Karma Houdini / Animated Films

Karma Houdini in Animated Films.

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• The Addams Family (2019): Margaux receives no backlash for trying to kill the Addams family, and even starts dating Uncle Fester and sells all of the homes in Assimilation. The only punishment she does earn is getting her show canceled by the network as a result of her incriminating tirade on Assimilation's citizens being live-streamed, but she makes it clear that selling the homes themselves is her bread and butter, not the show. She has yet to apologize for illegally spying on the neighbors, nor do we have any indication that she had patched anything up with Parker.
• All Dogs Go to Heaven: The entire family of canidae (dogs) are karma-dodgers. The film states this is because dogs are naturally kind and loving, so they get a free pass.
  • Carface (the Big Bad of the film) also ends up in paradise after he's offed, even though he flat-out murdered another dog, held an innocent child captive for weeks, and engaged in all other sorts of nasty business. Karma bites Carface hard in the sequel. It's revealed that he's The Mole for Satan himself and is Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves in the end, being dragged kicking and screaming into Hell. He does make a Heel–Face Turn in the animated series, though.
    Itchy: What do you know? And I thought All Dogs Go to Heaven.
  • As it turns out, the first time Charlie died, he only got into Heaven because he was a dog; Annabelle couldn't find a single redeeming quality in him. Of course, he does get redeemed at the end following a Heroic Sacrifice.
  • The way things play out actually make this a Zig-Zagged Trope. Dogs do get into heaven by merit of inherent qualities but any that get in solely on that grace are unlikely to actually enjoy being in heaven given the traits they're likely to have. Not to mention that said dogs may well be ruled by their vices enough to try going back to Earth because they can't stand the thought of being dead, regardless of how they may benefit from the rule. And those that do return to life discover that an automatic guarantee to Heaven is a one off for if they die again then they go where their actions and qualities determine is fitting.
• An American Tail had three mean, cynical orphans near the end who bully Fievel, briefly convince him to give up looking for his family, make him throw a tantrum, lose hope, push him into a mud puddle, throw straw at him so he can make a bed, and finally move him to tears. Though they are presumed to be scared away by Gussie and Tiger when they tried to take Fievel away from his family, or they had already left by then.
  • Warren T. “Rat” and his enforcers’ karma for extorting, taking advantage of, and eating the immigrant mice? Being forced onto a boat and shipped to Hong Kong. The cat mafia does lose its money and established power and influence, but the implication is that they’ll get it back eventually. As Warren puts it, “It’s okay, boys! There’s plenty of mice in Hong Kong!”
• Anastasia: Young con-artist Dimitri comes up with the idea to find a random girl to impersonate the lost Grand Duchess Anastasia, giving him the chance to collect considerable reward money from her grandmother. His older friend Vlad is 100% complicit in this scheme, which includes convincing the heroine Anya that she might just be the lost princess, but whereas Dimitri pays mightily for attempting such an elaborate deception, Vlad is never punished at all, and in fact is portrayed from start to finish as a kindly older man who would do no harm to anyone.
• Asterix Conquers America: It is true that Caesar never gets punished as much as his underlings are. But this story takes that trend to the extreme. After the Romans have burned the village and captured all but four of the Gauls (which is pretty much as close as they come to winning in any "Asterix" story), all of the private soldiers are beaten up and Lucullus is even devoured by Caesar's pet panther. Caesar though manages to hide in a barrel and escape the scene unharmed. It is notable too that while other stories will portray Caesar as a man of honor, he has no redeeming qualities here. And still, he is free to just casually exit the movie with his pet panther.
• Downplayed at the end of Balto, where the evil Malamute Steele nearly succeeds in killing off the population of Nome by deliberately getting Balto and his team lost in the Alaskan wilderness, knowing that this will kill them as well, and then tricks everyone into thinking that Steele is actually a hero, however his punishment for all of the crimes he committed against Nome are surprisingly very lenient given the sheer villainy of his character: shortly after Balto and his team finally safely arrive in Nome with the diptheria medicine, everyone turns against him and start branding Steele as an outcast instead, and Steele then disappears afterward, not even returning in any of the sequels not do they ever mention him again. Interestingly enough, there was a Deleted Scene where at the end of the movie, Steele would've tried to kill Balto one last time, with their final battle ending with Steele accidentally being hung on a lever used to open a coal shaft, and then Buried Alive underneath a pile of coal dropped onto him, and thus killing him, but it was scrapped for being too dark, and the fate Steele received instead was far more lenient in comparison.
  • Played even straighter with Niju, the Big Bad of the second movie: despite plotting to overthrow the alpha wolf Nava and take over the wolf pack, Niju ultimately ends up getting away scot-free, with him last seen accidentally falling off an ice floe and into freezing water and then swimming back to the wolves' old home instead of following the other wolves as they move to a new home.
• At the end of Cars 3, despite eventually losing to her, Jackson Storm is never given any comeuppance of any sort for deliberately sabotaging Cruz Ramirez's victory by slamming her into a wall, only for her to still overtake him anyway by flipping herself over him during the final race, due to him not even appearing again after Cruz crosses the finish line, aside from the possibility of him eventually becoming Cruz's archrival.
• Despicable Me:
  • Gru might be a Villain Protagonist (for a given value of "villain"; most of the evil he commits is barely above Poke the Poodle level), but the Miss Hattie runs an Orphanage of Fear, forcing her charges to sell cookies and putting them in the "Box of Shame" if they fail to meet their quota or rebel in any way. She receives no punishment whatsoever. The girls are taken back to the orphanage, due to a phone call from Dr. Nefario - actually done to get them out of the way so he and Gru could pull off their plan to steal the moon. Gru gets the girls back in the end, but Miss Hattie simply disappears afterward and presumably remains at her job, none the worse for the wear.
  • Vector's father, the Bank President who was actually the true mastermind behind what Vector was doing. It comes off as sort of ironic that the truly evil villains are the ones that get off scotfree. Though he does lose his son, who is implied to be the only person he actually loves.
• Disney Animated Canon:
  • Cinderella: Lady Tremaine is one of the few Karma Houdinis in this canon, getting away with making Cinderella's life a living Hell for 20 years, even with The Hays Code in effect. In the more recent direct-to-video sequels, however, she gets punished by being humiliated (along with Drizella) in front of the King and the local noblemen after the Fairy Godmother's wand she stole turns them into frogs and then, when reversing that spell, makes them wear Cinderella-like clothing, complete with brooms and all. This actually happens in Cinderella III: A Twist in Time, which is set not long after the end of the original Disney movie and has Lady Tremaine, aside of abusing the wand's magic, manipulating a remorseful Anastasia (who's been retconned into a Naïve Everygirl) so she takes Cinderella's place with magic.
    • This is somewhat justified in that Cinderella actually does forgive her stepfamily in the original Perrault story, which the film follows. In that version, the younger of the two stepsisters was also much less of an evil bitch than the other one. There have been other interpretations of the story with one of the stepsisters being depicted as either the lesser evil or not so bad.
  • Pinocchio's got four of them, despite The Hays Code being in effect. Foulfellow and Gideon trick Pinocchio twice, first to send him to Stromboli (who lost his star attraction and his investment in Pinocchio when he escapes, so it can be assumed the karma bullet manages to get a decent hit on him), and later to Pleasure Island and the absolute worst of them, The Coachman, who they're in cahoots with. Pleasure Island lures in and encourages boys to behave badly so they'll be transformed into jackasses and sold to salt mines as workers. Even though they turn children into slaves, wayward as they may be, they don't get their comeuppance. This arguably tells an aesop that you can't simply defeat or get rid of temptations in life, you just learn not to be drawn in by them.
    • In the original book, the (unnamed) fox and cat end up as miserable street beggars; the cat who used to fake blindness really became blind, and the fox had to sell his tail. They beg Pinocchio to help them, but he essentially tells them "good riddance".
    • According to the book Mouse Under Glass that there was a planned idea that, while heading off to save Gepetto from Monstro, Pinocchio would run into Foulfellow and Gideon again. They try to convince Pinocchio that they can help him, but apparently the third time's the charm, because this time he doesn't listen to them, and when they attempt to chase him down, they get caught by the police.
    • There's also the SNES Pinocchio game where at the end of the Pleasure Island level you get to fight the Coachman and throw him off a cliff to a Disney Villain Death.
  • Lady and the Tramp: The Siamese cats, who completely disappear after getting Lady muzzled and kicked out of the house, despite of The Hays Code being in effect at that time. At least their owner is implied to have done a Heel–Face Turn at the end and stopped hating dogs so much, so it's possible the cats did as well. The original cut was apparently worse, with the cats being far more malicious. Meanwhile, the rat who attacks the baby towards the end and does get comeuppance was portrayed as a comic bumbler. Walt Disney himself insisted that their personalities be switched with the rat portrayed as sinister (which also added some much needed tension to the climax) and the cats portrayed as more mischievous than evil.
  • Aladdin: Razoul, the Captain of the Guard, throws the hero off a cliff to certain death because Jafar paid him to eliminate the rival. This was when Aladdin was still disguised, so it wasn't even that Razoul was enacting vigilante justice on the thief he'd been trying to catch for years. Nevertheless, though Jafar gets his comeuppance at the end of the movie, Razoul not only escapes justice but retains his position as the resident Inspector Javert type throughout the 2 sequels (though he mellows at the end of the 2nd one).
  • Beauty and the Beast: Played with regarding the Enchantress that curses the Prince into the Beast and gets the entire plot rolling. The Enchantress shows up in an old crone disguise, offers the prince a rose that he doesn't have any real reason to take even if he wasn't a massive Jerkass at the time, and turns her away. She promptly reveals herself and curses him for being rude to an old woman he had no reason to suspect was a powerful enchantress (a reaction she obviously deliberately tried to invoke). Worse is that the Enchantress doesn't just curse the Prince for this, she curses all of his otherwise perfectly innocent servants and anyone else who happen to be in the castle at the time into appliances as well as the castle itself and much of the area around it into a grotesque shadow of it's former self, and puts a time limit to breaking said curse to "teach him a lesson", all of which for no reason as far as the viewers are ever shown. Worst of all, the Enchantress gets away scot-free for her terrible actions for all this without even a single mention of her by anyone after the introductory scene. It's probably worse, since in the movie, the Beast's servants mention they've been stuck as objects for ten years, and the rose dies when the Beast is twenty. This means Beast was either 9 or 10 when he was cursed. In other words, he was cursed because he didn't know any better.
    • There is also Monsieur D'Arque. After being bribed by Gaston into taking Maurice into the madhouse to enforce Gaston's Scarpia Ultimatum, he simply disappears from the movie.
  • Hercules: Though not a completely straight example, as they suffer much throughout the movie, Pain and Panic ultimately don’t share Hades fate of being banished to the River Styx. They just watch their former boss get dragged down, presumably getting off scot free despite aiding him in his plans.
  • Atlantis: The Lost Empire:
    • The Leviathan is a non-human example, having massacred nearly all of the 200-man crew aboard the Ulysses, and for all we know, it's still out there preying on unsuspecting trespassers.
• Finding Nemo: The barracuda that brutally kills Coral, Nemo's mother, all of his siblings and almost kills Marlin, Nemo's father, completely disappears afterwards and never pays for its act. Averted later, though: Toy Story 4 reveals that it was eventually caught and stuffed, and displayed at Second Chance Antiques.
• Gnomeo & Juliet: Benny, Gnomeo's friend, manages to get away scot-free despite committing credit card fraud to buy a $20,000 lawnmower, destroying two entire gardens and nearly inadvertently killing the main characters of the film. He even gets a love interest during the Dance Party Ending. Completely averted in the original, as Ben is a pacifist and is one of the few characters still alive at the end.
• Golden Films tends to do this with their villains, leaving their stories discontinued and unresolved.
  • In Pocahontas (Golden Films), Mr. Gains, the villain for the first half of the movie, disappears after Pocahontas gets married. Before that point, he had wanted the right to hunt animals in the forest. When he was attempting to hunt for food, he shot and killed one of Pocahontas's tribesmen. He also kidnaps Pocahontas herself and attempts to use her for his own personal gain. After her husband is introduced, Gains just disappears. It's never stated where he went or what happened to him. He's just gone.
  • Their version of Anastasia. Rasputin leads the revolutionary movement against the Romanovs and essentially takes over Russia. After his Villain Song, he's forgotten about for the remainder of the movie. Once Anastasia regains her memories after suffering from amnesia for a few years, the movie just ends. Russia is taken over by an evil magician who is responsible for the death of Anastasia's family and he is never punished for his crimes.
  • In their version of Pinocchio The Coachman gets away with turning Pinocchio, Candlewick, and several other boys into donkeys and selling them into labor.
• Home (2015): Captain Smek is arguably responsible for everything bad that happens in this film, but other than losing the captaincy, he's never punished.
• Ice Age: Diego's pack members Oscar and Lenny flee after their leader Soto is killed by Manny. Zeke might join them in that category depending on whether or not he managed to dig himself out of the hollow rock he got stuck in.
• The Incredibles:
  • In the opening of the film, Bomb Voyage robs a bank, tries to kill Buddy Pine and destroys a railway bridge, causing the Super Registration Act to be enforced. He still manages to get away scot-free and possibly stays at large for the remainder of the film.
  • A mugger gets away with assaulting a civilian after Mr Hugh threatens to fire Bob if he tries to go after him.
• Incredibles 2:
  • The Underminer gets away with doing a lot of property damage and stealing money from banks, and is never seen again.
  • Violet believes that this will apply to Big Bad Evelyn Deavor, who, being rich and well connected, will probably get off with a light punishment for everything she did.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas: Lock, Shock and Barrel receive precisely no comeuppance for trying to feed Santa to Oogie Boogie, although admittedly they were serving him out of fear, and did go and get the Mayor to show that Jack was alive. The closest they came to comeuppance is in a deleted scene, in which Jack scared Lock, Shock and Barrel when they were watching Oogie Boogie trying to put Sally and Santa Claus in the stew.
• Patlabor: The Movie: Shinohara Heavy Industries escapes any punishment for failing to notice that their new Labor OS had a virus embedded in it before installing it on every SHI Labor in Tokyo: the government allows them to cover it up since too many careers in the public and private sectors are on the line.
• The Secret Life of Pets: Even though Snowball switches sides near the end of the movie, he is the only flushed pet to not suffer any punishment (nor face real redemption, since Ozone—who took Max and Duke's collars — was shown at Leonard's party during the credits) for his actions halfway into the movie.
• Downplayed for Mike in Sing. Although the movie ends with him on the run from the Russian Bear Gangsters for cheating them out of a lot of cash in a poker game, he also gets away with an impressive live television performance, an expensive sports car, and a girlfriend who's proven herself to be a loyal companion. So all things considered, he ended up rather well despite being his major Jerkass tendencies.
• At the end of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Bowser, after being defeated during the final battle in Brooklyn, is shrunk by being force-fed a Mini Mushroom and then locked in a birdcage in Peach's castle... but then it is proven that Bowser hasn't learned his lesson, and may soon become the Mario Bros.' Arch-Enemy. Additionally, Kamek and the rest of Bowser's army mysteriously disappear the moment Bowser is defeated and shrunk, and not even they get any punishment of some sort. It's very likely that because of this, either they, or perhaps even Bowser Jr. and the Koopalings (who are absent from the movie) may still continue to cause trouble to the Mushroom Kingdom, and that Bowser likely isn't going to remain trapped in his birdcage forever...
• Tom and Jerry: The Fast and the Furry:
  • While he is on the receiving end of the majority of the movie's slapstick, none of it causes any lasting harm to Tom, so he ultimately gets away with having killed Soccer Mom, Granny, and Squirty and having cut Australia in half, causing half of the continent to sink into the ocean, even winning half the cash prize and a 50% stake in the mansion, with his only karma being that at the end, he trashes the mansion trying to evict Jerry.
  • The President of Hollywood gets away with helping mastermind the race, which ends with four of the seven racers dead (possibly five, depending on whether or not Gorthan found a way out of his situation), half of Australia sunk into the ocean, and several of the world's most famous landmarks destroyed, and with killing J. W. Globwobbler when the executive starts rambling about how he intends to reinvent his studio as a maker of earnest, wholesome family entertainment.
  • Biff Buzzard and Buzz Blister receive no consequences for killing Dr. Professor (which was an accident, but it was an accident resulting from careless negligence when messing with machinery they knew was dangerous, and the two show no remorse for it), nor for tricking Gorthan into licking a pole, which results in him being stuck adrift at sea, unable to participate in the race any further, with his tongue still stuck to a pole.

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