Heroes and Villains
Now ask students:
- What is a villain?
- Who are some of their favourite villains in media?
- What makes someone a villain?
- When you imagine a picture of a villain in your mind, what do you see?
Again, there is no need to reach a consensus on this point. If students start suggesting examples of real-world villains steer them back to media, as this may lead the conversation off-topic.
Now have students access the student chapter Heroes and Villains or display it on a screen or digital whiteboard.
Show the first four slides (ending with Aladdin and Jafar) and ask students to imagine, in each case, that they had never seen the movies represented before and did not know anything about the characters.
For each of the hero and villain pairs, ask students:
- Which of these is the hero?
- Which is the villain?
- How do you know? (Remember to base your answer only on what you can see in the image.)
Prompt students to think about:
- Colour: What colours are the heroes’ skin (or fur) and clothes?
- What are the villains’ colours?
- How do those communicate either heroism or villainy?
- Shape: Remind students what they learned about shape language in the Comic Book Characters lesson.
- Which characters are mostly made of pointy shapes like triangles?
- Which are mostly made of rounder shapes?
- Bodies: Which characters have slender or muscular bodies?
- Which ones have larger or unusually-shaped bodies?
- Do any characters have disabilities? (Point out that a facial deformity, like the scar on the face of one of the lions, is a disability.)
- Which ones have larger or unusually-shaped bodies?
- Faces: How are the heroes and villains’ faces shaped differently?
- Which are more realistic and which are more cartoony?
- Which facial features are exaggerated?
- Point out that three of the four villains are smiling, while their paired heroes are not.
- Do we normally think of smiling being something nice people do?
- What about the villains’ smiles makes them seem more villainous instead of nicer? (You can have students try to mimic the villains’ smiles, which are all turned up sharply at the back of the mouth. Does it feel like a sincere smile? How would you feel if you saw someone smiling at you like that in real life?)
- Point out that three of the four villains are smiling, while their paired heroes are not.
- Aladdin, in slide five, is the only one of the heroes who is smiling and whose villain is not. What might that tell you about him? (He is a bit roguish, not entirely a hero.)
Ask students if they know what the word stereotype means. Make sure they understand that a stereotype is an image or picture of a kind of person that makes it seem like they are all the same: all stepmothers are wicked, all princesses are kind and beautiful, and so on. Ask if they know the word prejudice and make sure they understand that it means believing that there is something bad about a whole group of people, based on who they are.
For older students: Have students compare the villains’ noses in particular. How are they similar? (All of them—even the lion!—have sharply downturned or “hooked” noses.)
Ask students: Can they think of other cartoon villains with noses like that? (A few examples: Captain Hook in Peter Pan, the Evil Queen’s disguise in Snow White, Mother Gothel in Tangled.)
Why might that kind of nose be used to show that someone is a villain?
Now explain that for many years there was a stereotype of Jewish people as all looking a particular way, including having a hooked nose. Because of prejudice against Jewish people, when people drew villains they would often make them look like that stereotype. That included illustrations in the collections of fairy tales that many Disney movies were based on, such as the drawing of the witch in . As a result, people started to think of things like hooked noses as meaning “villain” even when they didn’t recognize it as a Jewish stereotype.
Now ask: Imagine that something about you—your hair or eye colour, what your ears look like, et cetera—was often used as a sign that a character was a villain. How do you think that would make you feel? How do you think people whose bodies or identities are often used this way, like people with disabilities or people with larger bodies, feel when they see villains like them on screen?
Go to slide 6 and explain that the image on the left is an early design of Anna and Elsa from the movie Frozen, made when the writers intended Elsa to be a villain.
- This sketch is from Claire Keane’s website, which hosts many of her sketches for films such as Frozen, Tangled and Enchanted. If you have time to explore with students, it can provide opportunities to explore the Key Concepts that media are constructions and each medium has a unique aesthetic form. Point out that very little changed in the Anna design between the early sketch and the final 3-D rendering.)
Ask: What was changed in the Elsa design to make her look less like a villain?
An image or picture of a kind of person that makes it seem like they are all the same.
Believing that there is something bad about a whole group of people, based on who they are.