Everyone has their Disney movie, and for me that was always Aladdin. For any one of a hundred reasons, Aladdin was the one that resonated the most, that I rewatched the most, the one that I wanted to live and luxuriate in until the clamshell VHS was worn down to melted plastic.
The new Signature Edition Blu-ray for Aladdin is the best the film has ever looked, a heart-stoppingly gorgeous transfer that accentuates the color and design of the city of Agrabah and its mystical inhabitants to such depth that you feel as if the carpet might swoop off the screen and carry you off with it.
Released to coincide with the home media drop of this year’s live action remake, (which I also enjoyed) this disc serves as a stark reminder of what a vital, captivating medium hand-drawn animation remains, and just how confident and bold the Disney Renaissance films could be. While some elements of Aladdin don’t hold up to either adult scrutiny or the cultural evolution since 1992, the film still casts a spell that is hard to deny.
I don’t need to run through the plot, do I? It’s Aladdin. The plot of the movie is Aladdin. You get it. Street rat, magic cave, magic lamp, shenanigans. Whole new worlds, friends like me, the works.
Aladdin’s storyline has always been among the weakest of the Disney films of that era, and Aladdin one of the flatter protagonists offered up. It doesn’t help that he’s accompanied by three different sidekicks of varying degrees of magical ability to bail him out of danger 90% of the time. That goes for the villainous Jafar and the lovely Princess Jasmine as well. They’re more personality placeholders with terrific designs than fully realized characters, even by the broad standards of children’s animation.
But directors Ron Clements and John Musker (white-hot after revitalizing the faltering Disney empire with The Little Mermaid, and who would go on to direct Hercules, Treasure Planet, The Princess and the Frog, and Moana) seem aware that the story never musters past functionality and instead hit their narrative beats with enough efficiency that it affords them the ability to invest their time and energy into lively jokes and set-pieces. Even before Robin Williams shows up as the Genie, which isn’t until the film is almost half over, Aladdin is pitched as a cheerfully anarchic comedy of a kind that Disney had never really tried before and wouldn’t again until Clements and Musker’s Hercules (and the studio wouldn’t get it right [sorry, Hercules] again until The Emperor’s New Groove). Aladdin happily indulges in every gag it can think of, maintaining juuuuuuuust enough of an emotional through-line to keep from feeling completely weightless.
Weightlessness is reserved for when the magic carpet lifts off into flight. These scenes are every bit as lovely as they were in 1992, and the Blu-ray transfer renders the images so vividly that it feels like you’re watching a brand-new film. Listen, I know when it comes to feature animation the war has been lost and we live in a computer animated world (even as hand-drawn continues to thrive on TV) but Jesus Christ did watching this version remind me of how incomparably lush and compelling this flavor of animation can be. While the early attempts at incorporating CGI stand out like a sore thumb, (the Cave of Wonders’ head and collapsing interior look like they’ve escaped from Tron) Aladdin’s animated world is wildly alive, and the fluidity of hand-drawn allows for expressive, elastic characters that only serve to heighten both the humor and heartbreak.
No one is better served by this than Robin Williams. It’s old hat by now to point out what a singular achievement the Genie is, realized by Williams’ iconic vocal performance and the sterling animation headed up by Eric Goldberg. We all wept over the “Genie, you’re free!” screenshots after his passing, thank you very much. Williams’ work literally changed the very nature of animated films, as Disney and its rivals all realized you could, wow, cast celebrities instead of trained voice actors and goose a couple extra million out of the box office. But watching it again for the first time in years, it really is the single best fusion of performer and animated alter ego ever. The Genie embodies the energy, the anarchy, the surprising warmth, all the things that made Williams so incredibly special on stage and screen. Even as Williams’ pop culture references grow more and more dated (I’m honestly not even sure who he’s mimicking half the time) the spirit and magic of his work hasn’t faded at all.
Other aspects of the movie…not so much.
Look, I don’t want to harp on this element because it’s been litigated and debated a million different times, including during the film’s original release. But it bears mentioning that the use of caricature and stereotype within the world of Aladdin has only grown more glaring with time. That Aladdin and Jasmine are essentially (somewhat) tanned white people surrounded by darker-toned background players, that the design of Jafar and the palace guards lean hard on stereotypical features that the more heroic characters conspicuously lack, it all adds up. There’s nothing to be done about this as it exists in Aladdin except to take comfort that for the likes of Moana, it feels like Musker and Clements learned the proper lessons and Disney’s use of people of color and the cultural touchstones they cherry-pick to turn into blockbuster movies has evolved appreciably. It’ll never be fixed because Disney is an evil corporation buying up the world and imperialism is one motherfucker to unwind, but all the same there’s something almost weirdly reassuring at just how backwards Aladdin feels at times. It’s a nice reminder that things have changed, and culture has in fact grown and improved in many ways even as there are still unfathomably huge strides to make.
Everyone involved in this Blu-ray seems fully aware of the special place in the canon that Aladdin occupies. As I’ve said, the actual picture and sound on the film is next-level gorgeous, easily the best the film has ever looked. The disc also features numerous extras, including a Sing-along mode and features that detail the process of carving what would be Aladdin out of improv, masses of story documents, and a dozen different influential creative voices.
But that’s the magic of the Renaissance films, and of animated films in general (and films in general): Somehow all these disparate voices and clashing personalities managed to wrangle a movie out of the madness. That any movie is good seems like nothing short of a miracle, and that some are as exceptional and timeless as Aladdin is an entirely different kind of magic.
