Actually, you might need to know a little more. Most animated villains either get ambiguously captured/arrested, or they fall to their deaths. And how apropos, indeed. With a harmless fall into the mist, a villain can be disposed of with pure justice and yet with child-appropriate innocence: we know he met a violent end, but we didn't actually have to see the bloody finale.
Another added benefit - with the ambiguity a falling death provides, a sequel can easily be set up. Hey, guess what, Gaston actually landed on a giant trampoline, let's gear up for Beauty and the Beast 2: Revenge of a Frenchman! (Only a matter of time before they pull that dirty trick for real.)
But in some movies - those rare, beautiful standouts - we witness a greater end. We witness something truly terrible, which befits our terrible villain. We witness an end which makes it very clear that this villain ain't coming back. We see a violent end - and hot damn, do we. Sometimes, animation studios like to push the envelope.
So without any more blathering, let's get into the list! Videos will be included for your benefit.
(Oh, and I think I need to specify. Movies made for kids. None of that animated Batman crap.)
Honorable Mention: Various movies - Dragged into hell
I am aware of three animated movies - The Princess and the Frog, Corpse Bride, and Hercules - where the villain gets dragged into hell as comeuppance.
Okay, that's not strictly true. Hades from Hercules is actually the ruler of hell. What he gets dragged into, then, is a swirling cauldron of tortured souls who quickly pull him under. But, for conciseness's sake, I'm gonna say he gets dragged into hell.
Does this remind anyone of The Mummy Returns?
As for Dr. Facilier in The Princess and the Frog, he is perhaps the only one of these three who straight up, no bones about it, literally gets pulled into hell. Since he failed to fulfill his promise to the voodoo gods (or whatever they are), they emerge out of some tombstones (because of course this takes place in a graveyard) and drag him screaming into the maw of death.
This movie was dark.
And Lord Barkis from Corpse Bride? At the end of the movie, he is killed and turned into a corpse, whereupon all the other corpses gang up on him and drag him into the land of the dead for untold tortures. Semantics, semantics. I don't know about you, but I'm willing to call that "dragged into hell."
"New arriiiiiiiival."
I was honestly unsure of where to put these deaths on my list. Sure, they're not violent, but... I mean... being dragged into hell isn't something to sniff at. So I decided to just put 'em here. Make of this what you will.
11. Oliver & Company - Electrocuted; run over with train
I kind of like this one. Disney had balls.
The movie's main villain, the gangster Sykes, goes out fairly quickly when a train freakin' plows him and his car into smithereens. We see the entire thing onscreen. The car explodes into a fiery ball and everything.
No implications here. Sykes is toast.
As for Sykes' two eeeeevil dogs, one of them just has a generic falling death. The other, however? No such luck. Electrocuted. Onscreen.
Skip to 1:26.
10. The Little Mermaid - Stabbed by ship
At the climax of this movie, the sea witch Ursula decides to use Triton's trident to make herself huge. Which, in retrospect, may have been a mistake.
Instead of her huge size helping her win the fight against Ariel, Ursula gets more than she bargained for when Prince Eric literally stabs her with the prow of his ship. One word. YIKES.
9. Tarzan - Hung/neck snapped
This one's not the most gruesome on this list, but it's something special. (Depending on how you define the word.) Certainly, it's pretty unique.
After spending the whole movie being an 1800s British aristocrat/hunter who seems vaguely racist but you can't quite put your finger on why (maybe it's because he's an 1800s British aristocrat/hunter?), Clayton ends up in a treetop battle to the death with Tarzan. He tangles himself in vines and, infuriated, cuts them away with his sword...machete...thing. Tarzan realizes that the vines are wrapped around the baddie's neck and tries to warn him, to no avail. And that's the end of Clayton.
It's more the implications of this death that are violent. And the fact that we can actually see Clayton's swinging body in silhouette for a few seconds. My my, Disney.
Also, I just have to say that the facial expressions in this movie are fantastic.
8. Mulan - Blown up with fireworks
Nothing about this death seems particularly terrible. The villain, a conquering Hun named Shan Yu, is catapulted on a lit firework into a hut full of more fireworks, courtesy of our heroes Mulan and Mushu. Then, oh wow, beautiful colors, triumphant music, let's not think about how a man just got exploded and/or burnt to death!
This one is lightly implied, but when you think about it for more than two seconds... ouch.
7. Ice Age - Impaled with icicles
So, the villain in this movie is a saber-toothed tiger called Soto, whose evil plot is that he wants to eat a baby alive. But thaaaaaaat's another story. (Is it ever.)
At the movie's end, Manny the mammoth dishes out some freezing cold justice on Soto by causing icicles to rain down on him like money rains down at a Los Angeles strip club. We don't see the stabbing (of course not), but from other characters' reactions, it's probably gory.
I keep forgetting how damn ugly this movie was.
6. Chicken Run - Murdered by her own husband
This one is particularly dark. I mean, it really is. The villain, Mrs. Tweedy, is a farmer who wants to start a chicken pie business. At the end, the chickens escape, and Mrs. Tweedy ends up stuck in her own pie machine with boiling oil slowly approaching her head.
Her long-suffering husband, Mr. Tweedy, opens the door to the barn. He sees his wife stuck in the chicken machine, and realizes that she survived her final battle with the chickens. And Mr. Tweedy ain't having that. So he shuts the door again.
And if that was actually it, this would probably be the darkest movie on this list. But it's not. The whole thing explodes (relatively harmlessly...?), leaving an infuriated Mrs. Tweedy alive among the rubble. Whereupon her husband drops the gigantic barn door on her, crushing her. That's not quite as bad as boiling alive/drowning in oil, but it's still up there.
This one's a doozy.
5. The Incredibles - Shredded and/or blown up
This is a great death, because the movie's most famous scene predicted it. Early in The Incredibles, Edna Mode - the superhero costume designer, as if you didn't know - refuses to create a costume with a cape for Mr. Incredible, because capes lead to bad things.
An iconic scene.
And she's proven right: late in the movie, the villain gets sucked into his evil ship's propeller by his cape, bringing him and the ship to a violent end.
Please ignore the thumbnail. I promise this isn't
a YouTube Poop.
4. Shrek - Eaten by a dragon
I actually kind of sympathize with Lord Farquaad from Shrek. His greatest crime was discriminating against ogres. And to be fair, Shrek spent like 3/4ths of the movie making himself appear as horrifying as possible so everyone would leave him alone. So can we really blame Lord Farquaad?
Anyway. After Lord Farquaad realizes that Fiona is also an ogre, he tries to have Shrek and Fiona arrested, but Shrek whistles for the dragon, who breaks through the window and... well, you can guess. Chomp. I hope he didn't suffer.
3. The Lion King - Eaten(?) by hyenas
This is a great death. Scar spent the entire movie promising great things to the hyenas while treating them like rubbish. This comes back to bite him, quite literally (heh heh), when the hyenas turn on him after Simba defeats him, and dine on Scar à la carte.
This violent end is only listed below Hopper's death because of the ambiguity of it all - history isn't sure whether the hyenas ate him. The Wikipedia page says that the hyenas "kill" Scar, but honestly? They ate him. They were hungry. We all knew that as kids. We know it now. It's a fact.
2. A Bug's Life - Eaten alive
A fitting end for a guy who liked to eat. The grasshopper Hopper (creative name, I know) spent the entire movie extorting a colony of ants to gather food for him by threatening them with genocide. Then, in the end, he was tricked by our hero Flik into prancing right up to a bird's nest. He was torn asunder by hungry baby birds in quick succession.
Or, at least, so we presume. In 1998, Pixar wasn't exactly ballsy enough to show us Hopper getting torn apart. They were, however, ballsy enough to show his antenna getting ripped off, and other characters playing charades with his amputated body part. You do you, Pixar.
You may wonder - "Shady said this was the movie that inspired her list. So why is it only number two?" Well, read the fuck on.
1. (By a long shot): Titan A.E. - Neck snapped, literally onscreen right in front of us
This is number one.
In this long-forgotten Don Bluth movie, which is an odd mixture of utterly forgettable and daringly original, one of the villains (in a movie full to bursting of bad guys) literally gets his neck snapped. The entire thing is shown. This movie was rated PG.
I think you'd need your parents to guide you to the
nearest restroom so you could vomit your brains out
after seeing this as a kid.
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