Live action remake of Aladdin? Good idea or bad idea? Plus tangents on Disney

My favorite Disney animated film is Aladdin.

Now that I'm an adult and I over-analyze cartoons I'm no longer sure Aladdin was objectively a great movie. See this movie came out when I was about ten year old. That was young enough to retain my childhood wonder but old enough to get most of the more nuanced jokes and references. Maybe nostalgia made this movie better. Though I do think it had the best sound track. It's the only one where I like ALL the songs though maybe I'll give props to Moulan which had a solid soundtrack. I'm pretty sure Moulan had a smaller portion of music than any other Disney movie. One of the things that made it a solid movie was that the music literally stopped when the plot got dark and serious. I haven't seen Moana yet, but so far I think Moulan is the only Disney movie where the heroine is an excellent role model. Maybe because Moulan is the only Disney princess that is not actually a princess.

So Disney made so much money on Beauty and the Beast that it's almost impossible for them to not make a live action remake of all their animated classics.

I hear the live action Jungle Book remake was good but I'm not going to watch it till it shows up on a streaming service I have. Basically when Disney gets their streaming service up, I'm going to sign up for one or two months a year, binge watch everything of interest, then unsubscribe.

So Will Smith is cast as the genie. I like Will Smith. He has done a lot of things I like. He also did After Earth and Suicide Squad. It wasn't Will Smith that ruined Suicide Squad (that took the work of many people), but I do hope After Earth teaches him to never write a screenplay a gain. That's on you, Will!.

He is one of the best contemporary actors today but he is not perfect. And following up on Robin Williams playing the genie would be very tough. Like following up on Heath Ledger's Joker performance only worse. While Heath Ledger is considered by a plurality of Batman fans as the best Joker, there were lots of Jokers. Robin Williams is the only genie people really remember.

If at all possible, you don't want to follow success, you want to follow failure.

 

Well.....

As I have kids I have watched a lot of cartoons lately so I feel qualified for this one.
Here are some notes:

- I really like the songs from Frozen. I also really like the characters, especially Anna (although she is a Princess) for several reasons. IMO one of the best Disney movies ever, in many regards
- Moana is nice. It is full of pop culture references, nice enough songs, and a few fun characters. And yeah the main heroine is not a princess. It is no Frozen but IMO it is one of the better Disney movies.
- I don't like Will Smith. I used to like him in his first movies but lately he comes across as too arrogant and self important, and the movies reflect it. That almost ruined iRobot for me, for example.
- I think it is unnecessary and kinda boring to make live action movies based on animated movies. Sure, some of them are entertaining, but I prefer original stuff to using old IPs.
- I never liked Aladdin, no clue why. Perhaps I just knew too much about the real culture (and stories) it is a caricature of, and disliked it for that reason

 

I really disliked the whole movie, and that's especially true for Will Smith.

It is OK to disagree about that, and also about Frozen. We just have very different taste concerning Disney movies I guess.

Oh btw: singing in animated (Disney and others) movies: yay or nay?
Me personally: Nay. In most movies I outright despise the songs and skip them when possible. There are very few I like, some are just good enough to be tolerable but I don't enjoy them.

 

Fun fact: I actually didn't dislike "Let it go" initially. By far not the best song from that movie but in the "tolerable" category for me.

....the first 20 times I heard it.
But I have a daughter who LOVES it. She is 3 and it is her favourite song.
Turns out that after the 200th time I don't like it anymore. At all.

 

That is... probably true but not very likely.
The more likely variant is that they lived in central Asia and may have themselves migrated west because of the Mongols.

But then... it is a Disney movie. Not a single one of them gets anything historical right. They "borrow" stuff from everywhere and warp it around until nothing fits together anymore. Basically all of their stories are rip-offs. Sometimes good ones though.
Examples are plenty.

 

Uhh...
I just watched a YouTube video about the origins of Disney movie stories (nothing new to me sadly) and realized that probably many people really don't know.

I know many of the originals from - actually pretty gruesome- children stories that some people still considered appropriate for children in the 80s (at least in Germany) but a quick search shows that some of them are apparently not as well known in other countries.
Some are based on novels from the 19th century or earlier.

So question for y'all:
Do you know some - or all of - the original stories that Disney used?

Hans Christian Andersen for example wrote
The Little Mermaid and The Snow Queen. And both don't end well.

Rapunzel, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and some others are Grimm Brothers stories, so those are very old and pretty grim.

Pinocchio was written in the 19th century and is incredibly violent.

Pocahontas is a real story. Not a nice one though.

Winnie Pooh is... outright sad. And so is the original Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Aladdin is based on One Thousand and One Nights, an old arabic collection of stories.

Peter Pan and the Jungle Book are also quite old. And quite different to the Disney version.


Many of the stories were changed in a rather extreme way. Some of the characters are even villains although in the originals they are the good guys, or vice versa.

 

I think this was a conservative makeover. If you re-watch the original Kaa sort of comes off a bit as a pervert. I think there were hoping it was less creepy with a female Kaa. Also, they were able to get a semi-famous female voice actress.

Well roughly 90% of movies are cash grabs. The remaining 10% are fishing for Oscars or are a passion project for a director or actor who is doing it for fun.

Frozen is commercially successful and Disney has had a dry spell of commercially successful animated movies. And it's well animated and has some catchy songs. Plus a song about cutting ice no one likes.

Frozen suffers upon scrutiny because the original fairy tale and if rumors are true the original screenplay made Elsa the villain. First Elsa left her kingdom with no rulers for about two years, then she froze her people for three years. Then she sang a song about how she didn't care about her responsibilities or the feelings of others. In some ways this is a story that is a metaphor for how a kingdom suffers when the king or queen goes mad and there is no one to reign in their excesses.

Then you mixed in a feel good story about sisterly love plus a will-they won't they romance. Wheeee! Plot holes and shifts in tone. There are more nitpicks but I will leave them out.

I liked iRobot. It's not the greatest movie ever but I found it entertaining. My friend tells me I have a low threshold for enjoying a movie.

I'll watch the remakes as long as I don't have to pay more than $2 or $3 to watch them. Ideally free.

I guess I was (and am) a huge mythology buff, so I didn't like Hercules for ignoring so much source material. Though I figured it wasn't just me because Hercules was less well-received, it's songs are not still sung, and it made a lot less money.

In this case Mulan is a victim of it's own excellence. I think the villain in this movie was one of the most realistic. If you overlook Eddie Murphy playing a small talking dragon, Mulan is the darkest and more realistic Disney movie besides maybe Hunchback of Notre Dame. Mulan fighting a much larger man seems less weird than Rapulnzel using her hair like a rope and grappling hook. Because of the realism of the setting, it seems unrealistic where Mulan beats a larger man whereas half of Merida's family turning into bears does not seem unrealistic.

I like that Mulan didn't wait on another character to save her. I especially like that she had to train to become strong. Unlike say a certain Star Wars heroine. In Frozen, both Anna and Elsa had a wide skill set for people who barely ever left their rooms. Including being able to drive a sled better than a man who group up in the snowy woods. Or a small bunny taking down much larger animals in a boxing match.

Certainly it was a good movie. It had it's flaws. The biggest was their metaphors were inconsistent. Perhaps Wisecrack went too deep but the movie suffered because they kept flip flopping. Are the herbivores being oppressed by an elitist predatory minority or are predators being oppressed by the numerous herbivores? The main plot was the scheme to demonize the predators BUT they wouldn't let up on the protagonist suffering for prejudices against bunnies.

You can have too much of anything.

Disney has made every story they get lighter and less gruesome.

Cinderella: The wicked stepmother told her daughters to mutilate their feet so they could fit the slipper. This almost worked but the blood gave them away.

Sleeping Beauty: The prince didn't just kiss her. She woke up with children.

Little Mermaid: Ariel was so unaccustomed to her new legs that every step was agony. When she failed to win the prince's love, the witch offered to break her curse if she murdered him. Ariel refused and turned to sea foam and died when the enchantment expired.

Pinocchio: The children turned into donkeys were sent to a glue factory and killed. Even in the animated movie, they never tried to rescue the other children or stop the crazy villain.

Rapulnzel: The witch stole Rapulnzel's hair to trick the prince and blind him.

Snow White was okay as far as I know. You can argue that a sleeping woman cannot give consent to being kissed but in this case it was more like resuscitating someone with CPR. Note that was Disney's first major animated movie, so they didn't think to twist it.

 

I like it!

Oh dear I even forgot about that movie. Yeah it was painful.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maghreb
The word basically means "west"



Oh and nice list of Disney changes @Scalenex
I'd like to add a few other fun ones:
- Kaa is a friend of Mowgli, not an enemy.

- in the original Hunchback basically everyone dies.

- Snow White is not cured by a kiss. The prince drops her casket and the apple part she bit off falls out of her mouth and she wakes up

- Pinocchio KILLS the talking cricket!

- Peter Pan is not really a good character. He is very chaotic though. He does stuff like killing some of his friends by switching sides during a battle, to "make it more interesting"