Last week, I posted a podcast I recorded with my friend Jason about the movie Patch Adams. In the film, Robin Williams plays a med school student who upsets the medical institution by caring about patients and clowning around the hospital. In the podcast, one of my biggest complaints was that the movie completely failed to make the “established” doctors into anything more than villainous straw men for Patch to knock over. When questioned as to why they hated Patch (a man who, given his outright illegal actions throughout much of the movie, they have every reason to hate), they would say absurd things about him sinking to the patients’ level, or being too happy.

This treatment of villains is something I understand, from a basic script-writing perspective, but is one of my biggest pet peeves. Yes, obviously the protagonist of the story needs conflict, and that conflict is often driven by an antagonist, whose own motivations have to run counter to the protagonist. In some mediums, especially short-forms, leaving it at that is acceptable; the storyteller only has a small amount of time to tell a story, so spending time shading in the villain detracts from the story at hand.

Movies are usually different, though. With 90-120 minutes to fill, the conflict between protagonist and antagonist is under a lot more scrutiny, and these “straw men” don’t hold up. Thought needs to be put into fleshing out villains for cinema, even when their source material did not.

Take, for instance, Kenneth Branagh’s 2015 live-action adaptation of Cinderella. The source material, a fairy tale, has intentionally simplistic villains: an evil step-mother and two evil step-sisters. In a bed-time story, this is all that is needed: an antagonist to keep the protagonist down, so that she’s overcoming something by going to the ball and eventually marrying Prince Charming. If any movie has an excuse to utilize paper-thin villains, Cinderella is it.

However, the screenplay (written by Chris Weitz, who coincidentally wrote the terrible Nutty Professor 2 alongside Patch Adams’ writer, Steve Oedekirk) does not take the easy way out. While the “villains,” especially the step mother (played by Cate Blanchett) are just as nasty to Cinderella as they are in the original animated Disney picture, care is given to explaining why they may be so awful.

One scene in particular shapes the step mother’s character. Cinderella’s father is about to go away for a trip that ultimately proves fatal, and he is attempting to instill courage in his daughter. Here, he explains how much his deceased wife, Cinderella’s mother, meant to him, and how important it is that Cinderella remain kind and courageous throughout difficult circumstances, even when her step-family makes it difficult. He makes it clear that Cinderella is his only true family left, and that she is the most important figure in his life. Meanwhile, the step mother looks on and hears the whole thing. This makes it obvious that, to the step mother, Cinderella represents her new husband’s previous life. Her resentment comes from a place of jealousy and bitterness, stemming from Cinderella being the living embodiment of her husband’s previous life.

One other scene allows Cate Blanchett to vocalize her character’s history and distaste for her step daughter. Here, after finding Cinderella’s remaining glass slipper (I’ll trust that you, the reader, are familiar with the story), she explains that she married her first husband out of love. However, after her first husband died and she was left with nothing, she re-married Cinderella’s father for money and status, only to have him die too. This frames her as somebody who experienced great loss, just as Cinderella has, but dealt with it through anger, cynicism, and bitterness rather than kindness and courage. Instead of being cruel for the sake of cruelty, it frames the step mother as a direct counterpoint to Cinderella, making their conflict ideological in addition to structurally necessary.

The best thing about this? These two scenes only take up roughly 5 minutes of screen-time in a 105 minute film. It’s proof that narrative efficiency is never an excuse for a boring antagonist. If a film based on Cinderella can create an interesting, fleshed-out villain within 5 minutes, there’s no reason for dramas that are fundamentally more complex to not put in that effort.