Unconditional loyalty. They say all pets possess it: the ability to love their masters no matter what. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of the Disney villains: through the years, their pets have stood fast with them – no matter what.
Not all Disney villains have been animal lovers. Cruella De Vil, for example, liked dalmations only for their fur, and Captain Hook never shook hands with a crocodile. But, for the most part, there has been a relationship between villains and pets since Disney's first animated feature, SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS. In that film, the role played by the wicked Queen's raven may not have been the largest, but it was the beginning of a trend. Of the 32 animated films that followed, nine provided villains with pets. Some were abused and some were adored, but all of them were faithful to the evil that their masters did.
Take, for example, CINDERELLA'S wicked stepmother and her lethargic cat, Lucifer. Their relationship is so close that the animators chose to give them a similar feature. This is evident in the scene wherein Cinderella is called to her stepmother's bedroom. Lucifer sits on the stepmother's lap, under the darkness of the canopy, and the audience sees only two sets of glowing yellow eyes.
Lucifer's animator, Ward Kimball, based the character on his own lazy house cat, but Lucifer becomes much more than just a pet in the film. The cat becomes a villain in his own right. While the stepmother provides the evil for the main story line. Lucifer does the same for the film's subplot, terrorizing Jaq, Gus, and the rest of the mice. Lucifer even acts as an ally to the stepmother (perhaps unwittingly), as he tries to foil the mice's attempts to free Cinderella toward the film's climax.
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