Not A Prize To Be Won: Princess Jasmine and the 2019 “Aladdin”
(Spoilers below)
I don’t remember the first time I saw Disney’s 1992 Aladdin. Sometime during my childhood, I watched it along with several other Disney movies and, despite the Orientalist filter I now recognize, it remains close to my heart. The music is sweeping, the animation is vibrant, the Genie is hilarious — and then there’s Jasmine.
Mr Titular Character can step aside. For all his considerable rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold charm, Aladdin was not the draw. Jasmine was. She was cool. She sneaked out of the palace. She had a pet tiger. She sicced said tiger on a list of suitors. She looked somewhat like me, with brown skin and black hair and South Asian/Middle Eastern features and clothes. For thousands of little girls growing up in the West, she was their representation in media, a Disney princess who looked like them.
I grew up mostly in India, surrounded by movie posters of Indian women, so representation wasn’t a big deal for me when it came to Jasmine. But she was an animated character I saw myself in, and she lived in a world of minarets, bazaars, and magic carpets, something like a fantasy version of my hometown Hyderabad, a magic world that felt familiar. This summer’s live-action remake got me thinking again about Jasmine.
Along with Mulan, Jasmine is my favourite Disney princess. Not Belle, whose bookish ways mirror mine; not Rapunzel, the charming star of a movie I enjoyed more than the much-hyped Frozen; not sister duo Elsa and Anna, idols of millions of children, and Disney princesses in all but marketing.
Disney-princess wise, my top two are a bit of a weird pick. They made their debuts around the same time as Belle in the 90s, during what animation buffs call the Disney Renaissance. It was a time when Disney’s movies became more successful and their princesses more dynamic. Rather than the “someday my prince will come” dreams of Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora, the five Renaissance princesses — Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, and Mulan — stumbled into their romances in pursuit of other dreams. This continued with the next two princesses, Tiana and Rapunzel, and partly with Anna.
However, the importance of a romantic interest to the plot has apparently been thrown aside, with Elsa and the two most recent official princesses, Merida and Moana, not having any. This new phase of princesses is, frankly, exciting. It’s nice to see that one of the most powerful media influences on young children is broadening the themes they focus on and downplaying romance (which is weirdly ubiquitous in children’s media).
But the Renaissance girls are important role models too.
These — especially Jasmine — are princesses who are locked within metaphorical towers of expectations in ways some of the newer princesses are not. They are expected to fit into very specific roles dictated by gender with little choice or routes out. Mulan’s solo about finding herself comes immediately after she grandly screws up a meeting with the matchmaker; as she leaves, she walks past a dozen girls dressed and made up like her waiting to meet the matchmaker, because that is what is expected of them. Jasmine has no such solo, but it’s apparent that her situation is stricter and enforced legally when, in her introductory scene, her father explains the law about her having to be married by 16.
And yet.
Trapped within these oppressive structures, these princesses nevertheless find agency. They find ways to rebel. Mulan dresses up as a man and takes her father’s place in the army, thus escaping her initial predicament (and getting herself into a new one, but it works out for her and, more importantly, is what she wants). Jasmine, on the other hand, does not find her way out till the very end of the movie. At this point, a plot hole emerges when the Sultan tweaks the law so Jasmine is allowed to marry whomever she wants. This is a strange twist Disney seems to have introduced just to write themselves out of a corner — why, if the Sultan was capable of unilaterally changing the law all along, has Jasmine been subjected to it through the whole movie? Perhaps it can be argued that it suited Jafar’s interests to keep the princess subjugated, and so his magic influence over the Sultan prevented the change from being made. Even with that argument, once the Sultan rewrites the law, the concession made is a poor one — an allowance for the princess to choose her groom on her own, but not when or whether at all she gets married. It is only a victory because we have seen Aladdin and Jasmine fall in love. Jasmine is still forced to navigate a situation where the odds are stacked against her.
Despite this, she uses every opportunity she has to display her agency. She fights back against multiple oppressive royal machinations — the law forcing her to get married, her effective imprisonment in the palace, the proposed beheading of a petty thief who is stealing to survive. She also, unlike the princesses before her, is actively involved in the climactic fight. However, her standout defiant moment is when Prince Ali makes his grand entrance and Jasmine interrupts his conversation with the Sultan and Jafar to take them all down for their patronizing attitudes. “How dare you. All of you,” she says, glaring at the sheepish men in the throne room, “standing around deciding my future? I am not a prize to be won.”
Elsa might’ve ice-attacked the lot of them. Rapunzel might’ve launched into battle with a frying pan, Mulan with a sword, Merida with a bow. Those are not options available to Jasmine, cloistered all her life and devoid of weapons or magic. What makes her heroic is not that she shatters the cage she is in but that she fights however she can, given her restraints.
The 2019 live-action Aladdin understands this, and goes a long way towards fixing some of the injustices the animated narrative inflicted on Jasmine. The oppressive law from the original is scrapped. Jasmine is pushed towards suitors so the Sultan can retire and not worry about succession, and Jasmine is fighting to be recognized as the capable heir to the throne. She rejects her suitors not out of a desire to hold out for true love but because she recognizes that she will be a far better ruler of Agrabah than any one of the parade of princes seeking her hand, so why bother marrying someone she neither respects nor loves? The movie gives her a story arc that is not about supporting Aladdin — thereby passing the Mako Mori test* — and when she becomes Sultan at the end of the movie, it is because she has proven herself a diplomatic and courageous leader. She’s also more important in the climax, convincing the head guard to let them go, stealing the lamp off Jafar’s belt, and steering the magic carpet.
Most symbolically, Jasmine gets her own song. It’s a showstopper of a solo called ‘Speechless’, delivered just before the climax, where she sings defiantly, “I won’t be silenced, you can’t keep me quiet….all I know is I won’t be speechless.” The song is an exhilarating piece that easily outshines the sluggish remixes on the rest of the soundtrack and cements Jasmine as a hero.
This year’s version has its flaws. The music is average (except for ‘Speechless’, original to the 2019 film), the story remains somewhat culturally problematic, and the script does not reach the heights of giddy humour offered by the killer combination of Robin Williams’ Genie and animated visual gags. What it does get right is this: the chemistry between its leads Naomi Scott and Mena Massoud; and the justice done to Jasmine’s character and story. It gives her a more solid dream to chase, political ambitions, and a solo worthy of the greatest Disney protagonists.
What Naomi Scott and the writers of the 2019 Aladdin have done is raise Jasmine far above the prize she had never been, and make her the hero she always was.
*There are several litmus tests to analyze female representation in media, the most well-known of which is the Bechdel test. The Mako Mori test focuses on character development and asks if a movie has a female character with a story arc of her own that is not about supporting a male character’s arc — essentially, if there is a female character who has a life beyond her interactions with male characters.
