Differently Ever After
It might come as a shock, but this is the first time I’ve ever fully seen Disney’s animation of Aladdin, due to the fact that I have had a vendetta on Jasmine/Aladdin for as long as I can remember. This is because I was always compared to Jasmine starting from my all-white Christian kindergarten class (their parents included…). Since I was so young, I should’ve taken this as a compliment — hell, I was being directly compared to a Disney princess! But I did not take it this way. Instead, it only further emphasized for me how I was so different from everyone else in my class because of my brown skin, which is the only reason I was being compared to Jasmine. I shouldn’t have been so hyperaware of the color of my skin at such a young age, and even though these rather harmless comments like those came from innocent kids pointing out something that seemed so different and obvious to them, it made me really uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong — people loved Aladdin as they did any other princess movie, but I just always had a negative association with it that never really changed.
It seems important to clarify that I am not Arab or Middle Eastern, I am of Indian heritage, but I was born in New York (neither of my parents were born in India either) and my family never really participated in Hindu practices…we are American. But because of my physical similarities, my American identity wasn’t enough for unknowing Kindergarteners to disassociate me with Jasmine…which is understandable to me now. But I didn’t want to be Jasmine, the princess so culturally and visibly different from all the others. I wanted to be a “normal” princess like Cinderella or Snow White. So I never dressed up as Jasmine and I never watched the animation — since others couldn’t disassociate me with Jasmine, I did everything I could to dissociate with it.
Thus, watching Aladdin a few days ago was a very interesting experience for me. It was a fun watch and visually stunning, but just so different from every other Disney princess movie I’ve watched so far. Aladdin was in fact a revolutionary change for Disney, and it first came as a very positive film for those in middle eastern cultures because they finally had a somewhat positive and glorified representation in cinema. But the movie, even at its release in 1992, is still known for its underlying appropriation of Arab culture and for perpetuating orientalist views. Disney seemed to so obviously do everything they could to differentiate it from its western culture precedents, from costumes to setting to animals, etc. For example, where as usually the animals used in other princess movies are birds, deer, and mice, Aladdin had animals deemed “exotic” that have never before been seen in previous movies: camels, elephants, tigers, parrots, and monkeys.
I immediately noticed that even from the opening song “Arabian Nights”, it describes the city saying “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.”
So I understand why as a young kid I wouldn’t really want to be associated with this…because even if its exoticism and orientalism is not obvious to naive kindergarteners, it was just obviously representing different people and cultures, and I didn’t want to be viewed as “different.” To be honest, my hyper-awareness of my skin color never really went away. I always wonder why I’m always slightly uncomfortable with my race, because even in my predominantly white town me and my family were never actually treated any differently — we had/have many friends and haven’t experienced any horrible racist incidents. However, movies like Aladdin and general stereotypes of POC created an inherent view that I should feel different, so I always internally assume people look down on me as different, even though objectively that was almost never remotely the case in my personal experiences, which I feel really lucky about it.
Work Cited:
Aladdin. Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, Walt Disney, 1992. Disney Plus.
