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Growing up during ‘90s Disney Renaissance, one of my family’s favorite cassettes tapes to listen to as we drove to and from school every morning was a collection of Disney villain songs. There was something deliciously infectious to the nefarious do-badders warbling their evil plans. My mom, a life-long church choir singer, could belt out Ursula the Sea Witch’s bouncy-yet-gothic “Poor Unfortunate Souls” like a Broadway diva while I prided myself on my Jeremy Irons’ impression while singing Scar’s fascist show-stopper “Be Prepared.”

The only villain song we ever skipped was Claude Frollo’s “Hellfire” from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” a choice having less to do with our religious background than the fact that, unlike the succulent campiness of the other songs, it sounded genuinely sinister and scary. The piece broke the illusion cast by Disney’s rogues gallery—one of playful malevolence, of Iarger-than-life wickedness too cartoonish to be real, but not cruel enough to be unidentifiable. “Walt Disney wanted to have the villains in his animated films be interesting,” Disney animator Andreas Deja explained in a special feature in the Blu-ray release of “Sleeping Beauty," “there had to be something about them that you recognize as a human quality, something that is beyond just bad.” We might never actually want to cheat, steal, or murder, but who couldn’t envy Gaston’s ruggedness? Hades’ fast-talking charisma? Maleficent’s authoritative majesty and power?

Having caught on to the legions of fans who prefer the bad guys over the good, Disney has transformed their villains into a franchise unto themselves, establishing official fashion brands and merchandise focusing exclusively on their scintillating scoundrels. But with the undeniable (and lucrative) success of Disney’s villains, a simple question must be asked: where have they all gone in recent years? Part of this can be attributed to Disney’s recent departure from the traditional musical format for their animated films: both “Big Hero 6” (2014) and “Zootopia” (2016) aren’t musicals and feature villains who remain largely in the shadows until the last act. Additionally, their last two Disney princess films, “Frozen” (2013) and “Moana” (2016), were musicals but didn’t feature traditional villains like Cinderella’s evil stepmother Lady Tremaine or Jasmine’s court adversary Jafar.

Then there’s Disney’s latest animated movie “Ralph Breaks the Internet,” the a film which shockingly has no villain at all. A sequel to their Academy Award-winning “Wreck-It Ralph” (2012), the film continues the adventures of eponymous bad-guy-turned-good-guy from classic arcade game “Fix-It Felix Jr.” and his best friend Vanellope von Schweetz as they embark on a monomythic journey into the Internet to find a new part for Vanellope’s broken arcade cabinet. Their story is one of self-discovery, with Vanellope’s arc mimicking those of the Renaissance princesses like Ariel, Belle, and Mulan who desired more out of their unfulfilling lives—in her case wanting to escape her predictable arcade game for the spontaneity of hyper-violent online racing game Slaughter Race. (In one of the film’s best punchlines, she’s coached by the other princesses into triggering her own What I Want Out Of Life song that appears in the first act of nearly every princess movie. Indeed, it’s the only song in either “Wreck-It Ralph” movie.)

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“Chocolate or strawberry, sir?” a waiter asks as he lowers a plate of ice cream before the soldier.

“Strawberry,” the soldier answers. The waiter pours a thick syrup on the little mound of ice cream molded in the shape of six American marines lifting a flag. Just a few weeks earlier this same soldier, Corporal Ira Hayes, had been among those sculpted marines as they planted the American flag on top of Mount Suribachi at the height of the Battle of Iwo Jima—an event re-created in Clint Eastwood’s historical drama "Flags of Our Fathers" (2006). A candid photograph of the flag-raising taken by Joe Rosenthal would become a defining image of the war, and a boon for American propaganda. With the battle won, Ira and his fellow flag-raisers were shipped back to the States to participate in a bond drive. Now, sitting in a fancy dining room thousands of miles from the rest of his unit, Ira watches as a slow waterfall of red bloodies the ice cream men, three of whom were killed in action mere days after the picture was taken. Sergeant Mike Strank was blown to bits by a mortar; Sergeant Hank Hansen shot in the chest; and young Harlon Block blasted to pieces, surviving just long enough to stare into the face of a medic and whimper that he’d been killed. And now their likenesses were covered in chocolate and strawberry and eaten by civilians in suits and ties, laughing and dancing to the sound of “Any Bonds Today?”

The strawberry syrup scene was a rare moment of heavy-handed symbolism from a director who until then had largely abandoned the allegorical flourishes of his earlier Westerns in favor of unfussy, to-the-point genre films and dramas. But "Flags of Our Fathers" was an unusual film for Eastwood no matter how you looked at it. Emboldened by his recent Oscar-winning success with "Million Dollar Baby" (2004), Eastwood helmed a $100+ million diptych on the Battle of Iwo Jima, told from the perspective of American and Japanese soldiers. "Flags of Our Fathers"'s Japanese counterpart, "Letters from Iwo Jima" (2006), claimed the most critical acclaim and box office success, but it was "Flags of Our Fathers" that pointed the way for Eastwood’s future career. It was here that we saw the emergence of a new introspection in Eastwood’s work coupled with an obsession with interrogating America’s need for heroes. And although we see these ideas reflected in "Gran Torino" (2008), Eastwood’s film about a Korean War hero who sacrifices his life to save a Korean immigrant family from gang members, it’s in real-life historical dramas "American Sniper" (2014) and "Sully" (2016) that we see these themes first defined in "Flags of Our Fathers" most clearly examined.

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NO OTHER CHOICE (2025)｜©️NEON 在韩语中，有一个叫做”삼년상”（三年丧，发音：sam-nyun-sang）的习俗。朝鲜王朝时代，一户人家的父亲过世后，成年子女即便完成了丧礼，也须在墓地附近搭起草庐，居住至少三年。这象征着子女对父母前三年养育之恩的报答——那三年间，孩子无时无刻离不开父母的庇护。三年之后，若仍有哀思，自无妨碍，但三年，是守孝的最低期限。 一种文化将哀伤的”最低限度”明文编入习俗，将悲痛与悼念的轨迹铭刻进语言本身——我觉得这相当耐人寻味。观看朴赞郁（Park Chan-wook）导演最新作品《无可奈何》（No Other…

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The thriller, with a screenplay by Krysty Wilson-Cairns based on the true-crime book by Charles Graeber, has its world premiere next Sunday, Sept. 11.

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