Appears in: Toy Story 3 (2010)
Setting: Pixar’s wacky universe of anthropomorphic toys.
Type: Corrupt authority figure, tragically twisted.
It might seem crazy that a greatest villains list that includes serial killers and arch-criminals includes a stuffed purple bear from a family film, but in the context of the wonderful world of fiction, it makes perfect sense. In real life, butchers and tyrants get the lion’s share of morbid attention, but in the world of fiction, the effectiveness of a villain’s characterisation and the sinister energy that accompanies him are the key markers of his place in any nefarious pecking-order. This list isn’t being organised around anything as prosaic as fictional body counts.
Lotso-Huggin-Bear, despite his recent appearance in a single film, is one of the best animated villains ever. This is mainly because your standard animated baddie, the sort that crops up a lot in the Disney canon, is a simple soul. They want power for the sake of power, or to hurt the heroes out of pointless spite. Lotso wants power, and he definitely messes with Woody, Buzz and co out of spite, but the addition of a tragic back-story and blatant deep-seated psychological anguish adds the spice that makes him the nemesis of the Toy Story trilogy. Sid from the first film was a bargain-basement sadist (who obviously didn’t know that the toys he was torturing were sentient), and Stinky Pete in the sequel had just snapped from frustration; he’d gone overboard, but you didn’t sense he was Evil with a capital “E”.
Lotso, however, is profoundly damaged goods. The fact that he starts out looking like a stock amiable grandfather-type character makes the reveal of the festering nastiness underneath pack more of a punch. Unwittingly abandoned by his owner, he got so hung up on self-pity that it warped the way he saw the world; he lost the ability to contemplate love and playfulness, and only saw the bleakness and the betrayal. Using his size and newfound bullying, manipulative tendencies to spread the pain around, he turned a supposedly idyllic day-care centre into a tiny police state. It takes a SERIOUSLY mangled psyche to turn a place where pre-school children hang out into a police state, even if it was after closing time.
Lotso’s sullen, pettily malignant presence helps turn the last Toy Story into one of those awesome youngster movies that have massive, unabashed streaks of darkness running through all the colourful hi-jinks. The grimness of having such an unlikely brooding Dark Lord figure for the heroes to define themselves against makes his spectacular karmic defeat, and their life-affirming triumph, a fitting capstone to a mini-epic of pop culture.
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