These kinds of audiovisual cues are not accidents in the slightest. Jafar’s evil is further manifested in his curly beard, traditional clothing, and “ queer coding”-while Aladdin is clean-shaven, mostly shirtless, and very hetero. Main characters that the audience is meant to admire, like Aladdin and Jasmine, have Western features, lighter skin, and American accents, while nefarious or impoverished characters like Jafar and shopkeepers have beards, hooked noses, and thick, Middle Eastern accents. The 1992 movie’s racism extends beyond its setting by presenting a plethora of classic, deleterious Othering: It mispronounces Arab words including “Allah,” depicts nonsense scribble instead of real Arabic script, and codes its characters to reinforce racist and Islamophobic tropes.
#ALADIN ANIMATED MOVIE#
As Said goes on to explain,“in this way Islam is made more clear, the true nature of its threat appears, an implicit course of action against it is proposed.” Between the timing of the movie during a huge rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes and the (mostly white) people behind the camera, it’s hard to be hopeful about Disney’s motives. Because of the Islamophobic nature of the source material, without significant changes, this remake is in tacit support of Islamophobia. As Edward Said said of depictions of orientalism,”whenever in modern times there has been an acutely political tension felt between the Occident and its Orient (or between the West and its Islam), there has been a tendency to resort in the West not to direct violence but first to the cool, relatively detached instruments of scientific, quasi-objective representation.” At the core of this Aladdin remake is a response to rising Islamophobia, but not the woke kind you hope for. Misrepresentation of Islam is a uniquely Western weaponization of oriental tropes. The film director Jean-Luc Godard noted Americans tell the “best stories” because they “invade a country and immediately construct a narrative justifying it.” This movie was, essentially, a way to justify neocolonial, imperialist white feminism. At the time of its release, Aladdin served as a panacea, a sweeping solution to the vacuum of non-white narratives for children, callously delivered in a continuation of its rich racist legacy. Aladdin is thus fixed firmly within the gaze of white supremacy-the superior, Christian society that is not mentioned directly, but alluded to in juxtaposition to the brutal depictions of a hybrid Arab-South Asian culture and the film’s underlying anti-Islam messaging. Disney thus conceives of “Brown” as a monolith that could encompass Middle Eastern, South Asian, Black, and Latinx experiences, so a “Brown” story could appeal and represent all shades of skin-making “representation” yet another careless rendition of the Other. Its cast featured not even one Arab or South Asian voice actor.ĭisney may be catching flak now for its poor representation of the POC experience, but let’s not forget that at the time, Disney was known for making stories just about white people and marketed Aladdin to people “of all races” in its “biggest ethnic marketing campaign ever, selling the film to Black and Hispanic children in the U.S. Directed by white guys Ron Clements and John Musker, the 1992 movie was written by them and other white guys Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. It’s most likely a made-up story, added to a translation of A Thousand and One Nights by a French guy in the 18th century. He later saves Jasmine from the same fate-if you steal in a violent place like Arabland, you lose your hand.Īladdin is a white fantasy, and that’s hardly surprising, because the film is basically some white guy’s foggy notion of the Orient. In the opening scene, after we are introduced to the exotic climate by a heavily-accented vendor who tries to sell us his wares, Aladdin skillfully avoids being punished for thieving.
Agrabah is basically “Arabland,” a fictional place that real Americans are down to bomb, replete with popular imaginations of the Middle East as a sandy desert under the rule of violent Islam. No surface-level representation such as casting Mena Massoud, Dev Patel, or Riz Ahmed in the lead role would have changed that.Īladdin is set in nonsense “Agrabah,” a faraway place that’s “barbaric, but hey, it’s home,” a line from a song so racist Disney changed some of the lyrics the year after. That elephant is the source material of Aladdin itself-a misogynist, xenophobic white fantasy. Besides the obvious issues with a major studio saying there simply wasn’t a “right fit” among 2,000 actors who auditioned for this role, there’s definitely an elephant in the room, and this time, it’s not Abu in the second half of the movie. The studio behind the upcoming Aladdin remake (directed by Guy Ritchie) reportedly struggled to cast a Brown actor who can act, sing, and dance-after much Internet uproar, newcomer Mena Massoud and the light-skinned white and Indian actress Naomi Scott were cast as Aladdin and Jasmine.
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