15 Fan Theories About Villains In Underrated Animated Fantasy Movies That Shocked Us

From Redditor u/An_Armed_Bear:

Eris is constantly in motion in some way, whether it be her hair or her randomly shifting forms. [I think this is a] subtle way to visually characterize a goddess of chaos/discord.

From Redditor u/monstersimpin:

There's SO much I can say about Hexxus. But, to put it bluntly, he is very clearly getting off to pollution. He even flat out says so in the extended cut of the song I mentioned. At 1:46 the lyrics are "I feel good, a special kind of horny." The raunchy, sleazy sound makes you feel dirty just listening to it. I saw a comment on a youtube video of this song once that went something like "Recycling and going green is what you want everyone to see you doing. Pollution is the naughty one night stand you don't want your parents to know about." Which is the essence of Hexxus. He represents crazy, out of control, destructive hedonism.

From Redditor u/themightyheptagon:

Even for a cartoon, this movie's central plot—involving an anthropomorphized white blood cell battling an anthropomorphized virus inside Bill Murray's body—seems to take some serious artistic liberties with how viruses and diseases actually behave in the real world. Thrax, the virus in question, is a stone-cold bad guy who develops an elaborate plan to kill Bill Murray by breaking into his brain to steal his hypothalamus gland, thus cursing him with an incurable fatal fever.

All anthropomorphization aside (yes, we all know that viruses don't wear black trench coats or swap one-liners with Chris Rock), there's a pretty big problem with that whole scenario: in the real world, viruses don't evolve to kill people, they evolve to spread by reproducing as much as possible. Though viruses can cause harmful side-effects, those side-effects are all secondary to their true purpose: incubating in their host bodies and spreading to more host bodies.

Curiously, Thrax never once mentions anything about wishing to reproduce, and he doesn't seem to incubate or grow stronger in his host body. Instead, he arrives in Bill Murray's body at full strength, and immediately makes it clear that his only goal is to kill him (Bill Murray is his victim, not his host). If Thrax behaved like a realistic virus, he would have spent the movie trying to make clones of himself, or trying to infest the many cells that he encountered à la "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". So why doesn't he?

Simple: Thrax isn't a normal virus, he's an artificial bio-weapon. He was created in a lab and bred to kill.

This would explain his psychotic obsession with killing and his apparent lack of self-preservation. The death of a host body would be fatal to most ordinary viruses, since it would prevent them from spreading, but Thrax wouldn't care if killing people was his sole reason for existing.

Need further evidence? Well, consider the fact that Bill Murray (who works as a zookeeper) got sick because he was stupid enough to eat a hard-boiled egg after it fell into a chimpanzee's cage. In the context of the movie, the incident is used to teach children an important lesson about hygiene, but nobody discusses the implications of the Thrax virus being transmitted by a captive chimpanzee, of all things: a captive chimpanzee is exactly the kind of animal that you would expect to be used for animal testing in a laboratory. And as important as hygiene may be, people don't usually have their hypothalamus switched off from eating unsanitary foods. That sounds more like the work of a tailor-made pathogen.

Thus, the chimpanzee was either deliberately infected as part of an extremely unethical experiment, or it wound up in the zoo after an unfortunate mix-up at the laboratory that developed the virus.

Also, think about the disturbing implications of Thrax's name: Thrax, as in Anthrax. It's probably not a coincidence that "Osmosis Jones" came out in 2001, just as the infamous Anthrax Attacks in Washington were making headlines. His name is a hint at his true origins, and it was chosen by the screenwriters because they knew that it would evoke biological warfare.

It also seems like a bit of a plot hole that none of the humans in the movie are ever seen trying to diagnose or identify Bill Murray's illness or figure out where it came from. That's not an accident. The filmmakers knew that the movie would take a sudden dark turn if the humans had to address the virus' mysterious origins or admit that admit that its symptoms had never been documented. So instead, the climax just focuses on Ozzy and Drix saving the day inside Bill Murray's body. Never mind that there are probably more copies of Thrax out there (diseases exist to reproduce, remember), and not every human body has a heroic white blood cell like Ozzy that can be expected to stop it.

From Redditor u/tracymar55:

I think the Red Bull represents how big and overwhelming our fears and be and how we may let them drive us "into the sea" of our imaginings until we confront them. Also, Haggard uses fear in order to maintain his power and his "wealth" - despite poverty of spirit.

From Redditor u/TheMightyBill:

Horned King does have unnatural qualities to him, and could in fact be immune to mortal weaponry what with his undead appearance.

From Redditor u/goldfish_k:

Agent Muska, imo, is the personification of the Laputa, the last castle in the sky. Muska, as the one of the last descendants of the royal family, symbolizes the same greed that caused the destruction of the old nation. Referring to the aforementioned environmental concerns, examples like moss growing over the robots, the robot offering a flower to Sheeta can show that men and nature can coexist, but as in the opening sequence with the castles falling back to earth and the end where the last castle crumbles, there’s the message that nature will reclaim what men have taken if they are consumed by their greed. The opening sequence tells a story with just beautiful animation. Although cooperation and ambition is what raised the people of Laputa to the sky, the ambition turned to greed and they fought each other and destroyed one another. The same greed that dragged sky-faring people of Laputa is personified by Muska as he betrays the military he worked with once he reaches the skies, consumed by greed.