Every now and then, I write posts about movies.
I don't watch a ton of movies - I tend to have very narrow and difficult-to-define preferences when it comes to entertainment. I hate "wacky misunderstandings", but I love verbal non sequiturs. I love some of the current pop/rock musicals like Heathers and Legally Blonde, but I hate when the music seems clumsily written (lookin' at you, Fame) or is unnecessarily complicated as a means to show off how "deep" the composer is (lookin' at you, Sondheim.) I love comedy that lives in good snappy dialogue rather than relying on funny visuals and I HATE romcoms. Unless it's something that stays light and unserious like Family Guy or Monty Python, if a character behaves in a way I would not tolerate and this behavior isn't checked by other characters, or makes a choice I think is stupid beyond understanding, I can't stomach it. That goes double for characters who mistreat others and it's forgiven because of sympathy or social convention - I can't watch the exploits of Sheldon Cooper or Emily Gilmore without yelling at everyone else to just drop these self-absorbed buttholes out of your lives. Characters like that fill me with palpable rage and I am not entertained by that state of being.
Having said all of that...I'm a pretty reliable Disney fangirl when it comes to their movies up until about 1998 or so. The Disney Renaissance began when I was three and I am well aware that Disney is fully exploiting my age group's spending power with its remakes. Listen: Walt was no dummy when he decided to use centuries-old sources, like fairy tales, folk tales and Shakespeare, as the basis for his films. Those stories lasted because they're good - let's don't fix what isn't broken. The source material for Aladdin comes from a later edition of Arabian Nights (One Thousand and One Nights in Arabic) - it wasn't in the first version, but was added later by European editors based on a story by Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab1. There are published translations on the market now that make various attempts to both honor the original language and make the stories comprehensible to English speakers unfamiliar with Middle Eastern culture, but the stories themselves and several of their early English translations are in the public domain and can be freely sought and read online.
Point Is! I'm probably going to like Disney stuff from that era, either in its 90s or remake form, because the storytelling is solid. Yesterday, I saw the live-action remake of Aladdin and I have thoughts...
***THERE ARE FINNA BE SPOILERS. If you're familiar with the 1992 Aladdin, that goes double for you - there are differences! And I'm going to spoil them!***
I've missed a few of the Disney live-action remakes, largely the ones that are pre-Disney Renaissance (which is to say, pre-1989). Cinderella, Pete's Dragon and The Jungle Book all got revamped, but I feel like I didn't see much promo for them and, although I like the originals, none is my first choice for a rewatch.
But then they went after Beauty and the Beast. Which I completely adored and which, for me, set the standard when it came to seeing Aladdin. With Beauty and the Beast, they took everything about the animated version and cranked it up to 11. Belle's intellect and pluck, Maurice's mechanical giftedness, Gaston's chauvinism, more ornate settings, more detailed costuming, a bigger and thicker orchestration... For us late 80s/early 90s aspiring Disney princesses, it was a rosé fever dream, a box of chocolates beside a bubble bath, a dance around your living room with your tiny feet shoved into the toes of Mom's high heels. And of course, Disney took the opportunity to course-correct on a few things. The origin of the servants and their lost connection to the village was explained more clearly, the Belle/Beast relationship was distilled in an attempt to make it less illogical (however unsuccessfully), and of course there was that one moment when a dude danced with another dude and people who had no problem with a girl falling in love with someone who literally imprisoned her were convinced that the world would end and I WONDER IF THOSE THINGS ARE RELATED IN ANY WAY...
...sorry, another topic for another time. So going into Aladdin, I was curious about whether they would use a similar approach. Where for Beauty I was excited about every element, with Aladdin I was mostly excited about the music. I tend to love everything Alan Menken does (which, incidentally, includes the scores for Beauty, Aladdin and Hunchback, among many fantastic others) and I was ready to (1) sing along and (2) be delightfully surprised when my singing along didn't line up because lyrics or music were updated. I was ready to see a retread of the original plot with more detail, more magic, more volume.
I was right and wrong and I loved it.
About 90% of the plot is faithful to the 1992 version. However, in addition to small updates, like Iago speaking in short phrases like a real bird rather than carrying on conversations (no recreation of the Gilbert Gottfried performance) or the cutting-out of Jasmine's introduction and escape (she and Aladdin are introduced in medias res at the end of "Arabian Nights"), there's one major difference that clearly says "This is a 2019 Reboot!" and it's Jasmine.
She's still the princess and she's still under pressure to get married. However, where in the 1992 version she had to be married to a prince by a certain age and she resisted out of wanting to marry for love, in the 2019 version she has to marry a prince because only a royal male can be Sultan and her father is getting on in years. She resists because she believes she is more qualified to rule her own people than some rando from another country. There's a tangentially related subplot involving Jafar's plans to invade a neighboring country and using fearmongering to convince the Sultan to do so COUGH COUGH WAT. This beefing up of Jasmine's character and motives is reflected both in her dialogue, which paints her as witty, intelligent and compassionate, and in her music - she gets her own song called "Speechless" which is reprised a few times. I will admit that, although I like "Speechless," I'm not sure it's on the same level as the other songs. This is probably because I'm a nostalgia addict and am resisting the change and also because this was one of a few new tunes using Broadway lyricists du jour Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. They ok, but they ain't Howard Ashman or Tim Rice.
Since we're on music! The delightful thing about the new Aladdin score and soundtrack is that, for me, it is just the right amount of new. Like Beauty, the original instrumentation and motives are still present; if you're a megafan of the original and hear songs like "One Jump Ahead" or "Friend Like Me" from the new one in isolation, you will recognize them before the actors begin singing. Unlike Beauty, there are new layers added musically. Continuing in the vein of correcting past insensitive content, the new Aladdin adds to the original orchestration several Middle Eastern instruments and rhythmic figures that are more authentic to the setting. And of course, there's a thread of hip-hop percussion throughout, because Will Smith. It's essentially like going from just deep-fried turkey, which is delicious on its own, to having that deep-fried turkey in a sandwich with all the trimmings you like. I used to wear out "Prince Ali" because I loved every element - the tempo was fun and danceable, the melody was catchy, the harmony and chord progressions were smooth and engaging, and the instrumentation was thrilling. The new "Prince Ali" still has all of those things, down to the individual string and brass motives that punctuated the vocals, but a thicker percussion section, a dash of electronic manipulation and a more robust ensemble sound make it even better.
So I liked almost all of what I heard. Similarly, I liked almost all of what I saw. Look, I like CGI as much as the next person, and for a character like Genie, we are willing to suspend our analytical/realistic eye in the name of magic...but Abu bothered me. Why throw out all of Iago's original lines in the service of giving him a few pithy sentences as a real bird, but turn the dialogue-free Abu into a CGI caricature? Don't tell me it's so we can see him "emote" - the live, trained spider monkey for Ace Ventura did just fine, thank you very much. Don't tell me it's for Frank Welker's benefit - he could just as easily voice over a live monkey. And definitely don't tell me that it's to show off Disney's CGI prowess - the resurrection of Peter Cushing for Rogue One was for sure a head-tilter, but it was a far sight more believable than Abu. He looked good if we're looking at the grand scheme of everything ever animated on a computer, but he did not look 2019-major-production good.
I also took issue with Will Smith's singing. Don't get me wrong - he can match pitch and either he or his musical director had the good sense to switch him to rapping or urbane sprechstimme when the notes fell outside his range, but next to Jasmine and Aladdin's big voices, he was clearly the weak link. It is worth noting that Hot Jafar was not given his "Prince Ali" reprise, which gave me a tiny sad because it's one of my favorite songs from the original. I get wanting a more authentic Jafar and not wanting to put Jonathan Freeman in JafarFace again (he voiced the 1992 film *and* played him in the Broadway adaptation with some, um, interesting makeup choices), but we really couldn't find a Jafar who was Middle Eastern, hot and vocally talented? I bet he exists. I bet lots of hes exist.
So Will might not be much of a singer, but he is a great actor and he exemplified something that I think is pretty cool about the Aladdin property as rendered by Disney: the malleability of the Genie character. "Duh," I hear you say, "a character that can do actual magic is pretty easy to change." But I think it's deeper than that. You can see many varied performances of this character and it is still clearly the Disney Genie. Part of that comes from Robin Williams' original performance - Williams was a master of impersonation and this gave the original Genie a broadness of personality. They literally animated multiple Genies onscreen to keep up with Williams' frenetic rate of change, meaning that just about any take on the Genie is faithful to at least one of his iterations. The other part of this, I think, manifests as expressions of respect for Williams' performance by not copying it directly (in the case of Broadway, as he was still alive when it opened) and by paying light homage while still leaving the core of Williams' Genie to the man himself (in the case of the 2019 film, released 5 years after his untimely death.) Broadway Genie, James Monroe Iglehart, has a more jazz/scat approach to the Genie than his other portrayers because he excels at that style - it's Iglehart at his jauntiest, which is what you need for the Genie. Will Smith's Genie is effervescently cool and sardonic. All three have a lot of the same lines and sing the same songs, but each approaches it with his own strengths. Iglehart and Smith tend to divide speaking and singing similarly to Williams in the musical portions and have similar asides in pieces like "Prince Ali", but the specific pop culture references Williams used, his inflections, his accents...are all respectfully and reverently left alone as Iglehart and Smith explore their own versions of Genie. In this way, I think Genie is a lot like Leading Player from Pippin. Ben Vereen played it so dynamically that it made space for literally anyone, any race, any gender to take up the mantle and be themselves while still clearly being Leading Player. Conversely, although a character like Jasmine can be deepened and broadened as she was for this movie, certain elements are always going to be there. She will always be youthful, Middle Eastern, conventionally attractive, a soprano...
I guess, in an infantile way, that's been a big draw for me with Aladdin. Only some girls can be Disney Princesses...but anybody can be a Genie.
1 Wikipedia articles for Arabian Nights and Aladdin
