Villainous! was an animated featurette projected live at Disneyland, with an accompanying fireworks display. Directed by Steven Davison, it features Shelley Marie and her mother (who make their debut), Oogie Boogie, Jack Skellington, Princess Aurora, Maleficent, the Magic Mirror, Grimhilde, Norman, the Skeletons, Ursula, Flotsam and Jetsam, Doctor Facilier his Shadow and his “Friends on the Other Side”, Hades, Pain and Panic, Charon, the Hydra, Jafar, Chernabog, the Titans Lythos, Hydros, Pyros and Stratos, and, in brief cameos, Yzma, Captain Hook, Stromboli, Shere Khan, Cruella De Vil, Syndrome, Claude Frollo, Mother Gothel, the Queen of Hearts and the Headless Horseman.
Plot[]
Oogie Boogie tells the Halloween tale of Shelley Marie, a 9-year-old girl who, torn between going as Maleficent or as Princess Aurora for Halloween, was invited to step into the Magic Mirror and given a whirlwind tour of various supernatural villains trying to get her to embrace her "villainous" side. From Grimhilde's Castle to the Underworld, it's an exciting musical journey, but not one without its perils!
Songs[]
- Poor Unfortunate Souls
- Friends on the Other Side
References[]
- The Slave in the Magic Mirror is able to manifest in Shelley Marie's bedroom mirror and turn it into a gateway to Grimhilde's Castle.
- Doctor Facilier's Shadow speaks, in Doctor Facilier's own voice.
- Chernabog and Jafar are present in Hades's Underworld.
Continuity[]
- The cartoon contains constant mixes of old and new animation, even within single scenes. Sources of the recycled footage include The Nightmare Before Christmas (1989), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992) and more.
- The Hydra, which had died during the events of Hercules (1997), is here consequently shown as one of the denizens of the Underworld, with its head poking out of the River Styx.
Behind the scenes[]
Villainous! premiered in 2019 in Disneyland as part of the Oogie Boogie Bash ticketed Halloween event. It is an ambitious mix of animation techniques, welding new hand-drawn animation by Eric Goldberg (who also designed the character of Shelley Marie) with redubbed footage from classic films, new CGI and motion-capture animation on Shelley Marie herself, and even a spot of stop-motion in the opening (borrowed from The Nightmare Before Christmas).
According to director Steven Davison, for whom this was something of a passion project, the original pitch Villainous! “was originally called Terribly Twisted Tales and it was this very avant-garde piece and it was too weighted in a genre that didn’t work. The original ending was very scary. We had this big battle song and we showed it to the executives and they said, ‘My child would be terrified right now.”
The design of Shelley Marie was said to be inspired by The Addams Family’s Wednesday Adams and Beetlejuice’s Lydia Deetz. Her name is, of course, a play on Frankenstein writer Mary Shelley.