Why Disney’s Captain Hook is a Great Villain–and how yours can be, too

My daughter has been obsessively watching Disney’s Peter Pan (1953) the past few weeks. And it struck me suddenly that I like Captain Hook, in spite of his villainy. I’ve seen my share of Disney movies, and he’s the only bad guy I empathize with. As a writer, I started to wonder why.

First, I compared Hook to other Disney villains and their main emotional drives. Showing my age, my examples are ones from my childhood. Some modern Disney villains may also employ the techniques that make Hook a great villain, but the lessons I gleaned from Hook still hold true.

    1. Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty) – revenge
    2. Stepmother (Cinderella) – greed
    3. Evil Queen (Snow White) – jealousy
    4. Cruella De Vil (101 Dalmatians) – vanity
    5. Hook (Peter Pan) – revenge

On the surface, Hook seems much like the others, driven purely by some dark emotion. But although I enjoyed the other villains, I never empathized with them on any level. I identified 2 things that set him apart.

1) Motivation backstory – for most Disney villains, we never know why they are driven by these dark urges. Did Maleficent snap over a lack of invitation because she was a nerd in high school? Did the Stepmother grow up dirt poor and swear “never again”? Was the Evil Queen so insecure about her looks because her mother always told her she was ugly? Did Cruella De Vil want to stand out so much because she had always been overlooked as a child? We never know the backstory—we only see the results.

With Hook, we do know why he is driven—and it is a nuanced why. He’s not seeking vengeance for Peter cutting off his hand—no, he wants revenge because Peter threw the hand to a crocodile, causing the beast to stalk Hook constantly.

2) Vulnerability – The other Disney villains are pure evil. Chilling. The stuff of nightmares. And they have no human weaknesses.

Hook, though, has a glaring weakness—he is terrified of the crocodile. Not just nervous, but scream-like-a-child, jump-into-Smee’s-arms hysterical whenever he hears that clock. Such blatant vulnerability in a man who casually shoots his own crew when they annoy him opens up a very human side we can access.

These 2 techniques (combined with a touch of comedy) give Hook accessibility that many Disney villains lack—and therefore allow us to empathize with him.

I’m going to keep that in mind for my villains. While I have always known they need to be 3-dimensional, I have focused more on making them strong enough to push the hero than on making them accessible to the reader. By giving them nuanced motives that I allow my readers to see and by adding a vulnerability the reader can relate to (who wants to be eaten by a crocodile, after all?), I can make my villains stronger, deeper, and more memorable.

Do you have any tricks for making your villains relatable to the reader?

Into the Woods

The fairy tale has always exerted a powerful pull on our psyche. That’s why re-envisioned fairy tales by such writers as Robin McKinley, Mercedes Lackey, and Gregory Frost in his Fitcher’s Brides are popular. One of my favorite musicals is Into the Woods. The writing is fantastic and the cast of the 1991 television performance (including Joanna Gleason, who won the 1988 Best Actress Tony for it) was spectacular.

A large part of the charm of the show (at least for a writer) is how Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine wove together several well-known fairy tales into a single narrative. A Baker and his Wife go on a quest to lift a curse from their family, tying together the tales of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rapunzel. One by one, the characters go into the woods, that archetypal metaphor for the darkest parts of human nature. There their paths cross as they face the evil in the world and the worst in themselves.

The tales are woven seamlessly, the lyrics are witty, and the emotion is true. It is fun and funny while being true to human nature. It is no wonder that it won Best Score and Best Book Tonys in 1988. But also, as I writer, I enjoy premise of the (much darker) second act. This is a look at what happens after “happily ever after.”

**SPOILER ALERT**

What happens is that happily ever after isn’t what any of them expected, and even though they had achieved their wish, they now wish for something else. When an angry giant attacks the land, they all get thrown together to try to stop it.

Another twist that appeals to my writerly heart is when the characters decide to sacrifice the Narrator to the giant. They reason that since he is the only person “outside” the story, he is expendable. He argues that he is the only one who knows how the story ends, so he is essential. When he dies, the characters are left on their own to make decisions for the first time in their lives.

The musical is a study in the law of unintended consequences. The pursuit and attainment of seemingly harmless wishes (to go to the ball, to have money for food, to have a child) have disastrous repercussions not just for the wisher but for those around them. As the cast sings in the show – “Wishes come true, not free.”

One of these unintended consequences is the lessons we teach our children by what we say and do. Anyone with children in their lives knows all too well that nothing escapes children’s sharp eyes and ears. They see and emulate everything. The writers of Into the Woods (a show definitely NOT for young children) are acutely aware of the powerful effect our actions and our stories have on our children. Stories are magical, a spell woven with words rather than potions. One of the final admonishments of the show is a piece of advice every writer should take to heart: “Careful the tale you tell, that is the spell. Children will listen.”

What fairy tales still haunt your dreams? And what lessons did you learn from them?

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