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  • Aladdin's father in Aladdin and the King of Thieves. As implied by the title, he is the leader of the forty thieves. However, it's implied that his only motivation for wanting to lead them, as well as stealing various treasures, and why he left the family to lead them, was to allow his family to not be impoverished anymore. He also intended to return to his family once he had amassed enough wealth, but by the time he returned, he was unable to find them, and thus he believed they had died.
  • Tony in Alpha and Omega demands that pack traditions be upheld and is pretty willing to lead an all-out war to claim the Western Pack's territory. However, he's only willing to do so in order to ensure that his pack survives with the food and resources that the Western Pack has. He's a fairly decent wolf otherwise, if not a bit temperamental and a stickler for tradition. He becomes a lot nicer in the sequels as well.
    • Princess in the sequel A Howl-iday Adventure also fills this role, greatly contrasting her father King who serves as the film's Big Bad. She's his Dragon but is motivated by loyalty to her father, not the collective Social Darwinist views of King and his pack. There's also how she cares for Runt while he's their hostage, not considering him weak and worthless like the other Rogues.
  • Xibalba from The Book of Life is a Type 2. He only wants to rule his wife's world out of loneliness as his land of the dead is full of the souls of the dead who's family had forgotten about and/or no longer venerate on Dia de los Muertos and the land itself is full of smoke and dust and none of the life and joy of his wife's world.
  • Alma from Encanto is the main antagonist, her toxic treatment of her family being the core drama of the movie. However, she has a rather tragic backstory as a displacement victim and all she did was to try to protect her family and ensure her community survives. In the end, she more than redeems herself by apologising to her family.
  • Amos Slade from The Fox and the Hound is a more shaded antagonist than a typical Disney villain. He may be a curmudgeon who wants to kill Tod, but he's shown to legitimately care for Copper and Chief, and his hatred for Tod is driven mostly by misunderstandings or his supposed injuring of the latter. He eventually lets go of his hatred for Tod after the fox rescues him and Copper from a bear and the latter protects him for it.
  • In Home (2015), the Gorg may have destroyed the Boov's original home planet, but his children were stolen from him. It's not entirely hard to see why he’d be so upset.
  • King Haggard of The Last Unicorn, as shown in the scene where he explains why he captured the Unicorns. Not from greed, or power... but because they're the only things that makes him happy.
  • In The LEGO Movie, the Big Bad is an ordinary guy who just wants to keep his LEGO models organised, although he has a rather Jerkass way of going about it.
    • In the sequel, Finn and Bianca's mother orders her children to put away their LEGO playsets, unknowingly causing the destruction of the LEGO universe, but she only does so as a last resort because she's tired of them constantly fighting.
  • Huaxian in Little Door Gods gets a neat inversion of the usual hero/villain dynamic in her fight with Yu Lei. She is clearly not especially interested in the goal that the Mayor sets her to, and only follows along because it's a job in an otherwise bad economy. Meanwhile, Yu Lei decides to break the seal she's guarding and suck her into a black hole in the process, all for the greater good. It's also worth noting that at this point in the film it's not entirely certain whether Yu Lei or his idealist brother Shen Tu is in the right, so the audience is justified in rooting for either side.
  • The Once-ler in the 2012 adaptation of The Lorax is quite friendly and sympathetic for most of the movie, despite being the nemesis of the title character. He eventually makes a Face–Heel Turn partially due to the influence of his family and becomes a rapacious, amoral Corrupt Corporate Executive, and then he has a severe My God, What Have I Done? moment after it's too late and spends the rest of his life as a guilt-wracked hermit.
  • Human Twilight in My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games is motivated by a desire to understand the magic that emerges from Canterlot High School. At first, she's blackmailed into participating in the Friendship Games by Principal Cinch, but Twilight's own desires still keep her going even when her amulet starts stealing magic and opening rifts in reality. At the movie's climax, she unleashes the stolen magic and transforms into Midnight Sparkle, getting Drunk on the Dark Side and almost destroying the world.
  • Rameses in The Prince of Egypt (yes, the Pharaoh). Unlike the Pharaoh of The Bible, he's shown to be a well-meaning man who genuinely loves his brother Moses and is struggling with his father's shadow, but because of his upbringing, he's blind to certain things in life, like the suffering of the slaves. Yet he's not villainous at all until Moses starts demanding that he let his people go. The writers deliberately humanized him, but made him so sympathetic and tragic that, at some points, they had to rewrite some scenes between him and Moses because Moses came off as being cruel to him. And even then, he still is a very tragic figure.
  • Ratatouille: Ego is merely doing his job as France's top food critic, and even though he inadvertently caused Gusteau's death and damaged his reputation, with no remorse for the majority of the film, he finally changes his tune (along with his appearance) after tasting Rémy's ratatouille. He admits in his monologue at the end of the film that harsh criticism is "fun to read and fun to write," and that as a critic, he's gained some sense of authority to decide whether something has value or not.
  • South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut: For being the Prince of Darkness, Satan's actually a big softy and is by far the most sympathetic villain in the Big Bad Ensemble.
  • The Cleric from Toy Story That Time Forgot. He lies to all the other Battlesaurs, manipulates them, and tries to destroy Woody and Buzz, all to keep the Battlesaurs from realizing they’re toys. But he only does it because he cares about them; he genuinely believes that they wouldn’t be able to handle the truth and that he has to keep them in the dark to save them from a collective nervous breakdown.
    • Stinky Pete the Prospector from Toy Story 2 also counts as well. His main goal is to travel to Japan to be treasured forever after so many years of receiving no fulfillment. He convinces Woody, Jessie and Bullseye to travel with him in order to make the set complete and to do what is right for them, even if he takes extremes measures such as manipulation and threats in order to do so. Plus, the ending shows that he is capable of redemption once he finally got to be played with by a girl who loves to paint on her dolls.
    • Gabby Gabby from Toy Story 4 is introduced to Woody and Forky as a fairly unsettling doll with a gang of puppets at her disposal, willing to take what she wants by force (in this case, Woody's functional voice box), and Bo Peep suggests just staying away from her. But as the audience learns from her private time with Forky, she's just really desperate to have an owner, having watched the antique store owner's granddaughter Harmony from afar for who knows how many years. When she has a heart-to-heart with Woody later, he willingly surrenders his box to her, and she sets up a meeting with Harmony... who immediately tosses her aside when offered a home. Gabby tells Woody he can have his box back with no fuss, resigned to her fate as a worthless toy. Thankfully, Woody has other ideas.
  • In Disney's Treasure Planet, John Silver starts out as the bad guy; and he does it pretty well, most of the time. But he also turns out to be a great father figure to Jim Hawkins and his soft spot for the lad pushes him to do the right thing now and then. His core motivation of wanting to get what is, in his eyes, rightfully owed to him, is more complex than just standard pirate-related greed. Eventually, he has a Heel–Face Turn and sacrifices said treasure to rescue Jim.
  • In Turning Red, Ming is neither truly evil nor even a bad person. The problem is that Ming's overly controlling behavior often makes her an antagonistic obstacle in Mei's path in growing up and accepting her gifts. Everything she does is out of concern for Mei's well-being, but she just takes it too far, especially during the climax when she unwittingly unleashes her enormous red panda form and attacks her daughter in a blind rage.
  • AUTO from WALL•E opposes WALL•E, EVE and Captain McCrea and tries to prevent the Axiom from returning to Earth, but only because he can't deviate from his directive, and he genuinely believes that humanity won't survive on Earth. It's the actions he takes in pursuit of that directive, such as trying to kill WALL•E, mutinying against the captain, and endangering the entire population of the Axiom, that ultimately make him a villain.


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