Sofia Tartakovskaya- 09/20/2022
It was hard to elaborate for the full 15 minutes based on what we thought was really good or well done, but the discussion group agreed that for the time that it was made, it was pretty good production value. This is a children’s story so it gave us all nostalgia, but as I started paying more attention to the plot I noticed so much more. The interactions between all the characters I think was really well done, and I liked the banter between the Genie and everyone. The Genie’s character helped push along the whole story with his spunked out personality, and the story made the Genie have all the power. Whoever had the lamp would have the power to do whatever they want, so everyone fought over the lamp.
There are a lot of problematic things with the movie Aladdin. Disney created the first Disney Princess of color but basically made her complacent and not be able to change anything. The city of Agrabah was still starving and homeless but the movie was mostly based around the princess being saved by a random person she met stealing food. Both Aladdin and Jasmine met under dishonest circumstances and only found out the full truth later in the movie. The lying is problematic because it shows that they didn’t actually know each other fully and fell in love with each other under false pretenses. Throughout the whole movie, Jasmine just kept having problems and being taken and lied to, not only by Aladdin but also her father and Jafar, the movie’s Villain. Though he didn’t get far, Jafar tries to force Jasmine to be in love with him with the magic of the Genie, which is just one of the many ways the Genie and she could have been taken advantage of. If it wasn’t a kids movie, a villain with magic powers would have done a lot more damage than try to marry the princess. The ruler of the country was easily manipulated and taken under control of the villain, so he could have done a lot of stuff with that, but instead just tried to marry the princess. I think this movie is made for kids because it doesn’t go very in depth with story or character development. The problematic things like the age of marriage and the lying mostly goes over the kids heads, so all they see is a cool action movie with a happy ending.
