Aladdin Is A Love Story
Why Walt Disney Studios’ latest live-action remake is a trending to be miss
Executives at Disney have recently taken to re-imagining and updating their classic animated hits into live-action spectacles, and producing box-office smash after box-office smash as a result. Such films as The Beauty and the Beast have turned into worldwide phenomena and in turn, made the studio millions. With more highly-anticipated remakes coming down the pipeline, 2019 is shaping up to be a great year for Disney. One of those remakes, Aladdin, recently dropped its first trailer, and it was met with surprising hostility. Disney has always been the king of delivering top-notch theater experiences, but this latest direction taken with Aladdin drew much criticism. It quickly became one of the most down-voted and controversial trailers ever. (As if 2/14, there are 61k likes to 97k dislikes, for comparison, the similarly recent Frozen 2 trailer gathered 466k likes to a mere 25k dislikes)
At New Game+, we see this backlash as a fundamental misunderstanding of what made the original great. There is a big difference between a bedtime story where your father does all the voices, makes up new parts to surprise you, and acts out the villains so you can be the hero, and a bedtime story where your father rushes through the entire thing so he can get back to work. These live-action remakes by Disney are the latter. They are supposed to be vehicles that bring classic stories forward into the 21st century, but instead appear as simple cash-grabs without a soul.
You’ve probably heard that, despite the action billing, “Die Hard” is actually a Christmas movie. Although supported by the spectacle of guns, explosions, and action-star-in-the-making Bruce Willis, at its core, “Die Hard” is just about a man trying to make it back home for the holidays. Similarly, although Disney’s 1992 Aladdin was surrounded by musical numbers, high-flying magic carpets, and an immortal performance from Robin Williams as the Genie, at its heart, it was a love story.
The story of Aladdin is the archetypal tale of a poor boy who wishes to be something greater and a rich girl who has everything she wants but not what she needs. When we first meet Aladdin, he is living paycheck-to-paycheck in the slums of Agrabah. Every night before he goes to bed, he looks upon the sights and sounds coming from the royal palace, of which he has a great view. One day, at the marketplace in which he knows like the back of his hand, he sees the sultan’s daughter, who by chance or destiny has snuck out into the real world for the first time, suffocated by the daily existence of having to please her father and his requests for an arranged marriage. Together, they leave their fears, reservations, and old lives behind, falling in love.
The two lovers are quickly separated however, as Aladdin is forced to retrieve a magical lamp from the highly dangerous Cave of Wonders, and Jasmine is informed that Aladdin has been executed. When Aladdin comes into control of the aforementioned magic lamp, his character has already established that his heart’s desire is Jasmine, and thus, naively following societal custom, that which states a princess must only marry a prince, asks to become a prince. He uses this newfound elevated status to woo Jasmine, but all the while, Jasmine is wise to his antics. She catches subtle signs of Aladdin beneath Prince Ali such as his penchant for picking apples and then rolling them along his arm and his signature pick-up line “Do you trust me?”
As Aladdin’s supporting cast warns him of the treacherous territory he is venturing in, he builds lie upon lie in the pursuit of his goal, instead of staying true to himself. When his courtship is a success, and the marriage of Prince Ali and Jasmine is finally announced, instead of feeling joyful as Jasmine does, he is embarrassed, weighed down by his mountain of deceit. If all Disney movies from that era had a theme, with perhaps Beauty and the Beast’s being “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, and the Lion King’s being “Remember who you are”, then Aladdin’s would be “Tell the truth”. When Aladdin and his lies are exposed, he loses everything he once had, including his genie and most importantly, Jasmine.
This arc of Aladdin’s is something that we as humans all go through in some form or another, as we try our luck with the opposite sex. We try and present ourselves in the best way possible, but more often than not become something entirely different, and hilarity ensues. Because of this, we as an audience can admire and relate to the character of Aladdin on-screen for going after his desires, and all of the messes he ends up in.
The most recent trailer for the upcoming live-action Aladdin does not seem to have this focus. Although it is still simply the first trailer, and the footage fleshing out the characters of Jasmine and Aladdin may still be in the works, a great amount of effort seems to have been put towards surface aesthetic such as having “culturally appropriate” costumes or having the Genie appear as “fresh” as possible. And while the film looks to have scored on both accounts, the soul of the original movie is missing from the trailer. The Genie is supposed to be a one-dimensional character for most of the movie and his infinite cosmic powers are unrelatable to an audience for obvious reasons. The film set looks amazing and is authentic, but, as the narrator says at the very beginning of the 1992 classic, “Like so many things, it is not what is outside, but what is inside, that counts.”
I, like Aladdin, did not own many things growing up, but our family did have a VHS player and Aladdin was one of my favorites. In fact, I highly recommend watching the straight-to-VHS sequels; the third movie, Aladdin and the King of Thieves, is “criminally” underrated. And as a fan of the series and its characters almost since its inception, I fear to be disappointed once more that a live-action remake does not achieve its potential. The remake of Beauty and the Beast stayed true to the original, but it didn’t raise the bar by any means and I thought it an overall dud. With the upcoming Aladdin, I cannot help but childishly look forward to this must-see film, but maintain low expectations. The “Disney Renaissance” and the films that were produced as a result were truly special, put perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps, it was an age of magic.
