Disney's animated Arabian Nights tale, with politically enlightened Mediterranean noses and tawny complexions as well as a feministically flattered heroine. The obligatory songs sound even more dashed-off than the ones in the preceding year's Beauty and the Beast ("Riffraff! Street rat! I don't buy that!/ If only they'd look closer ..."), and the action in general seems overaccelerated and underappreciated -- more like the work of that Disney defector, Don Bluth, than of Disney itself. (The anthropomorphized Magic Carpet is nice, as is the Cave of Wonders with its leonine mouth. But not nice are the computer-animated backdrops that stand out from the principal characters like sore thumbs.) And while the Genie of the Lamp -- a genial Bluto with blue pigmentation -- affords infinite possibilities for the sorts of transmutations at which animation is unrivaled (see the early Betty Boops), these tend to be executed in a presto-change-o, blink-of-an-eye style rather than a liquidy smooth one. It has been posited that this style matches exactly the verbal style of Robin Williams, who provides the Genie's voice. But, apart from the objection that a voice as familiar as Robin Williams's will inevitably overpower and upstage an animated figure (just as Gilbert Gottfried's overpowers and upstages the pet parrot called Iago), why would we want our Ancient Arab to be doing impressions of the likes of Jack Nicholson, Rodney Dangerfield, Arsenio Hall, Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marx, and William F. Buckley? This ensures only that the movie will date much faster than those we might agree to call the "timeless classics" in the Disney library. Directed by John Musker and Ron Clements. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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