Evil Cannot Comprehend Good / Disney

• Beauty and the Beast:
  • Gaston doesn't understand why Belle would choose the Beast over him. To him, love is just a convenient bargaining chip—or a distraction, or a function of physical beauty. He also doesn't understand why the Beast let him live at the end, if his final attack and subsequent death is any indication.
  • When the Beast is still selfish at the beginning of the film, he seems genuinely shocked that Belle would give up her freedom to take her father's place as a prisoner.
• While they're more "weird" than "evil", this is the basic premise of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Jack understands the basic feeling behind Christmas, but not how traditional Christmas icons translate into Christmas feelings. The other townsfolk don't have a clue and merrily set about to twisting Christmas toys to their own scary designs because they feel this improves them.
• In Disney's Sleeping Beauty, the Good Fairies disguise themselves as human peasants, give up their magic, move into a cottage in the forest, and raise Aurora/Briar Rose as though she were a foundling, because they know it will never cross Maleficent's mind that anyone could perform such a selfless act. As Fauna notes: "Maleficent doesn't know anything about love, or kindness, or the joy of helping others. You know, sometimes I don't think she's really very happy."
• Frozen:
  • Justified with Prince Hans. As he never bonded with his brothers in youth, he calls Anna "dumb" for going after her sister in his Breaking Speech and looks confused when Elsa reacts with grief over Anna's Heroic Sacrifice, showing he never grasped the concerns the sisters had for each other. He's even more perplexed upon noting how Anna survived the frozen heart curse. Realizing he saw her as a mere pawn in a nasty game of political chess, Anna's rebuttal to Hans before she sucker-punches him even nails it: as anything he did was to seek power via lies and deceit, he truly doesn't love anyone in his selfish and metaphorically "frozen" heart. The book A Frozen Heart expands on it, revealing that the years of abuse led Hans to believe Love Is a Weakness.
  • While not evil herself, Elsa is so convinced of herself being a monster (especially after being told that Anna died because of her) that she is shocked when Anna sacrificed herself for her in spite of everything she had done. Anna response to this is to simply say that "she loves her".
• In Cinderella III: A Twist in Time, Lady Tremaine and Drizella don't believe in love and assume that the King and the Prince are only being nice to them because they're obligated to be so. By contrast, it's Anastasia who realizes that love is more powerful than magic and that the King and the Prince really are genuinely nice people. She quickly does a Heel–Face Turn.
• Pocahontas: When Powhatan opts not to kill John Smith and the rest of his tribe stands down in an act of peace, Ratcliffe immediately sees it as a chance for him and his men to attack. The rest of his crew spell it out to him that they don't want to fight, but he ignores and attempts to kill Powhatan in cold blood. But John Smith intervenes and gets shot by the bullet instead, leaving Ratcliffe genuinely shocked that Smith would sacrifice his life like that.
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Despite claiming to be Egocentrically Religious, Judge Claude Frollo is actually a bigoted and Bible-thumping nut who never accepts the Bible's true message on compassion and pride for all the Holier Than Thou ranting he does, yet has the gall to blame God for his issues. Others repeatedly call him out, but to the end, he remains ignorant, leading to his condemnation to Hell. Clopin even lampshades it in the opening song, noting that Frollo "saw corruption everywhere except within." Case in point: Frollo thinks the gypsies are Always Chaotic Evil, but goes nuts when Quasimodo told him that Esmeralda treated him with genuine care.
• In Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Commander Lyle T. Rourke shows complete confusion and frustration when his crew abandons him for condemning Atlantis to death out of greed, and when they explain that they didn't want anyone hurt in their tomb-robbing, he remarks, "P. T. Barnum was right." ("There's a sucker born every minute.")
  Rourke: Aw, you can't be serious.
  Audrey: This is wrong and you know it!
  Rourke: We're this close to our biggest payday ever and you pick now of all times to grow a conscience?!
  Vinny: We've done a lot of things we're not proud of; robbing graves, eh, plundering tombs, double-parking... BUT, nobody got hurt! Well... maybe somebody got hurt but, nobody we knew.
  Rourke: Well if that's the way you want it, fine. MORE FOR ME! P. T. Barnum was right.
• The Princess and the Frog: This is what in part brings Dr. Facilier down. When trying to convince Tiana to take his deal, he brings up her father — showing James beat down from work and cooking for the neighborhood while dreaming of their restaurant. But while he sees it as James working himself to death for nothing and dying before he could get what he wanted, Tiana realizes the truth: that it shows James was a man noble enough to sacrifice for the people he loved and kind enough to share his dreams with the world (both things Facilier are not), and while he never got to open his restaurant, he lived a life surrounded by the love of family and friends. Which is exactly why Tiana rejects Facilier's offer.
• The Lion King franchise:
  • In the final battle in the 1st film, Scar immediately attempts to guilt-trip Simba into not killing him by shamelessly using the relative card. Simba's response? "No, Scar. I'm not like you." Simba bluntly makes it clear that he wasn't going to resort to killing a member of his own family like Scar had done, and instead, asks him to leave the Pridelands forever.
  • The Lion King II: Simba's Pride: In the sequel to The Lion King, Zira severely underestimates the goodness inside Kovu, and automatically sees his and Kiara's friendship as a chance for Kovu to kill Simba, not considering that their attachment actually suggests that Kovu is the worst person to send to the Pridelanders. It also clearly never occurred to her that Kovu's original affection for Kiara could override years of indoctrination, or that experiencing the Pridelanders' kinder lifestyle would make him or her fellow Outlanders realize they were on the wrong side. Sure enough, it takes not even a day for Kovu to redevelop feelings for Kiara and refuse to become a killer.
• The Little Mermaid (1989): Ursula is shown to have a very shallow (heh) understanding of true love, and seems to think it's nothing more than lust. When Ariel asks how she can win over Eric without her voice, Ursula suggests that Eric will only be interested in her body. She calls Ariel a "tramp" when she and Eric become fond of each other, and her solution is to transform into a conventionally attractive woman and hypnotize Eric into marrying her instead. Also, in a deleted scene, she told a merman named Harold to bring her a water lily for his deal, only to reveal to Harold that they're out of season. This implies that she always chooses a price that she knows is impossible for her clients to fulfill, and that she thinks true love is equally impossible.
• Invoked in Leroy & Stitch by Gantu's Ironic Echo:
  Gantu: You never did understand the meaning of "aloha", did you?
  Hämsterviel: Well, I think it means—
  Gantu: Uh, that was a rhetorical question.
  • In other words, Hämsterviel, one of the only few true evils in Lilo & Stitch, doesn't understand the power of "aloha" and "'ohana", which turned all of Jumba's first 626 experiments (from Shrink to Stitch), as well as Jumba himself and, as of Leroy & Stitch, Gantu, into good people. Hämsterviel and arguably 627 and Leroy are pretty much the only true evil of the franchise (Jumba is Affably Evil, his experiments from Shrink to Stitch are more mischievous than malevolent, and Gantu had a Villain Decay after the first movie, but is actually good deep down)... that is until the anime introduced Cyber and Delia, and the later Chinese series introduced the Jaboodies and the Woolagongs.
• The Emperor's New Groove: At the start of the movie, Kuzco takes for granted the assumption that being Emperor gives him the right to treat the peasants however he wants; he struggles to understand when Pacha tries to explain that destroying an entire peasant village for selfish gains would be a bad thing. He gets better, though.

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