Is Disney's Aladdin Racist?

Imagine if you will a Disney movie set in 17th century Madrid, Spain. The title appears and the opening song starts. The lyrics being performed by a Swiss yodelling master sings out European days. The scene pans over. Strangely, Madrid is portrayed as a winter paradise rather than the hotter climate that it normally is. In this whimsical tale, you'll have an Irish folk tale of the 11th century being depicted. The main heroes are two Russians, both scantily clad in traditional 15th century German clothing. Despite both being Russian and being set in Spain, and despite the extreme cold being depicted, the woman's clothing is completely dysfunctional and purely sexualized. Again, despite the cold and cultural inaccuracy outside the sea of snow and ice, again in Madrid, for some reason, you see the beautiful buildings of Madrid, all which are loosely balcon design, but have stereotypical Spanish colors in a bad attempt to make it more authentic. Despite the strange setting, they're all speaking modern French. Despite them speaking modern French, however, any mention of food is made in English solely rather than the French being used throughout the whole movie. Triple deep fried cheese and bacon hamburger. [Music] All non-main characters are incredibly offensive stereotypes of Germans as overly controlling. The French being overly effeminite and weak. The English having rotten teeth and no depiction of Spanish culture because the creators simply forgot. The ending is a touching romantic wedding that takes place in a Dutch windmill by a tulip farm because you know Spain has a lot of those. This film is widely acclaimed and beloved by third world children the whole world over and shapes their ideas of what Europe entirely is over the rest of their lives. Does any of this sound ridiculous? Well, that's exactly what happened with Aladdin, but the inverse. Even with that said, this is still more culturally accurate to Europe than Aladdin ever was to the regions it attempted to simulate. I would normally put footage here, but Disney will obliterate my channel from outer space for even using like 5 seconds, so I'll refrain. Regardless, as far as Western depictions of other cultures goes, their track record is mixed, to say the least. From depicting the genocidal encounter of Europeans with Native Americans in a rosy andromantic light in Pocahontas to the disgustingly and I mean disgustingly inaccurate, insensitive and outright racist depiction of well everything in Aladdin. Ah yes, Aladdin. Well, Aladin as it's properly pronounced. Known for its catchy tunes, funny Robin Williams quips, and of course, Disney's most sexualized depiction of a Disney princess before or since. What frequently flew over most Western audienc's heads was not only the rampant sexism of the movie, but the overbearing racism too. Let's take a step back and explain why. The movie made in 1992 was produced right at the tail end of the Gulf War being originally set in Baghdad that was quickly changed as a result of the overwhelming anti-raci sentiments of the American population. As a result, Baghdad became Agriba, a fictional depiction of the Orient. Its original setting is important because it lets us know that to the writers, of which none were even remotely related to the culture they were attempting to depict, every part of the Orient is interchangeable from Morocco to Bangladesh. In fact, they specifically used 19th century orientalist paintings in order to get the general feel of the Orient. Yes. Rather than visiting or better yet getting advice from people specialized in the field of architecture at different historical periods, they went to other white people who never visited Iraq, India, or anywhere else for what they thought those places looked like. Everything about the movie falls in a range of inaccuracy. The names, dress, architecture, actions, everything. We'll get into all that in a second. What exactly is the reason for this sort of depiction, though? Disney has been known to do at least a little better, especially when it comes to depictions of European folk stories. Well, it really starts and ends with orientalism. Orientalism as a formulated concept was developed and built upon primarily by Edward Sed in his seminal work titled unsurprisingly orientalism. Within this groundbreaking book, S describes the view of the west, the oident, and how it looks at and examines the east, the Orient. Essentially, rather than treating the massively diverse nations, cultures, religions, languages, and peoples of these far-flung lands, instead the imperial governor and those surviiled colonial power, European artists, quote unquote researchers, etc., simply draw up a caricature, their own mysticized view of those people's, religions, and lands, either attacking, critiquing, or simply being enamored by that madeup of false European depiction instead of reality. It makes a desire of not wanting to understand different societies and cultures and places a heavy-handed euroentrism at the top supposedly superior to all else. It doesn't apply to Arab lands only either. East Asia, the Caribbean, Western Africa, all cultures foreign to the oident can be orientalized, caricaturized, and subsequently either vilified or drowned in infantilizing fascination depending on the political moods of the time. Disney's Aladdin is replete with orientalism. In fact, I'd say it's one of the most popular examples of orientalism in practice. Let's take a look then, shall we? The very beginning of the movie starts off with the trope of oriental sounding music, fairly inaccurate, especially to the time and place being depicted over a desolate desert landscape. That too is a common trope. The communities being depicted are urban, meaning around cities across West Asia and North Africa, and especially in Iraq, where this was originally set. Cities are built on the coast or at rivers with lush greenery allowing for agricultural development and water sources. You know, the things that allow cities to develop in the first place. Baghdad itself is built on Louvian plane, but no, the entire movie is depicted as a tyrants impossible city in the middle of the desert. Let's continue. The lyrics begin with a lovely line where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face. Yeah, Disney changed this line, of course, a year later, but not the one right after, which states, "It's barbaric, but hey, it's home." Of course, playing off of some strange orientalized assumption about the barbaric and backward law, or better yet, lawlessness of these exotic and far away lands. This itself is reinforced in the movie when Jasmine ventures into the city and naively takes an apple from a stall where the merchant, assuming she's a thief, immediately brandishes a scimitar and almost chops off her hand for Aladdin comes to the rescue. What a strange and barbaric custom, right? Well, no. These were things courts handled. There was no vigilante justice. Courts were a very important part of Islamic civilization, and they kept records of everything. Hell, there's even a legal divorce record from the 12th century in Baghdad where a woman's stated reason for wanting a divorce was that her husband's member was too large. If you're wondering, she was granted the divorce. Anyways, for stealing, a series of over 50 conditions need to be met before the law would apply. Islamic law was built around preventing the crime with the actual punishment being rarely implemented, if at all. Regardless, after those lovely lyrics of how barbaric home is, you're immediately met with the confused architecture of the orientalist mind. Baghdad and urban Arab cities and beyond were cities of palm trees and greenery. But I dare you to find a single depiction of a tree in the city. In fact, after numerous attempts at subconsciously informing us that this is a supposedly Islamic land from an orientalist's mind, from sexualized ve to references to the Arabic word Allah rather than the English equivalent God, you don't see the historical fallop. Every single Islamic polity in history put a huge emphasis on the development and maintenance of gardens. Even whole books have been written on it. But no, to the Orientalist, the Orient is a land of contradiction. Vibrant cities in the middle of the desert with sensual maidens and seductive sites that are somehow both lewd and repressive and brutish men who are both effeminite and weak, but also must be prevented from entering the oidance land in fear of outperforming the civilized European man in the masculine faculties both with his own oriental women as well as with the oidental jewel, the civilized European woman. It's a nonsensical view, but that still doesn't stop them. Moving along, as you view the city, you cannot miss what's right in the center. A particularly bad reimagining of the Taj Mahal. A beautiful example of Mughal architecture of the 17th century, set in a city half a continent away, whose cultural tradition was not only different, but also set and depicted 500 years before the Taj Mahal was even built. With all that said, orientalism makes it so that you don't see something wrong with this picture, unless you're more familiar with the setting. Let me contextualize it a bit. The distance between Agra, where the Taj Mahal is, and Baghdad is around 3,300 km. The distance between Cairo and Stockholm is 3,400 km. The distance between Moscow and Madrid 2 is around 3,400 km. Now, imagine the Cairo Citadel in central Stockholm or St. Basil's Cathedral in downtown Madrid. You see how silly that looks? Yeah, this isn't even the beginning. Aside from the grossly inaccurate architecture, you immediately notice all non-main quote unquote good characters have very specific features, you could say. Be they comedic, slimy, evil, or just plain stupid. They all have caricaturured facial features with obnoxiously large noses, scraggly beards, darker skin, and with fully unpleasant accented English. None of which are Arab accents. By the way, this is what an Arab accent sounds like. We reached this agreement through a civilized, constructive, balanced dialogue with the Secretary General of the United Nations. And the implementation of this agreement is in the best interest of Iraq. Compare this with our heroes who are European in facial features, fully native in American English, and of standard non-brutish or monstrous figures. These things always reminded me of anti-Semitic depictions of Jews, and placing them side by side does reaffirm that view. It's not to say that it was intentional, but it betrays that in the orientalist's mind, inaccurate and stereotyped depictions of Arabs, Persians, Turks, Indians, etc. are embraced and depicted rather than shunned and removed as with Jews. The irony being that the way they used to depict Jews, they now depict Arabs. European anti-semitism never left. It just shifted to another member of the Seemetic family. Continuing on, you see strange clothing that just doesn't make sense. First of all, the eras and cultures represented are all over the place. Aladdin wears Turkish pants regularly worn by women of the 17th century. Numerous traders wear seek turbans, which makes no sense as Iraq never had a seek presence. And the setting that can be inferred from the movie was before seekism was even founded as a religion. Some wear Turkish fez common to the 19th and 20th centuries, including Aladdin himself. And this is all completely ignoring Jasmine's horrible, horrible choice of clothing. This overly sexualized depiction is nothing more than the usual orientalist trope of the exotic, extremely sensual and seductive mistresses of the East. It looks like a Halloween costume for God's sake. You see, the Orient is a place of contradiction. Both endlessly sexual and deburuous, but also extremely sexually oppressive. Look at her clothing. There's no way this makes sense to the modern Western audience. as it shouldn't because it's based off of the orientalist view of the enigmatic east. But more importantly, it makes absolutely no sense to the people that inhabit those lands, both present and past. I had an issue with this ever since I was a kid. They're all showing too much skin. This isn't a prudish argument. If they truly were in the desert climate that is depicted, it would make absolutely no sense to be so uncovered. From Jasmine to Aladdin to the guards, even orientalist paintings get this right sometimes, as evidenced here. People in hot, dry climates wear loose- fitting, flowing clothes that allows air to circulate, keeping you cool. Not only is it sexist in its sensual orient look, but it just looks stupid, they die of heat stroke. Moving on from this, the names barely make any sense. Aladdin works fine. Let's ignore the horrible mispronunciation. It's like calling someone named Michael Mitchel, but whatever. At least an attempt was made. Jasmine is supposed to be Yasmin, but again, whatever. We let it slide. Gazim, the goon from the beginning of the movie. Not only isn't Arabic, it isn't even a real name. Supposedly, it was inspired by the name Kasam, but why not just use the name Kasim, then I guess sounding more Arab was required, which it doesn't, incidentally. Raja is a Hindu name. Abu makes absolutely no sense. This has infuriated me since forever. Ignoring the misprononunciation in Arabic we can use au meaning the father of adu is something else to make a nickname for example abuhura means the father of a kitten for someone especially fond of cats for example of course it can be used as a kuna technine as well but that's not the usage they're going for obviously abu on its own not only makes no sense but also just sounds stupid combine this with random usage of Arabic and even Turkish words like ephendi a status marking name similar to sir in English and random substitutions of the towards God for the Arabic word Allah, which means the exact same thing, and you end up with a caricature of a language as well, instead of an attempt at a faithful depiction. Interesting to note that this doesn't happen in any other Disney movie. Also, it sounds really, really stupid. I haven't even touched on the heavily stereotyped depictions of the vizier, which parallels both scheming Arab and scheming Jew archetypes popular in orientalist media. The character's two-dimensionality, however, has more to do with bad writing on Disney's part than anything else, really. Aladdin has no character development until the very end. Jasmine is a caricature of what a woman is, easily falling for the let me show you the world nonsense, which somehow convinces the supposedly headstrong female lead to want to marry despite being so adamantly against the whole idea in the first place. This coupled with a fundamental misunderstanding and mischaracterization of the cultures, social and legal systems, people and everything else being presented, or better yet misrepresented makes for a thoroughly racist and unpleasant time. The worst part, it's an entertaining enough movie, at least for children. The issue is that those kids don't understand the fundamental issues with the film, and many have grown into adults with the same cartoonish idea of everything to do with Arabs. I've worked with people who came to my country having no idea we had trees and unironically thought we rode camels to and from school. This was an adult, supposedly educated medical professional. Sure, the movie may not be blatant song of the South, I sure do love slavery racism, but that might not actually be better. Aladdin's racism is far more insidious, pervasive, and most importantly, unquestioned. That's what makes it so problematic. This, of course, is reinforced by the bipartisan support for the bombing of Agraba, a fictional city in a fictional land by the American public. If this doesn't change your mind about how problematic Orientalism is, well, then I guess there's still more work to do. And that's all for this time. I could have done more with this, like relating it to the original folk story, but honestly, that wouldn't have done much for the video. Don't expect more of this. There are enough YouTube leftists doing culture critiques.

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ComradeHakim Twitter: @YaBoiHakim Disney's Aladdin was considered problematic by the people(s) it attempted to simulate ever since its release day. Sadly, this conversation never went anywhere, and barely made it to a wider public audience, if at all. In this video, I attempt to illustrate at least a few examples of the horribly orientalist and ridiculous caricature of over a dozen cultures that is Aladdin.