Adaptational Sympathy in Animated Films.
- Beauty and the Beast: The titular Beast winds up being played much more tragically than in the original story. In that tale, he was a good man overall, but his appearance came from being cursed for turning down a fairy's advances, and he was more of a Manchild than anything else. Disney's Beast, though given the Adaptational Jerkass treatment (and being cursed for being as much of a figurative monster as he eventually became a literal one to match), really didn't know any better; both of his parents are conspicuously absent, it was indicated he was cursed when he was eleven, and the writer's own confirmation indicates that each day he remains a Beast results in his mind slipping into the savage monster he appears as. Sure he's angry, short-tempered, and violently destructive, but years of isolation, loneliness, and being driven mad from a curse he's had since he was a child has made him just as equally troubled.
- BIONICLE 3: Web of Shadows strangely does this to the Visorak. They're ruthless killing machines in all media, but the film showed them as slaves to Sidorak and Roodaka, ruled by fear to the point that they'd even commit suicide on order. One Visorak, Kollorak, even got a name specifically for the movie. At the end, the Visorak are freed from slavery and peacefully walk away. Outside of the movies, stories would consistently show Visorak as irredeemably evil by nature, driven by a desire to destroy and kill at any opportunity, needing leaders to control their chaotic behavior. Though they were sentient and had their own language in the books, they were never portrayed as being worth saving. In fact, near the franchise's end, one of the main tasks the heroes had to perform to save the universe was wiping out the entire Visorak species with no remorse.
- Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie gives Mr. Krupp some sympathetic qualities whereas he had virtually none in the original books, such as giving him a crush on Edith the lunch lady and suggesting that he's only a Jerkass because he's secretly lonely at heart. He also (secretly) likes George and Harold's comics, which was long speculated by fans (after all, how else would his hypnotized self know how to act as Captain Underpants, and about various comic plot points?).
- Frozen:
- Elsa is this, compared to the original story and various adaptations thereof, including an earlier draft of this very film. Most prior adaptations usually depicted the Snow Queen as an outright villainous character, who sought nothing but power, or, in the case of the original tale, made her a morally ambiguous party with questionable intent. In this film, Elsa does do harmful things, but she usually does them entirely by accident, having no idea how to control her powers, and is shown to be a good person who's afraid of hurting those she cares about, due to a childhood accident that harmed her sister.
- Anna, who stands in for the original protagonist Gerda, has a different line of reasoning for being the hero. Gerda was trying to break a curse that had turned her best friend Kai into an evil version of himself, while Anna was trying to save her sister from herself and free the kingdom from an eternal winter. That and her fiance turns out to be Evil All Along and leaves her to die so he can seize the kingdom for himself, after he manipulated her for most of the film.
- Green Lantern: Emerald Knights does this to Laira Omoto's father Kentor in her story, which is adapted from the Green Lantern Corps Quarterly story "What Price Honor?" The original story had Kentor being Laira's predecessor as the Green Lantern of her Sector, who was booted out of the Corps because he'd rather be a harsh dictator than rule over his people fairly. The Emerald Knights version changes it so that Kentor was never a Green Lantern (Laira's predecessor here instead being Galius Zed), resented his daughter for being chosen to be a Green Lantern over him, and ultimately feels remorse over having to fight his daughter, which ends with him being Driven to Suicide.
- The Grinch (2018): Like with his live-action counterpart, the titular Grinch has a Freudian Excuse for wanting to steal Christmas beyond getting some peace and quiet. This time, it's a Trauma Button for him, caused by years of loneliness and isolation from his time in an orphanage around the holiday.
- This is done for a few characters in the 2008 animated version of Horton Hears a Who!:
- The Mayor, reassuming his role as Horton's friend from Doctor Hoovey, is made as an Innocently Insensitive parent to his son Jo-Jo, while also being constantly put down by the Jerkasses on the entire city council, especially when Horton's actions inadvertently endanger everyone.
- Jo-Jo, to the same extent, is given this treatment since his father is trying to pressure him into being the Mayor of WhoVille when he clearly doesn't want to, and is often seen hiding away or slinking out in depression.
- In the book, the Sour Kangaroo's joey was merely a Yes-Man who parroted every ideal his mother said. In the movie, the joey, here named Rudy, is clearly cowed by his mother and is more of a Guilt-Ridden Accomplice. During the final climax, it is he that saves the clover from being destroyed as part of his Character Development.
- The LEGO Batman Movie:
- All versions of Batman start off with losing his parents and swearing vengeance to become the Dark Knight. As a Deconstruction of the Batman mythos, this self-aware, snarkier interpretation is actually hurt deep down by the loss of his family and is unwilling to let other people into his life because of it, devoting himself to being Batman full time. While other Batmen channel their pain into fighting crime or are surprisingly well-adjusted for having undergone such a traumatic experience, this Batman, Adaptational Jerkass aside, isn't as capable of handling the pain when he has no crime to fight.
- Surprisingly enough, the film does the same to The Joker by focusing on his villainous relationship with Batman, and how broken up he is when the Dark Knight refuses to acknowledge the clown prince of crime as his greatest enemy.
- The Little Mermaid:
- In the original fairy tale, the titular mermaid wanted to become human, only to experience one of the most noted Downer Endings in fictional history after going through all sorts of hell to get there. Disney's version, named Ariel, wants to be human too, but it comes with the added wrinkle that her father is of the fantasy forbidding variety, having a strong bout of Fantastic Racism against humanity and a stubborn refusal to see things from his daughter's perspective.
- The same goes for her father, King Triton, whose characterization in the original tale is changed to a deep-rooted hatred of humans—at least with the context of The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning in mind, as that film revealed his beloved wife Queen Athena died at human hands, making his hatred of them much more understandable, if very misguided.
- Lightyear: Evil Emperor Zurg, the sworn enemy of the Galactic Alliance, is a Card-Carrying Villain in both the Toy Story and Buzz Lightyear of Star Command series, seeking the destruction of Buzz Lightyear and the conquest of the galaxy. In this film, he is Buzz, driven mad by an attempt to fix his mistake of stranding his team on a hostile alien world by traveling into the future so he could obtain the technology he needed to set things right.
- The Lorax (2012): The Once-Ler is always played as a Tragic Villain—a man who wanted to create the Thneed to sell to everyone before he chops down the last truffula tree and devastates the environment—but the original story simply left it where he's more regretful of his actions, and trying to tell the protagonist how to set things right. The original animated special gave him a little more sympathy by showing he didn't want to shut down the plant and cost everyone their jobs (which the Lorax even concedes). This one shows he came from a rather abusive family who always put him down for not accomplishing anything meaningful, and he actually tries doing things the right way until they pressure him into taking shortcuts. The results are still the same, but he's not entirely at fault this time.
- Hilariously Inverted in Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension with Doofenshmirtz-2. Our Doofenshmirtz had a Hilariously Abusive Childhood ranging from being raised by ocelots after his parents disowned him, spending years as a lawn gnome, and his parents failing to show up the day he was born. And what Freudian Excuse drove Doof-2 to evil? He lost a toy train. That's it. Doof-1 is not very impressed, considering.
- The Polar Express:
- The titular Hero Boy (named Chris by supplemental material) was just along for the ride in the original book. The film adds the detail that he's lost faith in Santa Claus, so the titular train brings him aboard to help him regain that belief.
- The train's Conductor (named James by outside material), in the original book, just had the job of keeping an eye on his charges. In the movie, he's hellbent on making a schedule so the kids can see Santa, getting annoyed when a pulled emergency break and a stampede of caribou stop the train, and goes out of his way to keep his passengers safe when they derail on a frozen lake.
- SCOOB! does this to Dick Dastardly. While still the film's antagonist and implied to be the same one in his previous Hanna-Barbera appearances; here he's motivated less by his own ends and wants to see his beloved dog, Muttley again after trying to steal Alexander the Great's treasure got Muttley trapped in the underworld before the film's events, and regretted it deeply.
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin, is cast in this light. All versions, most famously the one from Daredevil (2015), depict him as believing himself to be Necessarily Evil—a being who maintains his own criminal empire in order to reign in greater chaos that would be present without him watching. He still sees himself this way, but he's willing to risk breaking reality itself because he had lost his wife and son in a car accident when they ran away from him after learning about his criminal lifestyle and was funding experiments into finding an alternative version of them from another universe so he could be with them again.
