Coming off the towering artistic achievement of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin took the Disney Renaissance into the realm of Arabian Nights, marrying lavish Middle Eastern aesthetics to a story filled with adventure, magic, romance, and a surprising amount more direct humor than most of Disney's fantasy pieces.
Aladdin is a serviceable hero, though a rather bland one: his only real motivation and struggle involves how to end up with Jasmine. Jasmine herself is a bit more compelling: she's trapped by a sheltered existence in a society that demands that she play the role of a princess and get married, when she desires a more meaningful life (and of course we get the typical love-at-first-sight Disney romance we've seen over and over by this point). Jafar manages to earn himself a place in the pantheon of Disney villains through his power-hungry plotting and sleazy demeanor (courtesy of voice actor Jonathan Freeman), while his power-escalation during the climax lends it quite an epic feel. The Sultan, on the other hand, is a completely ineffectual doddering fool, effortlessly dominated by Jafar and harping on about a marriage law that, as a monarch, he surely has the power to get rid of (which he does at the end, making one wonder why he didn't do so in the first place).
The true standout of the film though, is, of course, Robin Williams as the Genie. Prior to his entrance, the film is a straightforward Arabian adventure film revolving around a romance; once he appears, he immediately steals the entire film, firing off sight-gags, pop-culture jokes and references to other Disney films with riveting abandon. The filmmakers gave Williams free reign to ad-lib during the recording sessions, with the animators translating his signature brand of manic unrestraint to the screen. The result is a character that feels one hundred percent like a Robin Williams performance, one of the few times an animated character has been made to so perfectly embody the qualities of their performer, and possibly one of the greatest voice acting jobs of all time. If there's anything negative to be said about Williams as the Genie, it's that it opened the door for a long succession of animated films that cast A-list actors more for their name than for their suitability to the role (witness half of Dreamworks' animated output).
While not quite reaching the level of elegant artistry achieved by its immediate predecessor and successor, Aladdin still manages to be a film of quality, blending disparate elements of adventure, romance, and humor into a unified package that stands as a testament to the skill of the animators, the voice cast, and especially to the never-to-be-replicated talents of Robin Williams.
No comments:
Post a Comment