This is a relitigation post about Chantel DuBois from Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted. She is currently on the list of Disallowed Characters, but I brought up on Discord that I plan to propose her and the Pro-Wrestler agreed with me that Chantel indeed qualifies for NPE by our newer standards on comedy, so thanks to him and let's begin with the proposal.
What's The Work?[]
Madagascar is an animated franchise created by DreamWorks. The trilogy of films follows Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Gloria the Hippo, and Melman the Giraffe as the main characters. In the first film, Marty escaped from the zoo which forced his friends to go after him in an attempt to return him to the zoo. This leads to all of them being sent to a reserve in Africa, but when their containers fall in the sea, they are instead carried by the water to the island of Madagascar. There, they befriend the local lemurs and learn to enjoy the nature.
In the second film, they try to return to New York with a plane but it crashes in Africa and they have to wait for the penguins to fix it. All the animals find others from their species and Alex finds his true parents. The lion Makunga is one of the main antagonists and he overthrows Alex' dad, Zuba, through trickery. Meanwhile, a group of humans led by Nana block the river with a dam which leads to a drought for the animals. Alex and his friends manage to destroy the dam and return the water back to the animals and he manages to get revenge on Makunga for what he did to him and his dad.
The third film Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted which was released in 2012 follows the main characters once again as they join a traveling European circus to escape animal control officer Captain Chantel DuBois. Along the way, they help revitalize the struggling circus with their unique talents, all while trying to return to their home at the Central Park Zoo and travel across Europe. the movie ends with the characters successfully defeating DuBois and deciding to join the circus instead of returning to their old zoo.
Who Is Chantel DuBois?[]
Captain Chantel DuBois is the main antagonist of Madagascar 3. She works as an animal control officer in Monaco and uses her position to capture and kill any animal she can and collect their body parts as trophies. When Alex the Lion and his friends go to Monaco, DuBois and her henchmen chase them in an attempt to capture and kill them because DuBois really wants to add a lion head to her collection. DuBois tries to capture them even after they go outside her jurisdiction.
What Has She Done?[]
Even as a young girl she has displayed sociopathic tendencies. In her very first scene, she explains with pride to her henchmen how when she was 7 she has strangled her first parrot, flushed her first goldfish and parched her first snake. The body of her snake is even shown on-screen and she uses it to put pencils inside its mouth.
Ever since then, she has killed many animals for fun and has taken their body parts for her collection. Her sadism has led her to start a career as an animal control officer for the chance of legally killing more animals. She keeps a collection of dozens of animal heads and other body parts hanging on the wall in her office.
She wants to add a lion head to her collection because she believes this would be the pinnacle of her career. When she hears about Alex, Marty, Gloria, Melmon and their friends causing trouble in Monaco, she is delighted because Alex is a lion and she could cut off his head and add it to her collection. She takes her henchmen and chases after the animals with the intention of killing them all.
After a long chase which causes a lot of property damage across Monaco, the animals barely manage to escape on a plane, but the plane crashes and they are forced to join a circus to hide themselves. However, even after the animals go outside her jurisdiction in Monaco, DuBois continues to look after them and try to kill them because she is obsessed with the idea of acquiring a lion head. She uses her tracking abailities and intelligence to find where they have gone. When she realises that the animal gang hides with a circus, DuBois decides to get to them. When she sees King Julien and the bear Sonya driving a motorcycle, she goes after them because she believes they would lead her to the circus and steals a police motorcycle. After this backfires on her and she is ambushed by police officers, she shoots darts at them which causes all of them to pass out except for one who got lucky because DuBois ran out of darts.
Inside her prison cell she digs a hole and tricks the guards into jumping inside and then she traps them and escapes. Then, she checks the police computer for info about missing lions and realises that Alex is from the New York Zoo. Then, she visits her henchmen at the hospital and heals them them by singing to them and renews the chase, trying to get to Alex and cut off his head. She tracks them to London where she tries to fulfil her ambition, but the penguins deal with her and her henchmen and shoot them away from a canon.
When Alex, Marty, Melmon and Gloria reach the gates of the New York Zoo, DuBois ambushes them and shoots darts which cause them to pass out. She tries to saw off Alex' head and only stops when other people arrive and they think DuBois has returned Alex with DuBois deciding to play along. During the ceremony to celebrate Alex' return, she pretends to be overjoyed about "saving" Alex and rips apart a one million dollar check, stating it was never about the money. Then, she tries to kill Alex by shooting a poisoned dart at his direction which is masked inside a glove but her dart is intercepted because the circus animals have come to save Alex and his friends.
There is a fight between DuBois and her henchmen against the animals. When all the animals managed to get away from her except the seal Stefano, she captured Stefano and tried to kill him out of frustration. When Alex returns to save Stefano, DuBois makes one final attempt on his life by trying to take his head off. However, she is defeated and dropped behind a fence in the zoo. Then, she is shot with a dart by Mort and is firthur humiliated by Alex who commands her to roll over which she does in her dazed state.
She is last seen inside a crate along with her henchmen who are in separate crates. They have been placed there by the penguins who have put them on a ship for Madagascar to punish them for their crimes.
Potential Mitigating Factors That Don't Hold Up[]
Awareness about the sentience of the animals[]
First off, she is aware that the animals she is hunting are sentient:
She witnesses them perform several acts which display their sentience. She sees the main characters driving a car while they are trying to get away from her, she sees monkeys driving a plane, she sees a monkey being able to operate weapons which shoot bananas at her and she sees King Julien and Sonya driving a motorcycle. She doesn't seem particularly surprised by any of these occurences which indicates she was aware of the animals' sentience even before the events of the film.
It is also shown on several occasions that she is aware about how intelligent the animals she is chasing are. For example, she correctly deduces that the animals are trying to get away from her by joining a circus, so they could blend in and hide from her. She also sets up an ambush in front of the New York Zoo because she correctly predicts that Alex and his friends are trying to return there because that's where they grew up. These instances further show that she is aware the animals are sentient and can strategise.
Care About Henchmen[]
She also doesn't care about her henchmen and only keeps them around because they are useful. When they get taken out during the chase throughout Monaco, she doesn't seem concerned about their well-being. While she later goes into their hospital room and heals them by singing to them, it's only done because they are useful to her and she needs them to capture the animals. Her tearing up by the end of the song doesn't prove she cares for them either because she only tears up due to how beautiful her song is and not because she is sad about what happened to her men.
What Prevents Her From Being Pure Evil?[]
She has some comedic moments throughout the film which include her crawling on four legs to smell the ground for the animals or licking their footsteps, her slapping the hotel manager because she was preventing her from smelling the direction in which the animals had gone, her shooting with darts at several police officers with each of them standing in line in front of her only for her to run out of darts for the last officer and get arrested, her healing her henchmen by singing Edith Piaf, her being fired away from a cannon, her being crushed between the butts of two elephants, her being hit by a dart and Alex commanding her to roll over and her final defeat where she and her henchmen being sent to Madagascar in crates which mirrors what happened to the gang in the first film.
However, she is not too comedic to be NPE because her crimes are still treated seriously and none of the other characters in the film perceive her as a joke. Her being a sadistic serial killer of animals who collects their body parts as trophies is never played for laughs, she is presented as competent and dangerous, none of the other characters within the film find her funny and they are terrified of her and even some of her comedic moments are used to further establish her as a threat even though they are funny like the scenes where she crawls on four legs to smell the scent of the animals she is chasing are used to show that she has the unique skill of being able to track the animals from a great distance which further establishes her as a threat and makes her appear more dangerous even though the scenes are portrayed as funny.
The reason why she was considered too comedic in the past was because back then we had different standards and it was decided that she is too comedic for NPE because she has a lot of funny moments. However, by our newer standards on comedy and with the approval of characters like Dave and Hunter by these new standards, I do believe DuBois fits here.
By our new standard, we don't judge whether a character is too comedic to be NPE based on how many funny moments they have but based on how their crimes are portrayed and how other characters perceive them.
Like I said already, DuBois' crimes are not played for laughs, at all, and her wall which contains trophies from animals she has already killed is used to establish how dangerous she is. She is portrayed as a badass who doesn't have a single unsolved case in her 20-year career, she is able to perform incredible feat like driving her motorcycle from one building to another and when she sees she wouldn't make it, she jumps from her motorcycle while it is falling and makes it to the roof of the building she wants to reach. Seriously, watch this scene: https://youtu.be/kJAXgU1pP4U
The scene where she arrives on the scene to chase after the animals is also pretty badass. Her introduction is made with a dramatic music where she appears from fire with a silhouette that resembles a demon: https://youtu.be/Dx7OKzXfHsQ?t=45
So, overall, while she does have funny moments, she is not treated as someone who is supposed to be perceived as a harmless joke, but as a genuine threat who shouldn't be taken lightly but still has funny moments since she is in a Madagascar film.
Heinous Standard[]
From what I have heard, the TV series are not considered to be canon to the films, so Chantel only needs to be compared to villains from the films.
She is easily more heinous than the villains from the first 2 films. In the first film, The fossa try to eat lemurs along with Alex's friends, but they are just predators who want to eat and it's not clear who leads them.
In the second film, Nana beats Alex, wants to eat him along with his father and builds a dam which deprives all the animals from the reserve from water. However, it's not very clear if she is actually aware that her building that dam would cause drought to the animals from the reserve and she is doing it to help her fellow tourists survive in the wilderness. There is also Makunga who doesn't even try to kill anyone and just manipulates a situation where Zuba, the lead lion, would be forced to expel his own son Alex from the pride, so Zuba would instead give the power to Makunga. When the drought starts, he decides to make the animals fight for it because he knows he would win, but that's really it.
In the film Penguins of Madagascar, Dave does attempt to do worse than her by mutating every cute animal and then unleashing them, so they would be slaughtered by the humans. This would give him a higher body count than Chantel, but at the same time he also has more resources than her because he has more money than her, he impersonates a famous scientist, he has a crew of octopuses and he has the serum which could be used to mutate animals, so he could achieve his goals.
Chantel on the other hand works as an animal control officer and has 4 henchmen and these are her resources. I feel that her being a serial killer of animals with a body count at least in the dozens does make her stand out in the franchise considering how light-hearted tha Madagascar films are. Her methods of killing can also be fairly brutal like when she tries to saw off Alex's head.
Two concerns many users had about her in the past were whether she knows the animals are sentient and whether her crimes are not too much off-screen.
For the first point, I have provided proof that she knows the animals are sentient under "Potential mitigating factors that don't hold up".
For the second point about off-screen villainy, her very first scene starts with her wall in the office which contains the body parts of dozens of animals being shown on full display, so there is enough on-screen evidence about what she has done and intends to do in the future. See this videoclip here: https://youtu.be/Dx7OKzXfHsQ
Conclusion[]
I would say yes but you are the ones who decide.