Aladdin (1992)

film · 1992 animated film directed by John Musker and Ron Clements

Findings (6)

Jasmine cannot choose. A law requires her to marry a prince before her next birthday, and her father selects the husband. Three suitors argue over which of them will have her while she stands outside the room, and she tells them she is not a prize to be won. When Aladdin says she should be free to choose for herself, she registers it as a surprising thing for a man to say. In the final act Jafar takes the palace and she is chained at his feet and made to serve him.

Agrabah is built from things that are not Arab. The palace domes are bulbous and pinched at the base, the profile of Mughal and Russian Orthodox building rather than the hemispherical domes of the historic mosques at Kairouan, Sana'a or Medina. The streets are filled with Indian performance traditions presented as local colour: a fire eater, a man on a bed of nails, a walk over hot coals, a sword swallower, a levitating man, and snake charming. Abu is turned into an elephant, Jasmine keeps a tiger named Raja, the narrator wears an oversized turban of a style worn in South Asia and Afghanistan, and Aladdin wears a fez associated with Turkey and North Africa. The city is a composite of everywhere except the place it claims to be.

Violence is the setting's background texture rather than a plot event. Jafar's henchman reports slitting throats as a throwaway line in his first scene. The thief who enters the Cave of Wonders is crushed and eaten on screen while screaming. Palace guards swing full-length swords through a crowded market to catch a boy who took a loaf, and one shouts that he will take his hands as a trophy. A market seller catches Jasmine giving an apple to a hungry child, forces her wrist onto a block and raises a blade over it on the spot, with no complaint made and nobody called. A passing prince calls starving children filthy brats and raises a whip at them in the street. Jafar puts a dagger into Aladdin's chest and pushes him off a cliff. None of it is treated as remarkable by anyone on screen.

The heroes are drawn and voiced as familiar and American. Aladdin and Jasmine have small, anglicized features and standard American accents. Jafar, the palace guards and the market seller are drawn with heavy beards, large curved noses and exaggerated features, and speak with heavy foreign accents. Sympathy and menace are distributed along that line, so the audience knows who to trust before anyone has acted.

The film presents the setting as a place that confines its women, and undresses them for the audience in the same frames. Jasmine's costume leaves her shoulders, midriff and cleavage bare, more than any other Disney princess of the period. The room Aladdin falls into holds women dressed the same way, faces veiled and the rest not. The genie conjures near-naked dancers as a demonstration of what he can provide. In the Prince Ali parade the men are covered from head to foot and the women are not. When Jafar enslaves her, her captive costume covers the same skin as her royal one. The animation traces the outline of the women's bodies in ordinary walking shots and does not do the same for the men.

Before any character is named or seen, the opening song tells the audience what the setting is. Over the title sequence a lone rider crosses the dunes while the lyric describes the place: "Where they cut off your ear / If they don't like your face / It's barbaric, but hey, it's home". The line is not drawn from any source text; it was written for the film. After protests led by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Disney replaced the first two lines for the 1993 home-video release with a description of the desert landscape. The word barbaric was kept at Disney's insistence, so the revision removed one specific act of violence and left the verdict on the place standing.