#ALADIN DISNEY MOVIE#
#ALADIN DISNEY FULL#

Thus, the 1992 Aladdin film became even more of an Orientalist fiction than the original story, and presented an Arab world as imagined by seven white American writers.

#ALADIN DISNEY MOVIE#

Disney’s 1992 animated film imagined up a fictional Middle Eastern city to set its story and replaced nearly all the original character names with ones stolen from The Thief of Bagdad, another movie based on “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp” and written by white filmmakers too.ĭirectors Ron Clements and John Musker drafted the first script of the Disney animation - inspired by Linda Woolverton’s screenplay, which was in turn based on lyricists Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s original story pitch - with Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio brought in to rework the story entirely, removing key characters and plot points. This “imaginative space” allowed white Westerners to purport an unrealistic and fantastical impression of Eastern cultures, which for many people of Arab, Indian and Chinese descent is not exactly representative. “Aladdin, which most people today associate with Persia and the Middle East thanks to films such as The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and Disney’s Aladdin (1992), was one of the more popular nineteenth-century productions set in China because of its romantic and moralistic storyline and its potential as a spectacle.Composers and librettists sometimes chose Persia as the setting for the tale because One Thousand and One Nights was from that region of the world and, like China, was a popular imaginative space for Americans and Europeans.” Moon explains in Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s: While Chinese Muslims did exist - the Hui being the most famous, dating back to the beginnings of the Silk Road - Galland’s version of the story is indicative of the Orientalist tradition of Western storytellers that sees the conflation of diverse Eastern cultures into one. The Sultan is referred to as such and not in Chinese terms as “the Emperor,” and other characters are clearly also Muslim, not Buddhist or Confucians, as their dialogue is filled with devout Muslim remarks and platitudes.

#ALADIN DISNEY FULL#

The assumption of a Middle Eastern origin comes mainly from the character names, like Princess Badroulbadour, which means “full moon of full moons” in Arabic. Galland’s tale isn’t even set in the Middle East - it’s actually set in a Chinese city, and Aladdin is not an orphan but a poor Chinese boy living with his mother, with the only other location mentioned in the story being Maghreb, North Africa, where the sorcerer is from.

According to Galland’s diaries, he had heard the story from a Syrian scholar in Aleppo - but no one has actually been able to find an original Arabic source for it. The story of “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp” didn’t even appear in the collection until French translator Antoine Galland added it in 1710. The stories are not just Arabic tales, but also have roots in Persian, Mesopotamian, Indian, Jewish and Egyptian folklore and literature. Aladdin first appeared in One Thousand and One Nights, a famous collection of Middle Eastern folk tales from the Islamic Golden Age (between the 8th and 13th Century) which was first translated into English, and renamed the Arabian Nights, over 400 years later.

Aladin disney