Cinema
Aladdin
(`U', Odeon Leicester Square; nationwide from 3 December)
Arabia, LA
Mark Steyn
Those catastrophic Euro Disney figures are not without their ironies. A company which got rich by importing European folk tales to the US is getting poorer by export- ing US pop culture to Europe. Meanwhile, in America, the ancient source material retains its potency, with both Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin breaking box-office records — no mean achievement in an age when kidvid culture has dwindled down to MTV's Beavis and Butt-Head (don't ask).
Even the songs — virtually irrelevant in the quarter-century from Jungle Book to Little Mermaid — are back on the hit parade, thanks to composer Alan Menken and lyricist Tim Rice (the British Oscar- winner who isn't Emma Thompson). Never mind the Academy Award, Rice, with his new collaborator Elton John, is actually in the trailer for the forthcoming Lion King an astonishing achievement at a company which famously disliked giving its songwrit- ers their due.
The big Menken/Rice number in Aladdin accompanies a magic carpet ride across the night sky: 'I can show you the world/Shin- ing, shimmering, splendid,' sings Aladdin, disguised as Prince Ali, to Princess Jas- mine. 'A whole new world/A new fantastic point of view. . . . ' If they ever make The Walt Disney Story, here's the theme song. Disney at its best did show us a whole new world (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty) or, anyway, our world from a new point of The milk s gone off, dear.' view (Bambi). Those eerie, disturbing Dis- ney classics create their own world and make us accept it on its own terms. John Musker and Ron Clements, producers, directors and co-writers of Aladdin, have plumped for the softer option: create a whole new world that's no more than the sum of a lot of old parts.
The opening sets the tone: 'Salaam,' beckons the narrator. 'Please, please, come closer.' The camera zooms in and crunches his nose. 'A little too close.' He invites us to 'come on down' and inspect the wares on his stall: 'Combination hookah and coffee-maker . . . thees eez thee famous Dead Sea Tupperware. . . . ' Two minutes in and, like panto in Scunthorpe, we're down to Tupperware jokes, game-show flim-flam and the catchphrase from The Price is Right. It's Euro Disney all over again. The setting may be Arabia, but it's wholly New World. Disney travel narrows the mind: Arabia is just like daytime TV.
The film's approach reaches its magnifi- cent apotheosis with the Genie, voiced by Robin Williams, who these days functions best as an animated cartoon. He's just doing his stand-up act, but no live-action director could keep up with his machine- gun vocal barrages. Luckily, Disney's ani- mators are quick on the draw and, for every aural impersonation, the Genie mutates into some ingenious, split-second sight gag. But what's all the technical expertise in service of? British grown-ups will get some of the voices (Schwarzeneg- ger) but not all (Arsenio Hall, Ed Sullivan, William F. Buckley Jnr, for Pete's sake). Polished as they are, they symbolise the shrinking of Disney ingenuity into its own corporate lamp. A magic carpet ride ought to be magical, not merely an excuse for Williams to do anachronistic stewardess routines, pointing out emergency exits and so on.
If Disney pulled all the stops out for the Genie, the principals are drawn with an economy bordering on the perfunctory. Jasmine, like Beauty before her, is an independent-minded woman of today, etc., to whom princes are a bunch of 'stuffed shirts'. Aladdin was apparently recruited from one of the more photogenic gangs in the LA riots — 'Gotta eat to live! Gotta steal to eat!' — but, naturally, he's a victim of society's failure to understand: `Riff-raff! Street rat!/I don't buy that/If only they'd look closer', he sighs, 'they'd find out there's so much more to me'.
But is there? How can Disney hope to expand its audiences' imaginations when its own is so constrained? It's a dismal failing of modern pop culture that the foreign can only be rendered in terms of familiar American archetypes. Indeed, the tendency to look at the world only through red- white-and-blue-coloured glasses is a dan- gerous delusion — and not just in movies. Disney makes the same mistake with Aladdin that President Clinton is making in Haiti — assuming they're just like us.
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