Lucifer

Lucifer is the fat, sly, ill-tempered cat belonging to Lady Tremaine in Disney's 1950 animated feature Cinderella. He is his mistress in miniature: pampered, spiteful and entirely comfortable with the household's cruelty toward Cinderella, whom he torments in small, deniable ways whenever the opportunity arises.

His real antagonists, though, are the mice. The film's comic engine is the running war between Lucifer and Jaq, Gus and the rest of the mouse household — chases through the kitchen, ambushes under teacups, and the celebrated sequence in which the mice must smuggle a key past him. That subplot carries much of the film's energy, and it is what audiences tend to remember most vividly from Cinderella alongside the ballroom and the glass slipper.

He was animated principally by Ward Kimball, one of Disney's Nine Old Men, who was handed the cat-and-mouse material as his major assignment on the picture. A widely repeated studio anecdote has Walt Disney visiting Kimball's home — famous for the full-size steam railway in his garden — spotting Kimball's own calico cat, and telling him there was his model for Lucifer. The finished character's markings differ from a calico's, but the story is part of the film's lore.

Lucifer's vocal effects — hisses, growls and yowls rather than dialogue, since he never speaks — were provided by June Foray, later one of the most prolific voice actors in American animation. She recalled being asked simply whether she could do a cat, and answering that she could do anything.

At the climax he is chased out of an upper window by Bruno the dog and appears to fall to his death, an unusually final fate for a Disney comic villain. The later direct-to-video sequels quietly undid it, explaining that he survived because cats land on their feet, and gave him further storylines including a romance. Sequels aside, Lucifer remains one of Disney's definitive bad cats — no grand villainous scheme, just a thoroughly nasty pet with excellent timing.