aladdin (ron clements and john musker, 1992)

I make a lot of Letterboxd lists. Too many, really. One of my favorite kinds of lists is what I call "Blind Spots". These lists (I have 35 of them) are full of movies I've never seen. The vast majority are based on IMDB lists of the top this or top that. Before I watched Aladdin, for instance, it was on five Blind Spot lists: the Top 50 IMDB lists of Animation, Family, Fantasy, and Musical movies, as well as the Top 250 IMDB list for all movies. You could say that it was about time that I watched Aladdin, 30 years after its release.

There's a reason I never got around to it. I'm not all that fond of the Disney movies of that era. In particular, I don't like the songs. But for some reason, the songs in Aladdin didn't bother me that much, so I liked the movie more than I expected. It's an OK film, and yes, Robin Williams gets to be Robin Williams.  He's all over the place, although it takes a while for his Genie to appear. According to Wikipedia, "Because Robin Williams ad-libbed so many of his lines, the script was rejected for a Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award nomination."

The version on Disney+ also contained this disclaimer before the movie started:

This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.

Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe.

To learn more about how stories have impacted society, please visitwww.disney.com/StoriesMatter

All I can find specific to this was a line in a song in the original which went, "Where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face". This was changed to something less stereotypical.

Thanks to Robin Williams, and the relative absence of crappy songs, Aladdin is a good movie. (It did win Oscars for Score and Best Song, so don't listen to me about the quality of the tunes.) It's still a standard bland boy meets bland girl tale. Gilbert Gottfried does a notable turn as a parrot, but he inadvertently shows the problem with using names to dub dialogue in animated films rather than professional voice actors. Gottfried's voice is so recognizable that it takes you out of the movie ... you don't think hey it's a talking parrot, you think hey it's Gilbert Gottfried.