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aladdin remake discourse is making me nostalgic for Aladdin and I think the one real stroke of absolute genius in that movie is that the Genie is never scary
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i was a very sensitive kid who was viscerally damaged for life by Dumbo's pink elephants, the Heffalumps and Woozles,
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(mum wouldn't let me watch the Night on Bald Mountain sequence from Fantasia because that was what scared HER as a kid but I just thought it was cool...)
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basically anything hallucinatory involving elephants
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if you think of the Friend Like Me setpiece, it's structured like Pink Elephants and it's clearly the spiritual successor
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but the whole time, while it's a little sinister and otherworldly to a child, you understand the Genie means well and he's trying to please Aladdin, not just harangue him
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i'm really not quite sure how they managed it? because there's nothing really IN those sequences which are that different from the horrible ones in, say, Alice in Wonderland
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i think it's helped partly by that lovely sumptuous 90s colour palette
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also by the actual character designs... Eric Goldberg's Genie is so stylised, so utterly solid and pillowy
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so even in the part which would be scary to a young child, the part where he dances with the disembodied hands that squish him... it's two of the most expressive, cuddly hands in animation
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and the other part of it is that Robin Williams turns out to be a way, way better singer than anyone expected, probably also him
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the Genie's got this very sort of Max Fleischer vibe to him for a Disney character and you get the sense that in the 30s he'd have been played by Cab Calloway. which is a ridiculous responsibility to put onto a standup comedian who didn't sing professionally
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it's not until i've been rewatching these that i realised how much that performance actually stuck in my subconscious as what a good song performance sounds like. it's that ingrained
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people tell me i sing like an actor. i wonder how much of that i got from my Aladdin VHS
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he's obviously more interested in doing all of the voices and antics than being totally on pitch, but always there's parts where he GOES for it and he sounds like a completely convincing jazz singer. the animators had no idea he could even sing and they didn't trust the other voice actors to sing
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and considering how big a performance it is... he's always totally willing to muffle his funniest lines
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entirely in service of not making the gag too obvious. to keep the music going along
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he doesn't deliver 'have a little more baklava' or 'pull this out of a little hat' or 'when it comes to exotic type mammals' like the gag lines they are. he delivers them like a singer
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which is just stunning. so many performers do not have the instinct to hold back, especially not ones as manic as him
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
The colors in that film are like criminally underrated.
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
Genie is the go-to example of how to use blue in a character.
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absolutely. i mean, i think when i try and recall this film, and this might be due to how soft my skull was when i was watching it a lot,
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all i really can see of it is these pearly creams, gold, and oh god blue. those blues.
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
As far as I remember, Friend Like Me doesn't use a lot (or... any?) of magentas or lime greens which are characters that the human brain is kind of wired to think of as kinda bad or scary?
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oooh good call
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
Most of it is blue backdrop and while there's a decent amount of reds they're often accompanied by the goofier animated bits.
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the blues in Aladdin are the biggest, most expansive, spaciest, most magical blues ever committed to a screen
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
Color theory in animation/games is actually one of my core studies. (I came in struggling with color and came out with color in design being one of my best bits.)
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you could be riveted with just a flat canvas coloured that shade of blue
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
So the fact that the backdrops are mostly blue in that are actually very calming. Whereas like heffalumps and woozles i remember a lot of magenta in.
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
LIKE THINK FRIENDS ON THE OTHER SIDE. It's a big believer in lime green and magenta.
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Aladdin - Friend Like me - (English)
going to drop this here for reference
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
Also a lot of the directorial angles feature Genie as big but not looming.
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Friends On The Other Side - Dr. Facilier
and this one
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
And there's not a lot of tilt, until the very end!
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and when there is something scary, Robin Williams is silly enough to undercut it.
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
Yeah! The animation is bouncy, but in a friendly way bouncy. Genie is one of the most well constructed characters in all of animation.
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like the delivery of "Mr. Aladdin Sir" is so pompous we immediately get what the Genie's going for
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even if he's all lit up with the red light. no facial contortion there either, just the big round innocent eyes that show he's kidding around
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
OH THAT'S ANOTHER GOOD POINt Genie Round
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
round safe
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the pink used in that sequence is this scalding, neon pink. it's alarming, a bit too bright, but not a threat.
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
There's something to be said about the sound effects, too. right off the bat with the boxing bits, it's too soft to sound like real punches and that kinda continues through the whole thing.
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if you compare to Facilier's pink, there's quite a lot used (notably on the cards), but it's not bright and luminous, it's more rosy and dusty
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the whole of the Facilier sequence is a lot more earth-toned because P&tF is, but the result is it feels unsettling with the alarming magical colours because it's more to do with them intruding into a real world setting
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wheras as soon as the Genie slumps down in front of Aladdin the entire background vanishes and we're aware we're in a fantasy world
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in Friends on the Other Side, there's a physical transition into the fantasy world and it's apparent something is wrong. and the background is ALL that slightly darker neon pink
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so similar and so different
so similar and so different
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(got this really was a great era for Alan Menken self-plagiarising...)
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also this cut, goddamn
also this cut, goddamn
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aladdin is a good movie
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
Aladdin is a super good movie. Also, one more quick thing I want to point out that the remake really hurt me with:
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
Genie and Jasmine had very similar blues in the film.
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
It helped set them up as the characters that were on Aladdin's side. And blue isn't just a color of calm--it's the color of loyalty and intelligence.
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
There was a lot to be said to pair Jasmine's blue and gold with Genie's blue and gold.
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
Both felt very trapped and both needed Aladdin to be his best self in order to succeed in the story.
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
Dressing Jasmine in yellows and magentas throws color theory right out the window.
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
there it goes
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
goodbye.
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
Yellow, especially, is associated with joy. Jasmine is not a joyful character. She has the capacity for happiness, but dressing her in yellow kills my heart and soul.
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yeah, i get that they didn't want her design to be as sexualised, but, still, it isn't good
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they could have had her be unsexualised in blue
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hmm, i guess also there's the blue being used for the peddler who's clearly the genie, and a lot of the other live action changes seem to be in the vein of no-homoing the aladdin/genie thing a bit
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not that it was ever homo except in a Bugs Bunny kind of way
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it could have been they wanted to remove some possible interpretation where Jasmine was a Genie aspect. though i've never seen that seriously proposed anywhere
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
honestly the relationship between Genie and Aladdin was so good though? Minus that patch where Aladdin was like "ok but what if i didn't free you." He was a dick there.
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
It's actually something played up in a lot of animation--if you want characters to be similar, you put them in similar colors. If you want someone to stand out, color is the best way to do it subtly
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
re: belle is the only person who wears blue in her whole town.
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well, aladdin IS a dick and the Genie's aware of it
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(god i love that whole scene with 'you've lied to everyone else, I was starting to feel left out'. and the gag later with the Genie just razzing him through the lamp's spout)
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god this is so much of why the Genie works as a character. he's allowed to have a melancholy side to him that doesn't feel contrived.
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which is also, without being too insensitive, definitely a feature of Robin Williams' comedy above and beyond the miserable clown thing
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aladdin's story is 'be yourself' but the genie's is 'being someone impossibly creative is suffering', lmao i can't imagine why disney animators would relate to that as a theme :|
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
Gods Aladdin was such a masterpiece
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it's so much better than The Thief and the Cobbler and i don't care which scary cartoon brew power user knifes me in bed tonight for posting this
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like at least the character design in Aladdin was Good But Racist. the design in The Thief and the Cobbler is just 'trying to be clever' racist in the same way as a teenager on Tumblr who draws woke/ugly art of Taako
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
honestly a lot of animators/animation fans are the w o r s t about thinking "if it's more obscure it's better!"
Tᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀʙʟɪɢʜᴛ
And while I will say I've been p disappointed in Disney lately, their 2D films were phenomenal. I still cry every time I see the ballroom scene in beauty and the beast.
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i... don't rate a lot of 2D disney that highly tbh. i appreciate a lot of the really old stuff as technical art but it mostly feels cold and nasty. the renaissance stuff is largely great
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the 70s stuff contains some solid guilty pleasures and the 80s stuff is best ignored
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but yeah as for TT&TC... i feel it is pretty much unreasonable to suggest we would ever have had Aladdin without it. (or any of the good 90s 2D animation)
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and yes it was responsible for teaching the animators of the 90s how to animate traditionally in a very high quality way...
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but also it was a shallow, aesthetic boondoggle that was basically designed to torture animators which is why they all went to go and work for Disney instead
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When Disney Is The Soft Option For Workplace Treatment You Know You Have Fucked Up
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it's a tedious, soulless movie that i appreciate for its too-close-to-the-sun egomania but also, please stop. animation is supposed to be expressive and fun, not pointlessly perfect for no reason