User blog:BigBadSquid/PE Proposal: Budzo



And you thought Fagin and Dag were the most sadistic animal killers out there.

What's the Work
Adventures in Zambezia, or Zambezia for short, is a 2012 South African film about birds living in a bird utopia called Zambezia located on a tree in one of the landmasses that make up Victoria Falls. The city is protected by a group called the Hurricanes, who our protagonist, Kai the peregrine falcon, wants to join.

This is his story as he fights against the evil lizard Budzo, voiced by none other than Jim Cummings.

Who is Budzo? What has he done?
Budzo is a large and fat rock monitor with an appetite for eggs; in fact, he will do anything to enter Zambezia and eat every egg in the city. In the film's backstory, we learn that Budzo once did enter Zambezia and killed the wife of Tendo, the father of Kai and founder of the Hurricanes, explaining why he's so overprotective of his son. Budzo lost one of his claws in his failed raid and seeks to return for vengeance.

To do so, he hires a group of marabou (who were left out of Zambezia because they too eat eggs) to kidnap multiple weaver birds into building a wooden bridge for him to cross Victoria Falls into Zambezia. He threatens to eat them should they ever stop working. When they try to revolt, he kidnaps Tendai and later the rest of the Hurricanes to motivate them in that nobody stands in his way. Tendai calls Budzo out for murdering his wife, but Budzo dismisses him by simply saying that what he did was a long time ago.

Then the weavers build their bridge for Budzo to cross. Budzo told the maribou that only he would cross the bridge to eat as many eggs as he wants before leaving and giving the rest for them, only to see an entire army of lizards following behind. Cecil, the head maribou, asks Budzo why he would betray their promise, to which Budzo coldly remarks that they were just as naive as the Zambezians.

At the end of the film, the maribou team up with the Zambezians to destroy the bridge and prevent the lizards from crossing. Kai leads Budzo to the top of Zambezia using the eggs to lure him, where he is cornered on a water wheel. All birds including the maribou work together to push the water wheel and Budzo over the edge of Victoria Falls. As he falls to his death, Budzo uses a net stuck to his leg to grab Zoe (the daughter of Cheif Sekhuru and the chick in the egg that Tendai's wife died protecting) and take her down with him, but Kai saves her just in time.

Mitigation Factors
Redeeming qualities for Budzo are lacking, to which there are none. He displays only sadism to his character and deliberately only eats eggs out of his greed. Considering his massive gut compared to the other lizards, he's a glutton eating every egg he comes across even when he's not hungry. His motivation for all of this is a SINGLE CLAW, which is an extremely petty excuse for his actions.

Heck, the guy is fully aware that he's evil to the core. When one of the weavers calls him a monster, Budzo replies "Thank you. One does what one can."

Any other factors? Well, there are the lizards, but nothing is said about them to show that Budzo cares about them, even when they plummet to their deaths from the destroyed bridge. For the maribou, it's very clear that he only needed them for their service and promptly leaves them to be eaten by his lizards, calling them just as naive as the eggs of his targets.

Heinous Standards
The maribou act too silly and redeem themselves for any of them to count. None of the small monitor lizards are given characteristics other than "being hungry". Budzo, however, is taken pure dead seriously and is such a dark villain for a movie geared to kids. Even if his first attack is completely offscreen, the damages can be seen through Tendai's overprotectiveness of his son and Sekhuru's broken wing.

Final Verdict
He sounds like a keeper to me. What do you guys think?