According to Musker, "The biggest challenge of the movie was to get the audience interested in Aladdin as a person and his dilemma. Despite all the slam-bang stuff with the Genie and the other characters, if you're not involved with the protagonist, the film will suffer."
Accepting the challenge of animating Aladdin was supervising animator Glen Keane, an 18-years Disney veteran whose most recent credits include supervising the Beast in "Beauty and the Beast", the magnificent golden eagle Marahute in "The Rescuers Down Under" and Ariel in "The Little Mermaid".
Combining the confidence, likability and physical traits of Tom Cruise, certain personality elements of Michael J. Fox, the fluid movements and style of rapper M.C. Hammer, along with his own sensibilities, Keane was able to get a strong sense of the Aladdin character. "This was an easier character for me to relate to than a mermaid or a beast," says Keane. "I pictured myself back in high school and thought about how I would act if there was some girl that I really liked. When Aladdin first sees Jasmine, he has to build up his confidence just to talk to her."
"Another thing that's fun to see in Aladdin is the change that the character goes through", continues Keane. "In the begining, he believes that he has this great destiny and that he can accomplish great things, but deep inside he doesn't believe that. He thinks that getting the magic lamp will give him the power to do it. But he discovers that it's not really the lamp or the Genie that's going to help him. This realization lets us know what kind of person he really is."
For Eric Golderg, the supervising animator of the Genie and the first animator to work on "Aladdin", reality wasn't as critical an issue but the assignment involved a similar amount of passion.
"Al Hirschfeld was a major influence in designing the Genie and many of the other characters in the film," says Goldberg. "His drawings have an elegance of style and a way of presentation that look simple even though they're not. His work ambodied the spirit and qualities that I was looking for. Rather than drawing a lot of anatomy, our approach was to be more graphic and make the lines much more simplified and curvy to give it a sense of freedom and spirit. Ultimately, the Genie looked like a curvy wisp of smoke. It was a perfect match for the "Hollywood Arabian" style that Richard Vander Wende came up with."
"Another source of inspiration for the Genie design was the work of animators Ward Kimball and Freddie Moore in the early Disney shorts," continues Goldberg. "Their characters had a great exuberance largely because they pared things down to the bare essentials. A leg line would lead into a shoe, wich would lead up the other leg to give the same kind of elegance that a Hirschfeld drawing has. It had a great deal of freedom of movement because the shapes were so simplified. That's what we wanted for the Genie."
The character of Jafar posed an entirely different set of challenges for supervising animator Andreas Deja, whose most recent credits include overseeing Gaston in "Beauty and the Beast" and King Triton in "The Little Mermaid".
"What excited me about this film and the character of Jafar was our experimentation with such a different style, " observes Deja. "Jafar is very elegant and drawn as if he's making a fashion statement. I looked at a lot of Erte designs in creating his look and also incorporated Hirschfeld's simplified approach. I tried to economize the lines and make them all flow towards his face. I also gave him a long face with very thick eyebrowns that framed his eyes and extended his turban to make him look even taller and more vertical. His beard provides an opportunity to add personality by twisting it when he is scheming. His moustache helps to frame his mouth and punch up the dialogue. His face itself is like a mask for his greed and ambition."
"Everyone knows someone like Jafar," says Deja. "He's the kind of guy who might lose his temper and fly into a rage, then suddenly catch himself and put himself back in order. He's really very proper and probably bathes about three times a day."
Mark Henn, the supervising animator responsible for Ariel in "The Little Mermaid" and Belle in "Beauty and the Beast", once again was assigned to the female lead on this film. At the risk of being fickle, he says that Jasmine is his favorite female character of the three. Henn is based at the animation studio at the Disney-MGM Studios in Florida, where over 100 artists contributed to "Aladdin".
"They each have a very distinct personality," says Henn of the three animated women in his life. "Jasmine is very different from the rest; a lot more feisty than Belle, and not as naive as Ariel. In the beginning I had to really struggle to understand who she was as a person. The breakthrough came when I thought about the way Aladdin describes her to the Genie. I can't remember one character describing another in such detail in one of our films before. I wrote down his description and taped it to my desk in front of me. From then on, I felt like I was just hanging on for the ride. She just really came to life. Linda Larkin's voice was also a great inspiration and I tried to match her energy and excitement in animating the character."
For his inspiration in animating the character of Iago, supervising animator Will Finn did a little homework by studying the pet birds that he and his wife own, especially their pet cockatoo, Angel. "It's a great big raucous bird with a personality at least as distinctive as Iago's," says Finn. "A bird paces around the cage almost like a stand-up comedian so when Gilbert Gottfried was cast I immediately had something fun to work with. Gilbert's voice really dictated what this character was going to look like, specifically with the shut eyes, large mouth and teeth showing all the time. The trick was to come up with a caricature rather than make it look like Gilbert in a parrot costume. His voice was great to animate to and after he recorded his lines, I couldn't wait to start drawing."
The film's other supervising animators are Duncan Marjoribanks, who handled the acrobatic actions and playful pranks for Aladdin's pet monkey Abu; Dave Pruiksma, the artist in charge of the Sultan's performance; Aaron Blaise, the Florida-based animator responsible for Rajah; and Randy Cartwright, who brought personality and charisma to a magic carpet.
© 1992 The Walt Disney Company
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