He was doing it almost solely for another person.

It was clear that he wasn't doing it for himself. His second, most heroic act was venturing into the Underworld to rescue Meg, risking his life in that ghoulish whirlpool. His first truly heroic act was going up against the Cyclops in Thebes without his incredible strength, because there was a very real chance that he wouldn't make it out of that fight alive. Herc performed many heroic acts in the first and second acts of the film but as his father Zeus pointed out, none of it were acts of a true hero because none of it required sacrifice or any real bravery and, perhaps most importantly, none of it was even wholly selfless.

This demigods whole story revolved around what it means to be a true hero, so of course the main protagonist of Hercules is going to appear near the top of this list. We're interested in which characters performed most heroically given their circumstances, which ones acted with bravery, compassion, humility as well as what or who they saved and why. We're going to go through twenty of Disney's animated human heroes from the Disney renaissance to see which ones acted more heroically than others. Some were more heroic than others, sometimes because their stories allowed for greater acts of heroism and sometimes because the classic heroic traits just weren't a huge part of their character. Those classic films of the Disney renaissance left us with a plethora of heroes to choose from as we grew up but they weren't all perfect role models.

That's the hero's journey in the tiniest of nutshells. These stories often center on one or more characters who have to overcome an obstacle of some sort of epic proportions, oftentimes that means overcoming a personal flaw, usually by way of learning through struggle against a big bad guy. One of the reasons why Disney's classic animated feature films are so timeless is because they're able to recreate or reinvent old tales so that kids can enjoy them without being traumatized (you'll understand if you've ever read the original Grimm' Fairy Tales) and their lessons still shine through.

Disney brave characters