Carpet
Carpet might be the easiest Aladdin character to draw, but special-effects artists on the live-action film had a much more difficult job bringing the creation to life. “It’s quite a challenge to imbue character, personality and humor into what is essentially a blue rectangle, which has no face or eyes and none of the usual features we use to convey emotion,” Jarrett says. They relied on some of the same techniques as the original animators, using Carpet’s tassels as appendages and folds as shoulders.
Iago
Actor Alan Tudyk provided the voice for Jafar’s right-hand bird Iago, but the chatty parrot isn’t quite as talkative as he was in the animated film. “We aimed to keep Iago’s performance firmly rooted in realism,” Jarrett says. “Thankfully there’s plenty of reference of talking parrots, so we opted to keep our CG as close to reality as possible.”
Rajah
Jarrett’s team wanted to give their Rajah a regal air, like a feline godfather for the princess of Agrabah. “We designed him slightly larger, more mature and poised than in the original animation,” Jarrett says. “We kept his movements slow and deliberate with a somewhat knowing quality to his expressions.”
Props
ALL THAT GLITTERS
TO CREATE THE GENIE’S LAMP, THE SULTAN’S THRONE AND THE VIZIER’S SORCEROUS DEN, PRODUCTION DESIGNER GEMMA JACKSON SPUN BEAUTIFUL CREATIONS FROM GOLD. By Kevin P. Sullivan
Lamp
What is the story of Aladdin without Genie? And what’s Genie without the lamp? Jackson understood from the jump that this one prop would matter immensely, but a direct translation from the animated version simply wasn’t going to cut it. “When you’ve got live action of people rubbing things, and you can see faces and skins and pores and lips and eyelashes, you also have to have [a] similar amount of detail on things like the lamp,” Jackson says. From the “loads” of lamps Jackson’s team mocked up, director Guy Ritchie chose the heavily engraved version that landed the starring role in the first poster, the very first image fans saw from the film.
Jafar’s Chambers
Every bad guy needs a good lair, so for the home of Agrabah’s Royal Vizier, Jafar (Marwan Kenzari), Jackson and set decorator Tina Jones created a room filled with equal parts science and sorcery. “We found some fabulous old recipes from potions that were created for various magical spells from years ago for curing all sorts of ailments,” Jones says. “We made up a lot of jars and dried items that could be seen on the shelves.” And at the center was an enormous orrery.
Throne Room
In preproduction a film’s designers typically depend on concept artists to draft 2-D renderings of props and sets in order to get the director’s approval ahead of a build. But in the case of the sultan’s throne, the design team 3-D printed miniature versions of various concepts, allowing for a more accurate prediction of what the final product would look like. Once approved, the final design was built and finished with authentic fabric sourced from India. Not a bad seat if you can get it.
Double Act
CHANGE OF TUNE
FOR OSCAR-WINNING LA LA LAND SONGWRITERS BENJ PASEK AND JUSTIN PAUL, PENNING NEW NUMBERS FOR A LIVE-ACTION DISNEY MUSICAL WAS A DREAM COME TRUE. By Joe McGovern
Benj Pasek (left) and Justin Paul
LYRICISTS BENJ PASEK AND JUSTIN PAUL are no strangers to the big stage. The duo have earned Oscars for La La Land, Tonys for Dear Evan Hansen and millions of fist-pumps around the world for their anthem “This Is Me” from The Greatest Showman. For Aladdin, their task was nothing less than applying their touch to the Disney soundtrack of their childhoods. They were both 7 years old when Aladdin was released—and as they explain, this job was more fun than a magic-carpet ride.
As songwriters, how exciting was the chance to work with Alan Menken, the legendary composer of the original Aladdin?
BENJ PASEK It was the dream of a lifetime. The first movie I ever saw in the theater was The Little Mermaid, and those late-’80s, early-’90s Disney movies are responsible for raising an entire generation of musical-theater lovers. The idea of characters expressing themselves through song deepened the storytelling and did not seem unnatural to us kids. Cut to 30 years later, and everyone in our generation knows these songs because they’re in our bones.
JUSTIN PAUL Yeah, it really all comes full circle. If you look at musicals like Hamilton or Frozen or hopefully Dear Evan Hansen and The Greatest Showman—they have an audience because of those Disney renaissance films. So this really was a dream come true for us.
In that era, Menken and Howard Ashman had a winning streak almost as great as yours.
PAUL [Laughs] We’re a sad imitation of what they accomplished. They’ve always been idols of ours. What we always admired was the range of their work. It could be funny and heartfelt and emotional and witty and could span so many musical styles and lyric styles.
How much of this job was adapting the original songs versus writing new ones?
PAUL We wrote a few new songs, including one for Jasmine, who didn’t have her own song in the original. And then in places where there were little story tweaks, we wrote a new verse here or there for the original songs. Getting to write a new verse for “Arabian Nights,” for instance.
Did you have a part in reworking the genie’s big number “Friend Like Me”?
PAUL That one’s all Will Smith’s creation, as far as we know. He had some ideas about the lyrics and how to present it, and everybody was really excited by his take on it, which is really cool—and true to the spirit of how Robin Williams performed the song.
What inspired the new Jasmine song?
PASEK There’s a line in the original film when Jafar says to Jasmine, “You’re speechless, I see. A fine quality in a wife.” So we thought about that. What does it mean to stand up to someone who wants to render you speechless? And how do you reclaim your voice?
Also this Aladdin will remind people of the lyricist Howard Ashman, who died before the original film came out.
PASEK Oh, I hope so. Not only for his brilliant lyrics but the way he was able to weave in social commentary and reflect what was happening in his own life. Or how he explained the world in a way that was digestible for young kids—not only to dream but to deal with harsher realities too. It’s lasted an entire generation later.
The Legend of Aladdin
THE ANIMATED FILM AND BEYOND
Oral History
ANIMATING ALADDIN
HOW DO YOU CREATE A BELOVED CLASSIC? WE SPOKE TO THE ANIMATORS, FILMMAKERS AND VOICES THAT MADE ALADDIN SO SPECIAL. By Missy Schwartz
Genie (Robin Williams) meets Aladdin (Scott Weinger) in the Cave of Wonders.
IN 1988, WHILE FINISHING UP THEIR SCORE for Disney’s The Little Mermaid, composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman began working on a new animated project set in a world about as far from Ariel’s under-the-sea Atlantica as imaginable: the Arabian desert. Based on the centuries-old Middle Eastern and South Asian folktale The Thousand and One Nights, Ashman and Menken’s Aladdin would be a throwback musical/buddy comedy infused with 1930s-style jazz. In their version the titular scrappy lad bounced around Bagdad with a trio of pals, encountering not one but two genies. Yet when Ashman and Menken pitched their 40-page treatment to Disney’s then-studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, he was not sold. He asked them to instead work on another romantic fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast. Still, Katzenberg liked the idea of an Aladdin film and offered it to Little Mermaid directors Ron Clements and John Musker. It turned out to be just the beginning of a turbulent magic carpet ride that would take them to a whole new world.
Writer, producer, codirector
RON CLEMENTS
Jeffrey came to us with a list of three possible films that we might do. One was Swan Lake, which we thought was too close to Mermaid. Another was a project called King of the Jungle about a lion king in Africa. We didn’t think there would be much potential in that. [Laughs] And the third one was Aladdin. John and I are both into fantasy
, and it appealed to us. We had heard Howard [and Alan’s] score; we really liked the music. The main things that we changed were, in Howard’s version, Princess Jasmine was not a really sympathetic character. She was kind of spoiled, and Aladdin didn’t end up with her. Aladdin was part of a street gang of musicians; they had songs together: Babkak, Omar and Kassim. Aladdin had a mother originally, and in our version too.
Composer
ALAN MENKEN
[Our version] was more of a buddy story—very Old Hollywood, an exotic romp in the Arab world. We had this song called “Proud of Your Boy” that Aladdin sings to his mother. It was one of the many songs that were cut from the movie as it was developing.
Supervising animator for Jasmine
MARK HENN
I was just coming off of Beauty and the Beast and was animating Belle. Ron and John originally approached me and asked me to animate Aladdin’s mother. Eric Goldberg had come on board to [supervise animate] Genie, and his big influence was the caricatures of Al Hirschfeld. Character design-wise, that was an inspiration we were all looking at.
RON CLEMENTS
Howard’s Genie was kind of a Fats Waller character, and we really wanted to go with Robin Williams because we felt that we could do something that would be unique and take advantage of the animation. And Howard was cool with that. We actually wrote our script for Robin, hoping that he would do it because we couldn’t imagine anybody else.
For the directors, only Williams’s lightning-quick comedy style could bring to life the loquacious Genie. To win him over, Goldberg animated a sequence from one of Williams’s stand-up shows about schizophrenia. “What I did is animate the genie growing another head to argue with himself, and Robin just laughed,” Goldberg told EW in 2014. “He could see the potential of what the character could be. I’m sure it wasn’t the only factor, but then he signed the dotted line.” In an unprecedented casting coup for an animated feature at the time, Williams signed on (for scale pay: $75,000 instead of his usual average of about $8 million). But even as Aladdin was getting off the ground, a tragic undercurrent ran through the production: Ashman was dying of AIDS. He continued to work on both Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin until he died in March 1991. Following his death, British lyricist Tim Rice, who was collaborating with Disney on the Lion King soundtrack, stepped in to finish the music with Menken.
ALAN MENKEN
“Prince Ali”—I brought a keyboard to St. Vincent’s Hospital [in Manhattan], where Howard was getting treatment, and I was literally on his hospital bed working on the song. There was a song for Jafar called “Humiliate the Boy” [that was later cut]. It’s a jaunty little number in which Jafar gleefully humiliates and emasculates Aladdin, and those of us who knew Howard, it felt like there was a lot of what was going on in Howard’s own life that would play into that lyric.
Voice of Jafar
JONATHAN FREEMAN
They rushed me to the studio in January 1991 because Howard was not well and they wanted to demo “Humiliate the Boy.” It really was a lot of fun, and you can find it online in rough animation. But I have the dubious distinction of having recorded the last song that Howard wrote. I think about it occasionally. It’s very sad.
ALAN MENKEN
Howard died, and it was a very, very emotionally and logistically trying time. My fear was that after Howard, everything would be compromised and not be as good. But I was introduced to Tim Rice, who I had never met or worked with before, and of course it ended up being very fortuitous. When Tim and I wrote “A Whole New World,” the sense of rebirth of excitement was palpable.
Lyricist
TIM RICE
Alan came over to London and we wrote in my house. We got on very well, and I was already an admirer of Alan’s music so I was delighted that the principal tune we had to write [became] one of his very best: “A Whole New World.” It was all quite hurried. But in a way that was good. Sometimes a deadline is the thing that gets one going. It seemed to work the first time out. I mean, there were very few changes.
By the spring of 1991 most of the cast was in place, including Linda Larkin as Jasmine. Clements and Musker presented the entire movie on story reels (rough drawings with some temporary vocals and limited animation) to Katzenberg. To their horror, he demanded an overhaul of the entire film. His two biggest complaints: Aladdin’s mother was a waste of time, and the hero himself was a bore. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio—who would go on to write Shrek and the first four Pirates films—came in to help rework and shore up the script. But Aladdin’s release date remained locked in, which left less than two years to complete a movie that normally would take four. With that daunting deadline looming, the filmmaking team tried not to panic.
RON CLEMENTS
We showed the film, and Jeffrey just hated it. We always called it our Black Friday version, because we showed it to him on Holy Thursday and he made us come to work on Good Friday to really chew us out. We had to turn things around fast. It was scary. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio really helped a lot with that third version. Aladdin lost his mom. The romance became more of a centerpiece.
ALAN MENKEN
As often happens, the mother bit the dust. What is it with Disney and mothers? [Laughs] The sidekicks were cut, the romance was bumped up, the number of songs was cut—there was a lot in flux.
Voice of Jasmine
LINDA LARKIN
Jasmine was more of a minor character when I auditioned, and the part kept growing. I wasn’t a singer, but she didn’t have a song [at first]. And then they added [“A Whole New World”], and I thought, Oh, I’m getting fired for sure. That’s it. One time at the recording studio, I just burst into tears. I’m like, “I’m just afraid because I don’t sing that you guys aren’t going to want me to be your princess anymore.” The directors were like, “We are confident that you are going to be our princess. We’re going to fight for you.” And they did.
RON CLEMENTS
Jeffrey had some questions about Linda and actually did want to recast. We didn’t. We liked Linda a lot. We thought there was something very musical, very appealing about her voice. We finally convinced Jeffrey. We just needed to find [a singer] who could match her [speaking] voice. And Lea Salonga, who had won a Tony Award for Miss Saigon, matched perfectly. Another thing that changed was [Jafar’s bird sidekick Iago]. The original idea was that Iago would pretend to be this stupid parrot out in the open, but behind closed doors, he was a very suave, droll British type. We had just happened to see the movie Beverly Hills Cop II, and Gilbert Gottfried makes a strong impression. With Gilbert [as Iago], having another standup comedian who’s also a good improv actor helped keep the tone going so that when Robin came in, it wouldn’t feel like a whole different movie. The funny thing, though, was, the first time we recorded Gilbert Gottfried—and maybe I shouldn’t say this—but he was in New York and there was no video conferencing back then, so we didn’t see him. We’re hearing these guys talking, and we’re thinking, Where’s Gilbert? It turned out Gilbert actually puts that [squawking] voice on. It’s not quite his natural voice. We were talking to him and we didn’t even know it.
JONATHAN FREEMAN
Before they hired Gilbert, I was playing Iago. . . . But it’s great they got Gilbert to be the psychotic one because it helped me find a better performance [for Jafar]. It was a great coupling. He’s a lovely guy.
Because of the Gulf War, the setting changed from Baghdad to the fictional city of Agrabah. To make Aladdin a more compelling protagonist who could attract the attention of Jasmine, supervising animator Glen Keane transformed him from a boyish Michael J. Fox type to a shirtless hero based on a Top Gun-era Tom Cruise. After an extensive search, Scott Weinger was cast to voice him. Brad Kane would do Aladdin’s singing.
Voice of Aladdin
SCOTT WEINGER
I was working on a sitcom [CBS’s short-lived The Family Man] at the time. My mom said, “You have an audition for some cartoon.” [Laughs] Before I came aboard, A
laddin was younger, and you can freeze-frame certain musical sequences that they started working on before they cast their voice actor, me. There are a couple of quick shots where he looks like a little boy. I think I was 15 when I first auditioned. Robin Williams was my ultimate favorite actor. It’s not an easy thing to be a kid who was super-starstruck and couldn’t believe he was standing in that room with [his hero]. Robin was a legend and a superstar. He stole the show.
RON CLEMENTS
Robin would come in for four-hour sessions, and he worked so hard. He would embellish. He would improv. For example, the intro of Genie is probably about three minutes in the movie. Robin would keep doing that scene over and over again, even when we felt like we’ve got so much great stuff, more than we could possibly ever hope for. He would still have more ideas. So he would go, “Another take, another take.” For that scene he did, like, 25 takes, and by the end, it was 25 minutes long. It was like capturing lightning in a bottle all the time. . . . There’s hours of stuff that never made it into the movie.
ALAN MENKEN
Robin got every note down. He wanted to sing [“Friend Like Me”] like Fats Waller, and everyone patiently allowed me to get what I wanted. “Alan, are you happy now? Can we now let Robin do his thing?” I go, “Sure.” And then of course all heaven broke loose. They would run the track and Robin would just sail. He was a brilliant, brilliant talent. His mind just worked at breakneck speed. There’s so much in there, especially in “Prince Ali,” where all of the ad-libs were just crazy! [Laughs]
The Ultimate Guide to Aladdin Page 4
