ALADDIN

I always feel slightly uneasy reviewing cartoons. It is hard to intellectualise about a medium aimed squarely at children, in which all characters regularly defy every law of physics. It’s like being asked to write a thesis on Tom and Jerry, clearly a cartoon in which violence is used to represent the insecurity of western male heterosexual bonding. Or maybe not.

Usually I just ignore them, or give them to my kids to write reviews for me. Unfortunately, the last time I tried that, the 11-year-old demanded payment and bugged me until I gave him a cheque. And Aladdin is so hard to ignore. Building on the success of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, this triumph of traditional animation and hi-tech computers has been demolishing cat and mouse. It is the usual Americanised fairy tale, delivered at a sometimes overwhelmingly frenetic speed, with a sprinkling of cute talking animals and a virtuoso performance by a voice.

Robin Williams is probably the first living actor who can genuinely claim to have starred in a cartoon. Film has long struggled to find a format to make the most of his high-speed imagination, his extraordinary gift for comic improvisation. By removing him from the picture he has been curiously liberated: he could riff around the script and allow the animators to build in corresponding images later.

Just as Williams leaps from topic to topic and voice to voice, the Genie transforms from chat-show host to politician to Jack Nicholson. The animators are the first film-makers to have been able to keep up with Williams, and it pays off in spades. Forget his Oscar nominations for all that over-sentimental tosh he favours, this is Williams finest screen role.

And what else? Well, I sneaked a peak at a few other reviews of this film and I am reliably informed there is more to Aladdin than meets the eye. According to Sight and Sound, “the parallels between Desert Storm and the film’s subplot are too obvious to be ignored: feudal sultan, complete with starving minions, under threat from an evil menace, rescued by an Americanised genie,” who at one point, the reviewer notes, actually refers to “the new world order.” Sinister, or what?

Adam Mars Jones in The Independent paid close attention to the sexual undercurrent between Aladdin and the Genie, and the sexual role playing of Aladdin and the Princess, finding something disturbing in the Genie’s remark (after a hug) “I’m getting rather fond of you, not that I want to pick out curtains with you or anything.” ‘This surge of inhibited affection,’ Mars Jones wrote, ‘overcoming fear of a body of the same gender (and that in a medium where bodies have a compulsory innocence), with the anxiety displaced into humour – you have to be pretty grown up to understand that.’

Even the animators have got into the navel gazing. Mark Henn, the supervising animator for Princess Jasmine commented in an interview, “In the beginning I really struggled to understand who she was as a person.” I have that problem with a lot of women, Mark, but none of them are two dimensional drawings. Just buy her some flowers.

Aladdin is fast, furious and funny. And, oh, by the way, it’s a cartoon.