Aladdin (2019)
Disney doesn’t seem to have particularly good quality control on the live-action remakes of their movies, but based on the watch-order I’ve had for them, here’s what I’ve seen:
“101 Dalmatians” (1996) - pretty good
“The Jungle Book” (2016) - terrible
“Beauty and the Beast” (2017) - great
“Lion King” (2019) - boring
“Aladdin” (2019) - outstanding
We have “Mulan” and “Little Mermaid” coming next, in that order. I’m pretty confident that they’re going to fit the pattern.
Anyway.
“Aladdin” was awesome. The colors were vivid, the music was powerful, the and the script was everything you remember, but better.
Like Disney did with “Beauty and the Beast” two years ago, they kept the script to Aladdin mostly unchanged, but in a few locations they did update the wording to adjust for pseudo-cultural relevance and add lines to adjust the world-building or backstories to make things flow better.
I’m not going to relay the plot to this movie. It’s exactly how the cartoon one went, but this time with real people; you should already be pleasantly familiar.
Unlike with “The Lion King,” where the new voices made many of the characters feel noticeably different, mostly in a bad way, every actor here filled the role spectacularly.
In the 1992 animated classic, the Sultan was a goofy, borderline-incompetent man who already seemed pretty malleable before Jafar got his hypnosis tricks involved. In this version, the Sultan (Navid Negahban) was straightforward, getting old, and hoodwinked by a vizier he trusted.
Iago was downgraded from a rant-spewing Gilbert Godfrey to a two-word squawking Alan Tudyk. Tudyk could have easily filled the role with his own host of speeches, but by cutting down the bird’s script to only a few words per scene, it greatly increased his comedic impact and put him more in line with Abu, who never got to speak in the first place.
Speaking (heh) of Abu: he was, as far as I can tell, entirely CGI. But unlike with “The Lion King,” where big cats already don’t have particularly emotive faces, Abu was a capuchin, a species we’ve seen a lot thanks to “Pirates of the Caribbean” (2003). And, thanks to that exposure, Disney knew to focus in on Abu’s face when they needed him to show an expression. That said: Abu seemed oddly poorly animated, compared to his predecessor in “Pirates,” which might have actually been a real, trained monkey on set.
Rajah the tiger returned as well, also completely CGI, but was in far fewer scenes than the animated version.
Magic Carpet was there too, because of course it was. It didn’t get any more personality than it did 25 years ago, but you still got the feeling that it was a living, sentient being.
New character, Dahlia (Nasim Pedrad), was introduced as Jasmin’s handmaiden. She was a little airheaded and strayed a bit close to the ‘manic pixie dream girl’ trope occasionally, but stayed within reason. She was an acceptable addition to the cast.
Jafar (Marian Kenzari) was perfectly cast. Cartoon Jafar could rely on cartoonishly exaggerated expressions, while Kenzari conveyed his frustrations and plotting with his voice. You could feel his loathing for the Sultan as he spoke, even in wide-angle shots where he was too far away to read his expression. He reminded me of another villain I saw somewhere, but I can’t for the life of me remember who that was. Feel free to email me if you think you know who it is.
Aladdin (Mena Massoud) and Jasmin (Naomi Scott) might as well have been Pygmalion creations of the cartoons. They looked exactly like their animated counterparts, their voices fit, and they filled the roles flawlessly. It helps that there was outstanding chemistry between the two of them, which helped every scene with both become that much better.
And finally: Genie. Contrary to internet uproar about how ‘he’s no Robin Williams,’ Will Smith did a great job with the role, keeping the magic that Williams brought while making it his own. Smith did the role justice. While Scar didn’t feel like Scar in the 2019 Lion King, this Genie felt like Genie.
“But how was the music that I’ve been familiar with for 25 years?!” I’m sure you’ve been asking since you clicked onto the page.
Answer: It was gorgeous.
Alan Menkin, who directed the soundtrack for the original animated movie, got a second chance here and built on what he’d already created and amped up the already-amazing musical numbers we’re familiar with. Nothing was removed, and everything that changed was for the better. The musical numbers with Genie were tweaked to include an homage to Will Smith’s rap career, while a handful of the orchestral pieces were given a modern pop-spin or a touch of regional (read: Arabic and Indian) music.
The renewed “Friend Like Me” and “Prince Ali” are both worth a listen on their own even if you haven’t seen the movie.
Interestingly: while “Beauty and the Beast” seemed to take a few notes from “Les Miserables,” presumably because they both occurred in France, “Aladdin’s” music and choreography took some very obvious inspiration from Indian dance numbers - the kind of stuff you’ve seen in Bollywood clips on YouTube.
And before you get wrapped up in some argument about “Aladdin is Arabic, not Indian!” please, get over yourself. The original legend is Chinese, so the fact that it’s got an Arabic spin in the first place is already wrong. Also: Agrabah is a fictional city in a desert that’s never clarified.
The CGI here was a mixed bag. There were a surprising number of scenes that looked like CGI, which is frustrating, coming from Disney. Chunks of Agrabah felt like the sound-stage pieces they were, instead of a cohesive part of a greater city.
But the visuals were good nonetheless. Especially the giant dance number for “Prince Ali” as Genie paraded Aladdin into Agrabah - the colors, the choreography, the grandiosity. All of it worked so damn well together!
I think the only “major” departure from the animated movie and this one was in the very beginning. Originally, it was a merchant telling us a tall-tale to sell a lamp; a common fan theory was that Genie was the merchant.
In this one, it’s a father (played by Will Smith), telling his children a story to entertain them, so it makes sense that he’d ‘cast’ himself as the most powerful being in the story.
Unfortunately I was in the middle of a real desert when this his theaters, so I had to wait until it came out on DVD. I bought a copy to watch at home, and now I wish I’d gotten to see it in IMAX.
They took an already good movie and made it better, and it’s 100% worth your time to watch the highest def version on the nicest setup you can find.
