of Disney’s most vile; his total indifference to whether those around him live or die renders him more depraved than the likes of Frollo as per my moral criteria. As you know by now, I’ve always found impersonal, detached evil worse than the personal, hate‐driven or perverted kind (no matter how far the latter goes).
I also hope Disney knew that real‐world evil people don’t act like their typical repertoire of villains; they tend to be more like Rourke.
What do you think?