Aladdin Blu-ray Review
When you wish upon a lamp. . .
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, May 13, 2013
Disney's own corporate magic lamp had grown a bit tarnished over the years. The vaunted Mouse House helped to
invent the long form animated film and then created one undisputed masterpiece after another, films so legendary they
still resonate down the halls of film history:
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
Pinocchio,
Bambi and several other classics continue to delight children of all ages to this day. But there's
little denying that the studio lost at least a little of its mojo during the 1950s, despite still churning out a number of high
profile and highly regarded entries like
Lady and the Tramp, a perhaps incremental decline that became much more precipitous in the 1960s,
1970s and early 1980s, when even longtime Disney fans lamented the kind of cookie cutter animation style and less
than inspired storytelling that many of Disney's animated efforts exhibited. Fortunes started reversing themselves with
the release
The Little Mermaid
in 1989, quickly followed by Disney's huge triumph
Beauty and the Beast, the first animated feature to ever snare an Academy
Award nomination for Best Picture. (As much as I personally love
The Rescuers Down Under, which was released
in between
The Little Mermaid and
Beauty and the Beast, for whatever reason it doesn't seem to be
held in the same esteem as its two neighboring siblings.) Whatever mojo may have been lost in the decades between
the 1940s and the 1990s was obviously back in full swing by the time
Aladdin came along in 1992. The film was
once again a gigantic hit for Disney, becoming the highest grossing movie of the year, and ultimately garnering several
Oscar nominations as well as two statuettes for its score and its biggest hit song "A Whole New World". The film is a
raucous entertainment, slyly subversive and self-referential due to voice actor Robin Williams' often manic contributions,
but it also is a near perfect adventure and romance, one that appeals just about equally to males and females, the sort
of broad demographic allure that Disney would sometimes struggle with in later animated offerings that seemed to be
geared either mostly toward boys
or girls.
While
Beauty and the Beast may have been the critical darling of this particular era of Disney animated fare,
Aladdin is quite appropriately more like the scrappy little brother who may have hyperactivity problems, not to
mention attention deficit disorder, but who is undeniably lovable despite—or perhaps even because of—those
"problems".
Once the perhaps risky decision to cast Robin Williams as the Genie (as well as the Narrator) was made, the
handwriting
was on the wall for the film's ultimate
tenor, for Williams' anarchistic approach to free association as he did his voice work created both opportunities and
issues
for the animators. As the commentary included on this Blu-ray makes clear, Williams was given free rein at many
moments
throughout his days in the recording studio, and the result is ungainly, undisciplined—and just flat out hilarious. There
has
probably never been another Disney film with this air of the unexpected, and it infuses all of
Aladdin with a very
contemporary breath of fresh air, something that had been missing for years (some might argue decades) from Disney
animated fare and which even
Beauty and the Beast never really had, either, despite its many pleasures.
Aladdin cribs elements from many different versions of the age old stories, including a dash of
A Thousand
and One Nights and the many versions of
The Thief of Bagdad (
when are we going to see the gorgeous Korda version on Blu-
ray?). Aladdin is a street kid who pals around with his pet monkey Abu, a simian who aids Aladdin in his small scale
crime spree of stealing food. Meanwhile, Princess Jasmine, who has spent her entire life tucked behind the imposing
palace walls, wants to see what the real world is like, and escapes the protective glare of her father, the Sultan,
venturing out into the tumultuous marketplace only to instantly get in trouble. Aladdin rescues her, of course, and true
love would seem to be preordained, except that Jasmine is required to marry a Prince, and the Sultan has already
picked out a suitable husband for her, with a marriage planned for a mere 72 hours in the future. Playing out against
this star-crossed love scenario are the machinations of Jafar, the Sultan's Grand Vizier who is trying to get his hands on
a magic lamp with contains a Genie. Jafar has his own animal sidekick, an imperious little parrot named Iago. Through
a little bit of magic, Jafar discovers that only Aladdin has the goods to be able to enter the Cave of Wonders where the
lamp is stored, and a plot is hatched.
Considering how many writers contributed to this troubled project (lyricist Howard Ashman died just as the film was
getting off the ground, just one of many stumbling blocks that were encountered) and how many differed story
elements are woven together in the film (as briefly outlined above),
Aladdin remains one of the most effortlessly
entertaining and surprisingly cohesive entries in the Disney animated canon. Bolstered by incredible voice work, not
just from Williams but the likes of Jonathan Freeman (Jafar) and even Gilbert Gottfried (Iago), the film is easily one of
the funniest entries in Disney's long and storied history. The film is also graced with a wonderfully integrated song
score (Tim Rice picked up the pieces from the deceased Ashman and contributed some incredibly effective pieces,
including the Oscar winning "A Whole New World"). Composer Alan Menken continued the winning ways he had already
established with
Beauty and the Beast, contributing a wonderfully melodic and evocative score that easily
bridged pop, theater and Middle Eastern styles.
Aladdin also is one of Disney's most impressive feats of
animation from this era, with skillful (if relatively minimal) use of the then nascent CGI technology nicely melded with a
traditional 2D hand drawn approach. Character designs are gorgeous, and the backgrounds are simply lustrous, with
one of the most distinctive palettes from this era of Disney film.
