Animated Disney Villains Ranked
24. Mad Madam Mim – The Sword in the Stone (1963)
A mischievous witch who lives in a cabin in the woods and is one of the wizard Merlin’s few magical rivals.
Mim’s impish demeanour and appearance – like one of the Sleeping Beauty fairies’ ugly sisters – belies her malicious true nature. She may only be in one sequence in The Sword in the Stone but she is the biggest threat that Merlin and Wart face by some distance, and her shape-shifting wizard’s duel with the old sorcerer is one of the great sequences of imagination in Disney.
Mim’s villain song isn’t all that memorable but it does add to the sense of surprise when this seemingly non-threatening, mischievous presence turns out to be genuinely powerful.
Demise by: Utter humiliation when Merlin outsmarts her in their wizard’s duel, leaving her sick and bed-ridden.
23. Yzma – The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)
Emperor Kuzco’s advisor who plans to depose him and take the throne.
We’ve seen gradually fewer female Disney villains since the days of the studio’s default being stories of princesses and witches, but Yzma breaks more than a few rules on the villain front. For one thing, she’s conniving but also really funny, and Eartha Kitt in one last great role is clearly having the time of her life voicing her. For another, she’s in the usually exclusively male role of a plotting, murderous adviser (see Jafar) and so brings a unique perspective to her lust for power; it’s the only way she can ever hope to have her say.
Demise by: Turned into a cat and embarrassingly forced to be part of a kids’ scout troupe fronted by her idiot henchman Kronk.
22. Sykes – Oliver and Company (1988)
A greedy, cigar-chomping New York loan shark who ensures debts are paid in full.
Any baddie who is cruel to animals automatically gets a bump up the evil scale, and this modernised take on the antagonist from “Oliver Twist” puts a gang of cute strays in danger as he goes after the kindly, in-over-his-head Fagin. Robert Loggia has one of the great gravelly voices and Sykes’ lines ooze menace even if the character is a pretty standard-issue thug backed up by a pair of Dobermanns.
Demise by: Foolishly chasing Fagin and his gang in a car into the path of an oncoming train.
Recommended for you: 5 Reasons Oliver and Company Is an Underrated Classic
21. John Silver – Treasure Planet (2002)
The cook/mutinous cyborg leader of a band of space pirates after a long-lost treasure horde.
There have been lots of different takes on Robert Louis Stevenson’s character Long John Silver over the years (at least two others under the Disney banner), but this animated cyberpunk version is surprisingly among the more nuanced and sympathetic. He’s greedy and often callous but there is some kind of synthetic heart beating in there, something that makes him look after young Jim even at the expense of his treasure.
Demise by: Escapes justice to sail among the stars after saving Jim.
Madame Medusa peeling her eyelashes off haunted me as a child!!