Like Snow White & the Seven Dwarves, I like Disney’s Aladdin better than the original story. While the movie embraces some seriously racist stereotypes of Middle Eastern peoples and subscribes to the idea of a monolithic Middle East like “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp,” Aladdin offers its audiences a more concise plot, hilarious animal sidekicks, good music (zero points for Snow White there), and a smart and confident princess. In both versions, there’s the influence of Orientalism and a plot that relies on misogynic values, we might as well pick the one where Robin Williams voices the genie.
Before I get into my critiques of Aladdin, here’s what I think Disney did right. Prior to re-watching the movie, I always lumped Jasmine and her anachronistic wardrobe choices in with princesses like Aurora, Snow White, and Cinderella – passive with marriage as their only purpose in life. While Jasmine’s primary conflict in the movie does indeed deal with marriage, it’s about marrying for true love rather than because it’s the law. Until she meets and falls in love with Aladdin, she’s willing to throw away her luxurious life and palace to avoid marrying a man she doesn’t love. She isn’t afraid to stand up to Jafar, the Sultan, and Aladdin when they squabble about who she’ll marry – she calls out their sexism and forces Aladdin at least to change the way he speaks to her. Although naïve at times, Jasmine is unabashedly honest and extremely quick – she followed along with Aladdin in the marketplace, figured him out, and distracted Jafar at the very end (she really took one for the team with that kiss). I’d say she is Disney’s first badass princess. 
Now, as great as Jasmine’s character is, she cannot make up for the structural misogyny that drives the plot. Like the tale of Snow White, the piece of the original story Disney preserved most was the sexism. While annoying laws and customs demanding Jasmine marry may have been the norm in whatever time period Disney was going for, the fact that those are historical accuracies they always manage to keep in their movies bugs me. If they’re going to throw everything else out the window, why not leave the sexism out too? At times it may feel like Jasmine’s character serves as a vehicle to criticize such customs and institutions but then you remember that it’s Disney, and in order for Aladdin to succeed in his rags-to-riches story, he needs a princess who must marry because the law and her father say so. Also, was Jafar calling Jasmine “pussycat” in a sexual way at all necessary? No? I didn’t think so. 
Along with some problematic misogyny, Disney also demonstrates its inability to portray non-Western cultures accurately for the first time with Aladdin. It shows that research of the Middle East for the movie was only attending a expo on Saudi Arabia (held in Los Angeles). What stood out to me immediately was that every single man in the movie with the exception of Aladdin had big curved noises – something often included in caricatures of Arabs. Also, as I previously referenced, Jasmine’s outfit wouldn’t slide for a princess (or most girls for that matter) in that region of the world, not even today. In reality, she would’ve been wearing long sleeves, something covered her midriff, and a veil of some kind. If Disney wanted to forgo the veil because of their racist and misguided perception that women who wear veils are less free than their counterparts, fine. But, at least give her a top that covers more than a bra, if anything for her sake so she isn’t fetishized.
Real quick, some major plot wholes that I notice every time I watch this movie. Why can Aladdin and Abu touch the magic carpet in the Cave of Wonders? If Aladdin wants to be both a prince again and free the genie, wish to be a prince again and give the lamp to Jasmine for her to wish him free. Also, if the Sultan could have changed the law all along so she could marry for love, why put Jasmine through all that?
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