The following contains minor spoilers for Cruella.

Disney has released their newest live-action adaptation, and this time, it's another villain origin story. Cruella, much like Disney's previous attempt at showing a new side of a villain in Maleficent, attempts to turn the antagonist of a classic Disney film into a character that the audience actually wants to root for. What if these baddies weren't simply evil, but had clear and understandable motivations for acting the way they do? It's an interesting concept, for sure, but in Cruella's case, the execution left something to be desired.

A scene from Cruella recently went viral, and it's a scene that's meant to show where Cruella De Vil's disdain for dogs originated. Seasoned Disney fans will recall that her whole deal in 101 Dalmatians is that she wants to skin Dalmatian puppies to make a coat from their fur. This left fans wondering for years what could have possibly made this woman so despicable that she would have no qualms with killing puppies. According to Cruella, her vendetta against Dalmatians began when a pack of them killed her mother, in a scene that is incredibly baffling not only because it is so on-the-nose, but because the bad CGI makes what should be an emotional moment into something that looks utterly ridiculous.

RELATED: Cruella de Vil’s Origin Story Is Irrelevant

Villain origin stories are an inherently interesting concept, because villains are usually one of the most fun parts of any story (if they're well written), and it's always fascinating to get a peek behind the curtain and find out what makes a particular villain tick. However, this scene from Cruellabecause it is so pivotal to Cruella's character arc, just proves that perhaps there are some villains that don't need to be humanized. Sometimes, it's more fun to let a character be evil just for the sake of being evil.

emma stone cruella

There is a world in which a Cruella De Vil origin story actually works. Sure, it's hard to humanize a woman who spends a whole movie trying to murder innocent puppies, but it's not impossible. But the way the writers went about doing it in this movie just feels incredibly lazy. Before the film's release, it was basically low-hanging fruit to make a joke about how Cruella must hate dogs so much because they killed her family. No one really expected that to actually be the entire reason that she doesn't like them. It takes what could be a really interesting idea and essentially makes it into a joke.

It's likely that in the future, Disney will start to make more movies along the lines of Cruella or Maleficent and tell the stories of their villains. It's been done for certain stories before, particularly in the TV show Once Upon A Time (which just happens to be a Disney-owned property), which actually did a great job of complicating typically villainous characters and making them more likeable than their Disney cartoon counterparts - a prime example being the season 3 story arc in which Peter Pan is the villain and Captain Hook proves himself to be a heroic figure.

If Disney can make more villain origin stories like those of Once Upon A Time, they might hit some really interesting concepts. A lot of people are resistant to the live action remake route they've been taking, but if they used those remakes to tell villain stories instead, it would be a lot more interesting and artistically rewarding. However, there's also a good chance that those origins might turn out more like Cruella's.

So yes, it's interesting to learn a villain's motivations, but not every villain needs to have some tragic backstory that explains all of their awful actions. Some of these villains are just evil, and that's the end of it. It's interesting that from their whole catalogue of villains, Disney decided to pick Cruella De Vil to make a movie about why she's actually kind of justified in her hatred of dogs. The entire point of her character in 101 Dalmatians is that she is cartoonish and just straight up evil. Her name itself is a play on the words "cruel" and "devil", and anyone with "devil" in their name doesn't exactly need sympathy.

There's even a line in the iconic "Cruella De Vil" song that goes, "If she doesn't scare you / No evil thing will", implying that Cruella De Vil is more threatening than any other evil thing you can imagine. Again, this really doesn't seem like the type of person you'd want to sympathize with. Of course, maybe that's exactly why Disney thought they would see if they could make the audience root for her anyways.

If Disney decides to continue down the villain story route, perhaps they need to make better choices about what villains they're focusing on. Maybe they need to pick villains that it would be easier to sympathize with, and wouldn't be impossible to come up with a believable backstory for. Team Starkid on YouTube (of A Very Potter Musical fame) already managed to do this with Jafar in their musical Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier, which takes the story of Aladdin and tells it from Jafar's perspective, positioning him as the sympathetic main character. Starkid doesn't have the same vast resources that Disney has, and yet they made a really interesting character study of Jafar that actually manages to tell a believable story about why Jafar is actually a good person but always seen as the villain of the story, because the story's been...well...twisted. Why can't Disney tell just as compelling of a story about their own characters?

It's fun to see why villains act evil, but other times it's just better to let them be that way for no real reason. Sometimes, letting villains just be evil for no reason is as fun as learning about whatever tragic backstory Disney concocted for them. Even in the real world, sometimes people are just bad for no reason, and so it stands to reason that even some villains in Disney movies have no tragic inciting incident in their lives and are just simply bad people, or animals, or what have you. Sometimes, letting a villain just be plain evil can actually be more engaging than trying to give them a moral compass.

MORE: Disney's Villainous Character Tier List