But it's not just Disney who love to hate British accents. As Giancarlo Cairella notes in his canonical list of movie clichés, there are certain rules for Villains:
• The bad guy is the foreigner.
• Corollary: the foreigner is the guy who speaks English with an English accent
However, this is not broad-brush stereotyping at work here, heavens, no. It's fine-brush stereotyping:
Dear British person: could you could be the next Euro-villain? Are you a Crown subject? Have you performed leading roles with an internationally recognised theatre company? If you answered yes to both questions, you are hereby eligible to portray a villain in a major Hollywood film. In accordance with the laws of the European Union, the British villain will now be known as the Euro-villain – but we all know, deep down, that he’s British to the core. Adhere to the following guidelines and you’ll be well on your way.
Choose your character
Type A: Sneering, disdainful, urbane villain who wants to regain his degenerate aristocratic family’s squandered fortune while grinding everyone else down into the dirt. (Examples: James Mason, Alan Rickman, Dirk Bogarde, Paul Scofield, Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List, Jason Isaacs in The Patriot.)
Type B: Sneering, resentful working-class villain who rages against those who made his father a snivelling failure, his mother a whore, and generally kept him down in the dirt all his life. (Examples: Steven Berkoff, Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, Robert Carlyle, currently Vinnie Jones in Gone in 60 Seconds.)
“How to be a Euro-villain: Have you got what it takes to be a Hollywood bad guy? If you’re British, you’re already halfway there”, by Justine Elias, The Guardian (Friday 21 July 2000)
In fact, using English accents as shorthand for villainy is a way of proving you're not racist!
“Darth Maul speaks the King’s English, and he is the most evil, most awful guy – but the Royals aren’t getting on our case. Are English butlers getting upset about C3PO?”
-- Lucasfilm spokesperson, quoted in “Something to offend everyone”, by Andy Seiler, USA Today (27 June 1999) [sorry, URL link's expired]
When I first heard that someone (not Disney, I forget who) was making a cartoon version of Anastasia, I thought: "Great. The bad guy will be Lenin with a toff English accent. And his snivelling sidekicks will be a talking hammer and sickle". Well, close -- it was Rasputin, with a non-BBC accent, and his sidekick was a talking bat. But my irony-meter had already overloaded, only 30 seconds into watching the video, after realising that the main hit on the soundtrack for this movie about a deposed Romanov princess was a song by Richard Marx.