So in what world would the live-action Aladdin remake, out this Friday, ever match up to what only a cartoon could accomplish?
ALADDIN OLD MOVIE MOVIE
Nothing kills a kids movie quite like getting bored enough to ask adult questions. Best of all, he keeps the movie moving so fast that you don’t have time to stop, take a beat, and wonder if what’s going on makes any sense. And it works - Genie is one of the better Disney sidekicks: He’s warm and funny and kinetic, a giant blue freak who can morph into a slot machine or Jack Nicholson or a zombie or a sheep or Arsenio Hall.
The original Genie was famously written for Robin Williams, and he did so much improv in the voice recordings that they had to rebuild parts of the script around him. Genie was the only character that lightened a movie that was mostly blandly romantic or kind of terrifying. I’d rewind to a few key parts in the original Aladdin when I was a kid - Genie’s frenzied introduction, Genie singing Aladdin into the palace, Genie finally being set free. Aladdin was a vehicle for Robin Williams’ manic energy. Sure, it pretends to be a story about a street rat winning over a princess, or about a princess trying to gain some autonomy, or about a bad guy yearning for ultimate power. How many Disney movies about brown people was I going to get when I was a kid? Not many, so I learned to love what I had.īut even with all the representation afforded to me by these fictional brown people, there’s no denying that Aladdin is the genie’s movie.
When adults asked me what my favorite movie was, I told them Aladdin, not necessarily because it was true - that honor went to Sleeping Beauty because I liked the way Maleficent said “Why so melancholy?” to some idiot white guy she captured - but because it seemed apt. The original animated Aladdin came out just a year after I was born, but I wore through the VHS for years afterward.
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