*** (out of ****)
Featuring the voices of Robin Williams, Scott Weinger, Jonathan Freeman, Linda Larkin, Frank Welker, Gilbert Gottfried, and Douglas Seale
Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker & written by no less than 20 persons, including Roger Allers and Ron Clements
1992
90 min G
What a fun movie. I say that now because I’m about to say a few things that disparage “Aladdin.” I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. So I’ll say it again: what a fun movie.
There’s a fine line between tapping icons and myths and just being cliché. Each Disney “classic” of the 1990s finds a new way to straddle that line. Each time Disney taps one of our elemental desires—to “just be yourself” for instance—I can never quite tell if this is a studied adoption of a basic longing or just a room full of writer’s scraping the bottom of the narrative barrel. But Disney makes movies mostly for kids; if you’ve been watching movies for a decade or four than you don’t need to be told to “just be yourself” quite so often as, apparently, eight-year-olds need to. I guess.
“Aladdin” is firmly in that vein. I was about to say “Aladdin” is firmly in that “tradition,” but then I might be playing along with Disney’s marketing strategy of claiming that every movie of theirs that breaks even is a “classic” or a “masterpiece.” In it, young people and their various animal sidekicks learn to be themselves, learn to make choices, fall in love, face the supernatural, and assert themselves with dignity before adult authority figures. “Aladdin” is a story enormously familiar to everyone out of grade school, shaken up and put in an all-new setting with color, wit, and style. It is also remarkably efficient and fast paced; the ink is barely dry on the drawings for one setting before we’re flying off to the next. Because we know what’s going to happen we don’t want to spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for things to unfold. The all-new setting is a Persia/Middle Eastern/Arabian Nights conglomerate, with magic carpets, scimitars, viziers, onion domes, harem girls, and harmonic minor keys. Oh yes, and the matter of a lamp and three wishes…
By the time the skid-row thief Aladdin (voiced by Scott Weinger) uncovers the magic lamp where our genie lives, he has already escaped capture by the palace guards, been locked in a dungeon, fallen in love with the princess (Linda Larkin), and been tricked into a demonic cave by the vizier Jafar (Jonathan Freeman), the twisted and manipulative advisor to the sultan (Douglas Seale). This is breathless moviemaking. Aladdin’s not a very good thief, what with his tendency to give what he steals to sad-eyed and needy children. With the genie’s aid, Aladdin, his monkey sidekick, and his magic carpet (appropriately named Carpet) must set right what has been made wrong. At first, he tries to disguise himself as a prince in order to win the princess’s hand. She won’t have it. He has to—you guessed it—learn to be himself. Highpoints of the film include a chase through a collapsing tunnel and a magical climax in which all the powers of sorcerery take on the colors of a fire in the desert. Next to the Genie, the most memorable character is the vizier Jafar, who is appropriately loathsome and glowering. Everyone has an animal sidekick, if for no other reason then it would be awkward to show all these characters talking to themselves.
We also have “Aladdin” to thank for the totally anachronistic pop-culture quoting motormouths that seem to be required in every big budget animated film nowadays. In this particular film he is the genie voiced by Robin Williams. Everyone in “Shrek”—a movie populated entirely by TV addicts and sitcom characters dressed up to look medieval—is his descendent. If you like Williams running off at the mouth and screaming like a mile-a-minute maniac, then you’ll have a blast with “Aladdin.” I like Williams doing his Williams-schtick in small doses. In the course of the movie, his genie transforms into a nightclub entertainer, a Scotsman, a Scots dog, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Señor Wences, Ed Sullivan, a slot machine, Groucho Marx, a boxing trainer, a fireworks rocket, a French maître d’, a dragon, a certificate, a pair of lips, Robert De Niro, a flight attendant, Carol Channing, a sheep, a hammock, Pinocchio, a Frenchman in a beret and striped shirt, a chef, Julius Caesar, Arsenio Hall, a gay tailor, a game-show host, a drum major, Walter Brennan, TV parade hosts, a tiger, a goat, Ethel Merman, Rodney Dangerfield, Jack Nicholson, a talking lampshade, a submarine, a one-man band, a script prompter, a ventriloquist, a “Fantasia”-like devil, William F. Buckley, cheerleaders, a baseball pitcher, a tourist with a Goofy hat, and the moon. (Thank you, Internet Movie Database.) Very few of these incarnations have anything to do with Arabia in the days of Scherezade. But “Aladdin” is not concerned with historical accuracy and neither am I. Williams’ Blue Genie is only slightly more anachronistic than all the other characters, who speak with modern accents and colloquialisms. The question is, is Williams funny? After 12 years of imitators, to the point where the “Rugrats” are quoting “The Godfather?” Ehh…let’s just say I’m not howling for Williams to get an Oscar nomination for his voicework, the way many of the movie’s serious enthusiasts were.
Page two of "Aladdin" (1992). Back to home.