Chris Theodore Disney Aladdin Response

Well Disney... you did some good... you did some bad. Would you like the good news first? I think so.

You did a much better job with the princess Jasmine. Aside from some scandalous clothing choices here and there, Jasmine represented to me a much better progressive picture of what it meant to be a Disney princess. Goodbye to letting a man tell you who to marry, Jasmine wanted to find the person that she truly did love. Not only that, she would risk her position and status just to be herself. Not only did she challenge positions of love, she is also pretty smart. I can't give her full credit because she couldn't fully get at Aladdin's disguise, but she did some great things. To name a few: She pretended to be dumb in the marketplace (oh... that will come back for part of the bad), didn't let Aladdin just waltz back into her life, and in the end, again, pretended to go along with being in love with Jafar (haha imagine kissing him like that... big oofs). Although in the end they still ended up in a true love Disney relationship, I think I am semi-okay with this one.

Another thing was creating an evil villain that, for myself, hated right from the start. I don't know if this intentional by Disney, but I feel like their villains have a commonality of face structure (at least in regards to the films we have looked at in this class). Anyways, back to Jafar. This man carries a wicked serpent staff.

Not only does he carry it... he turns into a snake, places people under the spell of the snake, and is a snake when it comes to attempting to deceive the other characters. This just helps accentuate the "evilness" about him. By the end, you are so glad he is gone... at least I was. I also do have to mention my sister was Jafar for one of her dance recitals in high school, so bonus points there I guess...

Okay... now the not so good...

You know I was really started to like the genie. However, once he started changing into many different characters there was, in my observation, a lot of stereotypes being shown. This representation of different cultures started to get dicey for me, as it is an American film trying to represent others that are not American. I could go on about the genie making strippers for Aladdin, but I will save that for another time.

Continuing off of stereotypes... the Middle East ring a bell anyone? Aladdin knocks this one to the ground so much that it was almost painful. We hear prays to Allah, depictions of the barbarians, the building structure, see the colorization of the people, and just illustrations of what is believed to be Middle Eastern Arabian life. Disney creates the sense that "that the Middle Eastern world is a senseless one where you are executed or mutilated for the slightest infraction. And most importantly, nobody wants it to be that way." The movie is entirely different if you change the location, obviously, but I believe it could've been avoided to misrepresent the people of the Middle East so wrongly.

So overall, some good, a decent amount of end. Just feel for my man Abu and his constant third-wheeling.