It comes as no surprise that Disney villains are, in general, 1) highbrow / cultured (Why does Scar say "quid pro quo" instead of a more Saxon "tit for tat," for instance?). And 2) queer (single, childless, flamboyant, seldom conforming to gender roles).
Matt Roth has an interpretation of Scar that surprised me. He interprets Scar as a liberal, who instaurates the Welfare State in the Pridelands - even though both goose-stepping Nazis and the Soviet flag (Scar becomes the hammer, and the Moon becomes the sickle, in the visuals of his villain song, "Be Prepared"):
I think this means that both right-wing and left-wing totalitarianisms are wrong...
Meanwhile, Scar takes over. As the Bad Leader he brings the kingdom to ruin. Mannered and aristocratic, and clearly not producing heirs like his more manly brother, he is pointedly gay. He is also a rationalist and utilitarian, coveting the absolute power of kingship but not buying into its mystique. He exerts a corrupting influence on the young, skillfully putting all sorts of ideas into Simba's head. Worst of all, he willingly enters into an unholy alliance with the hyenas, a teeming brood of half-starved scavengers ghettoized in a "dark region" outside the Pridelands (think, for instance, of Jewish quarters, apartheid, etc). Taken as a whole, he represents that bête-noire of contemporary right-wingers, the Liberal Politician.
The hyenas speak in "street voices" provided by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin and clearly represent poor blacks and Hispanics. They are also stereotypical gang members, inherently criminal, cutthroat and mercenary — brawling with each other when not united by a common victim. As scavengers whose own neighbourhood offers slim pickings, they eagerly accept handouts. Scar provides them: he gains the hyena's loyalty by promising them a steady stream of meat, thus creating the Welfare State.
After he usurps the throne, Scar lets the hyenas out of the "dark region" and into the Pridelands, to the horror of the other species. Catastrophe follows: the lions' resources are squandered by the lazy and rapacious hyenas, who, in turn, harass the lions with petty terror. The balance of nature is upset: the herds flee, the water dries up, and the landscape soon resembles the wasteland where the hyenas have lived. The hyenas carry their blight with them; having brought down the productive ecosystem that used to provide them with scraps, their starvation only worsens. They offend Scar, who cares only about his power, by voicing nostalgia for the Mufasa regime which kept them in their place.
Demonstrating kingly mercy, Simba spares Scar — who, of course, tries one more backstab before he's done in by angry and betrayed hyenas, the very unsavoury types he has spent his years pandering to. A fitting end to the Liberal Politician.
But there to thwart this happy outcome, simultaneously trying to usurp heterosexual power and distract the hero from the heroine, is that neocon bugaboo — the gay male. In an age (the 1990s) when anti-semitism has fallen out of vogue and Communism is not taken seriously, he has to bear the full brunt of fascist animus.
At first glance, Ursula, the villain in THE LITTLE MERMAID, seems a woman; on closer inspection, however, the Sea Witch resembles a flamboyant, Divine-ly inspired drag queen. Her octopus-like lower half further renders her gender ambiguous: the first view of her tentacles emerging from the darkness is played up for shock value (not unlike a similar view in THE CRYING GAME). Ursula eventually pulls off a drag queen's coup. She takes on the appearance of a svelte brunette called Vanessa, speaks with the Little Mermaid's stolen voice (solving a chronic problem for female impersonators), and seduces the virile young prince into marrying her. She reveals the deception by literally splitting the seams of her disguise, emerging in her opulent glory; she manages to reduce the hypermasculine King Triton into a worthless worm, and only gets defeated when either Prince Eric (in the animated version) or Ariel (in the live-action) impales her with the prow of a ship, thus contrasting his erect phallus with her flaccid tentacles. Her threat to heterosexual pair-bonding and patriarchal power is thus laid to rest.
The gay villain of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST is, by contrast, hypermasculine. Gaston, vain and preening, covets heterosexual status in pursuing Belle, the beauty of the title; but he constantly ignores both her and the trio of blonde bombshells that swoon over him. He is only truly interested in male gazes, and blossoms in the midst of his all-male lodge, where he sings a showstopper celebrating his own masculinity. Provided, like Foulfellow with Gideon, with an elastic, high-contact companion Lefou, he is the epitome of camp. Mainly a figure of comic relief, Lefou's hard to take very seriously. The true evil of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, in fact, lies elsewhere: in the sexual dysfunction of the hero, the Beast-Prince who suffers from what clinicians call "infantile narcissism." The witch's curse simply brings his fetishism — in which inanimate objects are endowed with ego-fulfilling life — out into the open, transforming his castle into something like Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Constant parallels between his actions and Gaston's link his condition with Gaston's more deeply entrenched sexual deviance. The Beast finally breaks the curse — defeating Gaston and restoring his realm to "normal" — by embracing a prosaic heterosexuality with Belle.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST is a men's movement response to feminist nagging. It is engorged with anxiety that masculinity might be a mask for homosexuality; or that natural male narcissism might forever alienate the women that feminism has made so intolerant. In the end, it is a plea that women understand and love men's "beasts within" (their inner "wild men"), and help mother them into maturity. It is early 1990s wish fulfillment.
ALADDIN represents a surprising liberal aberration from Disney's right-wing trajectory. To be sure, the villain is still gay: Jafar is dark, effeminate, and prissily evil; Scar simply repeats Jafar in the shape of a lion. Jafar, however, very much acts the role of a gay man's gay villain, twisted by his desire for heterosexual power and his consequent self-enclosure in the closet. Advisor to the sultan, he is a Roy Cohn type with Leopold-and-Loeb overtones. He is counterpoised, moreover, to a healthier gay icon: the Genie, who, with Robin Williams's voice, flames across the screen in a one-man cabaret show. (Of course, a male genie is already sexually suspect in a culture whose TV-sitcom associations mark genies as female.) The Genie shifts gender several times and uses his transformative powers to generally wreak havoc on social categories, making street urchins into princes.
THE LION KING was made by a studio run by Jews; the music was written by gays; many of the characters were voiced by respected black actors; and the writers were liberal enough to give the film a "multicultural" veneer.
It’s much the same theory as the ‘Circle of Life’ proposed by Mufasa in The Lion King (1994) – the ghettoised handout-dependent hyenas and their liberal, childless and urbane overlord Scar are fine, as long as they’re kept in their own sphere. When they take over, the Pridelands fall into ruin and corruption.
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