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                                                                                CINEMA, Page 74

Aladdin's Magic


The funny, fabulous feature from Disney heralds a new Golden
Age of animation

By RICHARD CORLISS -- With reporting by Patrick E. Cole and
Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles


    I can open your eyes,
    Take you wonder by wonder,
    Over, sideways and under
    On a magic carpet ride.

    A whole new world,
    A new fantastic point of view . . .
    A thrilling chase,
    A wondrous place
    For you and me.


    This is a love song, of course. Aladdin the street rat is
taking Princess Jasmine on a flight into the liberating skyland
of first love. But the Tim Rice lyric, riding the lush carpet
of Alan Menken's melody, also defines the sorcery of movie
animation. Artists wave the wand of a pencil over a piece of
paper and, like the most genial genie, create unbelievable
sights, indescribable feelings. "Don't you dare close your
eyes!/ A hundred thousand things to see!/ Hold your breath, it
gets better!"

    And it does, in the Disney comedy-adventure Aladdin,
produced and directed by Ron Clements and John Musker. Boy
meets, loses and gets Girl in an Arabian kingdom of cotton-candy
palaces, tiger-mouthed pyramids, wicked viziers, larcenous
monkeys, misanthropic parrots, a truly magic carpet and a genie
who changes shapes and personalities faster than you can say .
. . Robin Williams! An enthralling new world.

    The old world -- the one of current Hollywood movies and
TV shows -- is in disrepair. In its tatty bazaar, peddlers hawk
worn-out notions as if the items held their former glamour.
Hoary formulas (sci-fi, sitcom) near exhaustion, and a smoggy
dusk shrouds the industry like crape.

    But for animation, this is a Golden Age. Not since the
1940s -- with Pinocchio and Dumbo from Walt Disney and the great
cartoon shorts by Tex Avery at MGM and by Bob Clampett and Chuck
Jones at Warner Bros. -- has the form been so commercially
successful and artistically exhilarating. Moreover, at a time
when mass art is fragmented, even divisive -- when virtually no
species of entertainment has universal appeal -- the hip, comic
ingenuity and emotional breadth of the best cartoons reunite the
consumers of popular culture with Hollywood's surest instinct
to please in a vast Saturday matinee of the spirit.

    On TV, the prime-time success of The Simpsons (the
medium's best-written series, no question, no competition) and
the cult appeal of Nickelodeon's gross-out, only slightly
homoerotic Ren & Stimpy is matched in daytime slots by cartoon
shows from Disney and Fox. In commercials and music videos, in
Nintendo games and as a top-selling portion of the videocassette
market, animation appeals both to adults nostalgic for their
Roadrunner days and to kids, whose attention span just about
carries them from one frenetic cartoon frame to the next. "Video
has made children discriminating consumers of cartoons," says
Simpsons creator Matt Groening. "My son's seen Bambi and
Pinocchio countless times, so he won't put up with bad TV
animation."

    The cartoon revival was dramatic on the big screen as
well. Disney, which slumped after Walt Disney's death in 1966,
regained its touch in the mid-'80s under the urging of Jeffrey
Katzenberg, the new studio boss, and Walt's nephew Roy Disney,
who godfathered a new generation of animators. The Little
Mermaid (1989) not only proved that joy could again be a
component of movie craftsmanship, it earned $84 million in its
North American theatrical release. Last year's Beauty and the
Beast outgrossed Mermaid by $50 million and was the first
cartoon feature nominated for an Oscar as Best Picture.

    Such acclaim breeds competition, and in the past year half
a dozen non-Disney animated features were released (Fern gully:
The Last Rainforest, An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, Cool
World, Rock-a-Doodle, Bebe's Kids and Little Nemo: Adventures in
Slumberland). Some of these had charm to spare; others were what
industry analyst Art Murphy calls "spinach pictures -- family
films that are good for you." Popeye eats spinach, kids don't;
the six films together managed just over half the take of Beauty
and the Beast. It all proves the difficulty of matching either
Disney's financial commitment to animation (about $40 million
a feature, compared with $12 million to $20 million for the
others) or its artists' mastery of a storytelling form that the
studio invented, misplaced and then, spectacularly,
rediscovered. Walt meets Mickey; Disney loses touch; Katzenberg &
Co. find Aladdin's lamp.

    This Aladdin is no prince in disguise. He is an anonymous
thief, a homeless ghetto kid in the imperial city of Agrabah,
ruled by a flustery Sultan and his Vincent Price-y adviser
Jafar. On the streets Aladdin meets the Sultan's daughter
Jasmine, who has rejected every royal suitor in the Middle East.
Love and ambition smite Aladdin; a thirst for adventure seizes
Jasmine. In fact, each of the main characters seeks freedom:
Aladdin from poverty, Jasmine from her regal confinement, the
Sultan from Jafar's silky domination, and the Genie from an
eternity in the lamp.

    From the first moments, when a merchant (voiced, as is the
Genie, by Robin Williams) offers to sell the viewer a
"combination hookah and coffee maker -- also makes julienne
fries," Aladdin is a ravishing thrill ride pulsing at MTV-video
tempo. You have to go twice -- and that's a treat, not a chore
-- to catch the wit in the decor, the throwaway gags, the edges
of the action. Blink, and you'll miss the pile of "discount
fertilizer" Aladdin's pursuers land in; or the fire eater with
an upset stomach; or half of Williams' convulsing asides. Chuck
Jones' verdict is judicious: Aladdin is "the funniest feature
ever made." It's a movie for adults -- if they can keep up with
its careering pace -- and, yes, you can take the kids. It
juggles a '90s impudence with the old Disney swank and heart.

    The studio was just regaining its animation stride in 1989
when lyricist Howard Ashman (who with Menken wrote the songs
for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast before dying of
AIDS last year) suggested a Disney cartoon musical of the
Aladdin story. After he wrote six songs and a story treatment,
Musker and Clements (The Adventures of the Great Mouse
Detective, The Little Mermaid) took over. But something was
wrong with the story. "It just wasn't compelling," Katzenberg
says. "Aladdin's journey didn't engage." At first, the hero had
a mother with a personality forceful enough to overwhelm the
callow hero. But then, every character and event did. "We would
look at the story reels," Katzenberg said, "and even Jasmine was
blowing him away." A year into development, the boss junked the
script.

    Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio made Aladdin "a
little rougher, like a young Harrison Ford," and dispensed with
the mother. Jasmine was also made stronger, and the Genie's
wish capacity was reduced from "unlimited" to the traditional
three.

    These decisions were relatively simple to implement. But
the drawing process is exacting, medieval labor, even in an era
when computers can paint the backgrounds; an animator will
spend a full day on a single second -- 24 drawings -- of
character movement. To devise and execute the Genie's production
number, A Friend like Me, supervising animator Eric Goldberg
(the man in charge of the Genie's scenes) made perhaps 10,000
drawings.

    Casting is as crucial a decision for cartoons as for
live-action films. Aladdin's voice cast includes curmudgeonly
comic Gilbert Gottfried as Jafar's parrot and Lea Salonga, the
original Miss Saigon, as the singing voice of Jasmine. But the
true inspiration was to have the Genie voiced by Williams, whose
comedy routines pinball from one manic impression to another.
Every time Williams would lurch into a new character, even if
for a second, the Genie would assume that form. In five
recording sessions spanning 15 months, Williams simply
revolutionized cartoon voice acting. "Until now," Katzenberg
notes, "we have been entertained by hearing the genius of how
Robin's mind works. Now, like an erupting geyser, in full living
color, we get to see him thinking."

    In his half an hour onscreen, the Genie makes dozens of
eyeblink metamorpho ses: a Scotsman, a Scots dog, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Senor Wences, Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marx, a
French waiter, a turkey, the crows from Dumbo, Eddie (Rochester)
Anderson, a rabbit, a dinosaur, William F. Buckley Jr., Robert
De Niro, a stewardess, a bashful sheep, Pinocchio, a magician,
a Jean Gabin-style Frenchman, Sebastian the crab from The Little
Mermaid, Arsenio Hall, a finicky tailor, Walter Brennan, a TV
parade host and hostess, Ethel Merman, Rodney Dangerfield, Jack
Nicholson, a talking lampshade, a bee, a U-boat, a one-man band
and a quartet of cheerleaders. Many of these apparitions show
up in the Cab Callowayish A Friend like Me, a showstopper in
which the Genie displays his awesome versatility.

    Goldberg had a giddy challenge with Williams and the
Genie. Animator Randy Cartwright faced a daunting one: to create
a character, the Magic Carpet, literally out of whole cloth.
The Carpet has no head, no voice, and mere tassels for hands
and feet. Yet it has a personality that puts most live-action
stars to shame. It can mope, strut, cringe. It is a gentleman
and a matchmaker. It holds and kisses Jasmine's hand. It makes
zigzag stairs of itself at the end of Aladdin's ride with
Jasmine and, as she stands on her balcony, coaxes the lad up to
kissing level with the princess. "He's very sensitive," says
Cartwright, "and always trying to please. It's abstract
pantomime."

    The man who paid for the Carpet, who gets to say no (and,
more than occasionally, Wow!) to Disney features, is
Katzenberg. "Animation films represent the heart and soul of the
company," he says. "It's the blood that flows through this
worldwide enterprise. And Aladdin is creating new blood." He is
speaking in part as a movie executive; he knows that, where
there's a popular Disney cartoon, there will soon be a
sound-track album, a best-selling videocassette, a Genie cookie
jar, a new ride to lure the customers to the Disney parks. He
also knows that cartoon characters, and the folks who animate
them, don't get gross profit points in the dozen theatrical
rereleases and possible sequels. Last year the studio exhumed
its 1961 feature One Hundred and One Dalmatians for theaters and
took in $60 million -- most of it clear profit.

    But Katzenberg is also a moviemaker, justly proud of his
studio's work in reviving the American cinema's unique
contribution to 20th century art. Aladdin, with its headlong,
death-snubbing herobatics, is a cartoon Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Today's best animators, excavating and restoring the medium of
Walt, Tex and Chuck, are triumphant raiders of the lost art.

    Animator: wonderful word. It means life giver. And, for
the movies, life restorer.