A Catalog of Villain Deaths in Disney's Theatrical Animated Feature Films

The worst Disney movie death is clear in my mind. In 1994, the company remade its 1967 Jungle Book adaptation as Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, a naming scheme lifted directly from Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This was Disney's first live-action remake, two years before 101 Dalmatians, and it established a formula they're still using on properties like Peter Pan today-- downplay the animated original's whimsy, bring in elements from the source material previously left out, introduce more serious elements of danger, keep the animals from talking. Aside from the Peter Pan and Jungle Book remakes' moves to grapple with their inspirations' racism, it's a bummer of a format, though it might be a little better than the 2016 Jungle Book's remake rules, where you take the original's script and characterizations wholesale and dump them in the uncanny valley.

But so in this movie, which isn't streaming on Disney+, which I saw in theaters and never hear mentioned, the villains aren't a scatting orangutan or a gay-coded snake or a gay-coded tiger, they're soldiers in the British Raj. There's a love triangle between Mowgli (Jason Scott Lee), a white woman (Lena Headey) and a colonizing military guy (Cary Elwes). The military guy's crew try to kill Mowgli and steal lost treasure from the jungle around them. One of these dudes falls into quicksand and drowns and it's horrible enough that I remembered it perfectly, despite only seeing the scene once in the theater when I was five and once on YouTube when I started writing this. The guy falls in quicksand and, thrashing around, swallows mud and sand, gurgling until he disappears and dies. It's a testament to Disney's power in 1994 that this movie got a PG rating from the MPAA.

The second-worst Disney death, incidentally, is also in this movie. Another member of Cary Elwes' posse is buried alive by sand in the delightfully named "Monkey City." He's trapped in a stone room, sand pours in and he either suffocates or gets crushed. Whichever makes you feel better. He has time to escape, too, but the sand breaks his leg. So he dies. That happens in Monkey City. You hear "Monkey City" in a Disney movie and expect to see a dang capuchin play the xylophone on a hippo's teeth, not a guy screechingly beg for his life as he's slowly killed in a Saw death trap.

But these are actors dying in live-action movies. It's time to answer the question everybody has: Who has the most upsetting death in a theatrically-released animated Disney feature? Hmmm? I have decided.

30 (should you choose to count it). Man, Bambi
“Man,” a metaphor for “men,” don’t mind their campfire while hunting for bambis, which leads to a forest fire. Maybe some Mans die in it.

29. A rat, Lady and the TrampTramp kills a rat for trying to kill a baby because that ain’t cool, baby!

28. The Carnotaur, Dinosaur
An unnamed Carnotaur tries to kill the named dinosaurs he's been stalking throughout the film, but is pushed off a ledge. Given that Dinosaur's poster shows a dinosaur watching a meteor fall from the sky, we can take in this villain death with the knowledge that every other character in the movie is set to die shortly after the end credits roll. It's a little like shooting somebody when you're both in a sinking ship. I'd rather you not kill me at all, but if you're going to do it, a quick death is probably preferable to burning with everybody I know and love in a literal apocalypse.

27. Shan Yu, Mulan
The leader of the Hun army flies away on a firework and explodes in the sky, marking the first Disney death that could be described as "pretty."

26. Maleficent, Sleeping Beauty
Mama M is stabbed through the heart by a fairy-guided sword. She's transformed into a dragon shortly before this happens, which probably made her heart bigger, and thus an easier target. A smarter Maleficent would have turned into an ant with a glock.

25. The Queen, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
The Queen, who would help this film pass the Bechdel Test if only she'd been given a true name, is crushed to death by a boulder that she was trying to use to crush the dwarves. She almost gets them, too, but a freak lightning bolt hits the ground in front of her. The Queen gets smoked by god.

24. Merlock, DuckTales The Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp
Merlock, a bird sorcerer, loses his bird powers while dropping from a great height. He reverts to human form and falls to his death. Not the worst death, but Merlock is voiced by Christopher Lloyd, so you hate to see him go (but you love watching him leave).

23. Ursula, The Little Mermaid
Ursula is impaled by a giant phallic symbol and dies.

22. Frollo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Frollo, one of the thousands of Disney characters to sing a song about being so horny he wants to commit murder, flies off a tall building, also like so many characters before and since. Frollo nearly kills Esmerelda and then he falls and then he nearly kills Quasimodo and then he falls and then he holds onto a gargoyle whose eyes light up and then he really falls. The impact would have killed him, but the camera lingers on the drop long enough to let us know Frollo has just been dunked into a pool of molten lead.

21. Helga, Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Helga is betrayed by another villain and thrown into a volcano. Why do so many Disney villains fall to their deaths? I suppose there's some plausible deniability for the heroes-- it's much easier to step out of the way and watch a person trip into the void than it is to stab a person in the neck or whatever. It's also "cleaner," by which I mean Disney always keeps their camera at the point the villain fell from, so we don't have to see the moment a person dies. If they animated a character like Helga actually hitting the ground and having her bones shatter and pierce through her skin, it would make the heroes look a lot less heroic. I'd also probably throw up. That said, we do see Helga survive her fall, but then the spot she's stuck in fills with lava.

20. Shere Khan, The Jungle Book 2
Shere Khan survived The Jungle Book, only to be killed nearly four decades later at the end of its sequel. JB2 was theatrically released, but come on. He falls into lava, as we all must. This ranking is mostly a dignity thing for me.

19. King Candy, Wreck-It Ralph
King Candy is Turbo and Turbo is an Ed Wynn impression who gets turned into a bug. When a massive pillar of flame appears, King Candy is uncontrollably drawn into it. His death is a little extra-upsetting because King Candy glitches back to reality a few times on his slow trip into the fire, with little stutters of horrible recognition interrupting what looks like a relatively peaceful immolation.

18. Ratigan, The Great Mouse Detective
Ratigan falls to his death after Big Ben, which he’s holding onto, starts ringing. The story’s Moriarty-equivalent dies because he tries to kill the Holmes-equivalent, which is how these things tend to happen. The villain could walk away, but they try to hit the hero with one last sucker punch, which means everybody watching can feel good about their horrible death. Big Ben is 315 feet tall and the average rat is about two inches big, so you would NOT want to be that rat lol.

17. Gaston, Beauty and the Beast
Gaston, an unholy combination of himbo and incel, dies a Ratigan's death in a fight with the Beast. He's defeated but he's spared but he's so angry he takes a cheap shot anyway but the follow-through on that motion sends him falling off a castle roof. In all likelihood, the poor, provincial town in this movie would treat Gaston as a martyr and continue to sing his theme song for decades.

16. Percival C. McLeach, The Rescuers Down Under
Take a moment to admire the name "Percival C. McLeach," a great villain with George C. Scott's perfect voice. Rescuers Down Under hit the same year Scott played Smoke in Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue. I haven't seen that anti-drug PSA in years, but I don't think it ended with Scott's character fighting off crocodiles, gaining some sense of victory when the crocodiles scatter, and then realizing why they swam away seconds before falling down a waterfall. If that did happen in Cartoon All-Stars, though, wow. What a coincidence that'd be.

15. Lucifer, Cinderella
“Lucifer” here refers to the wicked stepmother’s cat of the same name and not the biblical Christian devil (who dies in The Care Bears Movie, a Goldwyn film). Cinderella got two sequels and Lucifer the cat was in both, but if you watch his last scene in the first movie, where he’s chased out a high window by a dog, you’ll agree that cat is dead. Lucifer falls and then the camera holds on his still, splayed body for a few seconds. I don't know who those sequel cats are, but Lucifer is gone, man.

14. Hades, Hercules
We don't actually see Hades die, but he's punched into the river Styx after explaining to Hercules that too much time in this swirling pool of the dead will kill a person. Hades is pulled under by all of the people who have ever died and either dies himself or, if his immortality is enough to resist the Styx'x effects, merely sits at the bottom, getting tortured until the end of time. Rumor has it that contemplating Hades' fate led actor James Woods to lose his mind, executive produce Oppenheimer and become a right wing crank who hits on teenagers.

13. Pete, A Goofy Movie
Unable to deal with how inhumane he's been to his only son, Pete writes a note to PJ that says ""Twas I who acted the Goof all along," and takes a bottle of pills in Disney's first post-credits sequence.

12. Rourke, Atlantis: The Lost Empire
This is one of those ironic "too much of what you wanted" deaths that you get in horror and adventure movies, one of those "If you like gold, maybe you'd like to be buried in gold" things. If you actually asked the bad guy, they probably only wanted enough gold to buy stuff. They probably didn't want to suffocate and die. Rourke is stabbed in the arm by an Atlantean power crystal, which turns him into Living Atlantean Crystal Rourke. And then he's shattered by a propeller that would have ripped up Regular Old Skin Rourke just as easily.

11. Flotsam and Jetsam, The Little Mermaid
As Ursula is trying to kill Prince Eric with a bolt of energy from a trident, Ariel ruins her aim and the bolt incinerates Flotty and the Jets. This would be less awful if the eels didn't look at the screen with big, sad eyes before dying and if Ursula didn't yell "My babies!" after accidentally murdering them.

10. Facilier, The Princess and the Frog
Dude gets dragged to hell by voodoo spirits. His crime? Not killing more people. When Facilier's death screened in theaters, children were famously known to stand up in their chairs and yell "Quick, Facilier, just get a few quick murders off! Slit a couple throats! You can make it!" Your lips to god's ears, kids.

9. Lampwick, Pinocchio
This would be an easy number one if we saw more than we do. There are plenty of villains in Pinocchio. There’s Monstro, the fox and cat actors, Stromboli and the coachman who runs Pleasure Island. But the only person who gets punished in any real, lasting way is Pinocchio’s friend Lampwick, who was kind of a jerky kid in an old sitcom way and smoked cigars and drank beer that were offered to him. For the sin of giving into temptation and kinda sorta leading an already-astray Pinocchio astray, Lampwick is turned into a donkey and forced to spend the rest of his life working in the salt mines. The last time we see him, he’s calling helplessly for his mother. Not an onscreen death, but a heavy implication, given that we're told Pinocchio only escapes the same fate via divine intervention from the big J.C. (Jiminy Cricket, not Jesus Christ).  This isn't like Jafar turning into a genie and potentially being trapped in a lamp for eternity, because Aladdin shows us that genies get out of lamps. We wouldn't have seen Genie if they didn't. Lampwick's life and eventual death in the salt mines is an inevitability. Let me know if this sequence enhanced the movie for you in any way, because it depresses the hell out of me.

8. The Horned King, The Black Cauldron
As his plan is falling apart, HK makes a last ditch attempt to sacrifice The Black Cauldron's hero to his sentient cauldron. No, no, says the hero! The Horned King is hoisted by his own petard, eaten by his own cauldron and his skin is ripped off. For a few moments, HK is an animated, screaming skeleton, and then he's finally and fully sucked into the cauldron. The animation is unreasonably good here. You see the individual chunks of skin peel off his body and disintegrate, like something out of Heavy Metal or Akira. What you're seeing, if you're the rare person to care enough to actually see The Black Cauldron, is an early example of Jeffrey Katzenberg chopping everything up in the editing bay. Most of Katzenberg's later decisions mostly seemed to revolve around squeezing emotion out of movies, from the wistfulness of The Little Mermaid's "Part of Your World" to the actually pretty brutal break-up song in Muppet Christmas Carol, but here he was focused on violence. He took 12 minutes out of The Black Cauldron, but you can't entirely excise a villain's final fate unless you really want to Poochie it all up, so the Horned King's terrifying flayed corpse made it into this PG-rated movie. A few of the character's minions were supposedly "mauled' in the original cut, but they simply don't exist here.

7. Mr. Whiskers, Frankenweenie
Tim Burton, the Scariest Halloween Man Of Them All, took his own great live-action short from the "Good Tim Burton" era and remade it into a stop-motion feature just after the end of his "Give Johnny Depp A Wig And Zero Cohesive Direction Who Even Gives A Shit" era. In the original short, the antagonists were the suburban folks who couldn't understand Frankenweenie. In the feature, a psychic cat named Mr. Whiskers becomes a vampire and, in a fight with Frankenweenie, is stabbed through the chest with a flaming piece of wooden debris. And I say good! Tim Burton was right when he rolled out of bed in his cool blue glasses to half-ass his ninth project in thirteen years. The villain shouldn't be a lack of compassion, it should be a vampire cat and we should watch the vampire cat take a stake to the chest, otherwise the kids might think Timmy Burton is going soft! He's got more juice than ever! This is the dark prince of cinema we're talking about, and you better believe he's got something twisted up his sleeve!

6. Scar, The Lion King
Scar falls off a ledge into some fire, like so many villains. Luckily, he survives long enough to be killed and eaten by the hyenas he threw under the bus a little earlier. After an unknown period of time passes, Hercules dresses up in Scar's hide in Hercules, making Scar the only Disney villain to have his carcass worn by another film's protagonist (while giving Hercules something in common with Leatherface). Did Hercules know Scar possessed self-awareness when turning his skin into a costume?  Bob Iger off-handedly confirmed yes in a speech explaining the things he'd do to the children of any Disney employee who considered joining a union.

5. Mother Gothel, Tangled
After not aging for a long time, Mother Gothel ages extra hard, transforming from a middle-aged woman into a small pile of dust. Don't worry, she also falls from a great height. She's actually tripped by one of Tangled's animal sidekicks, which doesn't do much to soften the horror of watching a regular-looking person rapidly decay into a shrieking skeleton. She's dust before she hits the ground.

4. Bill Sykes, Oliver and Company
I wasn't as familiar with Oliver and Company before rewatching it a few months ago and was surprised that this Bill Sykes' death is even grislier than the Dickens Bill Sikes' death. That guy accidentally hangs himself while fleeing a mob, but this one, a loan shark voiced by Robert Loggia and primarily seen driving around New York City in a black Cadillac, gets the works. Sykes chases this version of Fagin (less anti-semitic than the Dickens one and PERHAPS NOT EVEN JEWISH), Oliver and the Artful Dodger through the subway tunnels in his car and drives straight into an oncoming train. The car explodes in flames against the subway car and Dodger, the Billy Joel-voiced character, looks over his sunglasses at the camera and says "He's the one who started the fire" with a glee I can only describe as profoundly inappropriate. Just kidding about the Joel line. I assume the whole death looked like a suicide to investigators trying to figure out how a guy managed to drive the wrong way down a train track.

3. Roscoe and DeSoto, Oliver and Company
Sykes' pet Dobermans die in the same chase their owner does. One falls off Sykes' car and hits the third rail and the other just kind of falls and is never seen again, in an edit jarring enough that it had to have come from Jeffrey Katzenberg. I'm cool with the decision, Jeff. Thank you. I didn't need to see one dog get electrocuted, so I sure as hell didn't need to see two of them die that way.

2. Clayton, Tarzan
Clayton, the Clark Gable look-alike who dreams of one day shooting all of the animals, is bested by 'Zan in a very well-animated rumble in the jungle. When Tarzan, white king of Africa/aspirational figure for James Cameron, shows him mercy, Clayton takes a Gaston-like desperate, flailing strike with a machete. But he falls into some vines! But he can cut himself free. But he cuts the wrong vines! Tarzan hits the ground and Clayton, who has somehow slashed his safety net into a slipknot, accidentally hangs himself. Lightning casts a jarring shadow of Clayton's suspended corpse against the background, literally ending the film's conflict and symbolically ending the Disney Renaissance.

1. Kocoum, Pocahontas
John Smith self-mythologized in his writing as a way of becoming a beloved avatar of British colonization. It worked so well that when Disney made a princess movie about Pocahontas 350+ years after Smith's death, he was played, fittingly, by Mel Gibson and was depicted as Pocahontas' love interest. He's the handsome stranger whose eyes are opened to the natural world by Pocahontas. As we learn in the song "Savages," there are problems with the Powhatans and the English colonizers. Neither can see the humanity in the other. If only the Indians understood where the British were coming from, you know? Pocahontas' initial love interest, Kocoum, (whose name rhymes with "steady as the beating drum") sees her kissing John Smith, attacks him and is shot by another colonizer (voiced by a young Christian Bale). Smith is just here to figure out why the grinning bobcat grinned and Kocoum is too much of an animal to understand where this smallpox champion is coming from, so he gets a bullet to the heart. His death is played for tragedy, but it's also clear he's a violent mess who wants to keep races from mixing. I can't imagine why he's distrustful of outsiders. If only we could all exit Pocahontas early.