Hi, I'm John Musker, one of the co-writers, directors
and producers of the movie you are about to witness.
And this is Ron Clements. I'm a co-writer, director,
I guess a producer as well, along with John, of this movie.
And I am Amy Pell, co-producer of Aladdin,
and we want to welcome you on our journey through the Arabian desert.
CLEMENTS: It's been, actually, about over 10 years, I think,
since we actually worked on this movie,
so we will be commenting on this from a distance,
but I think things will hopefully come back as we start seeing them.
MUSKER: What we have here, obviously, is our title sequence,
which we did over Alan Menken and Howard Ashman's wonderful song
Arabian Nights,
and one of the conceits we had when we made this sequence
was we tried to really make it seem almost like one shot,
so we were disguising the transitions from shot to shot.
So even here we go down into the palace,
and then we push toward the palace.
But it was too far to get all the way to the palace in one shot,
as I recall, so we had to kind of jump a little bit here.
Let's see... How did we do this?
CLEMENTS: Yeah, there's a jump cut right here,
where the guy blows the flames.
MUSKER: We timed this to Alan's big cymbal crash here, of course.
CLEMENTS: Oh, and there's our names. That's exciting.
But, actually, there was a much longer version of this song.
This is actually the shortened version of Arabian Nights.
Originally, it was a much bigger song, and for various reasons,
length reasons, we ended up with just a small portion of the song.
MUSKER: The song was sung by Bruce Adler,
a great Broadway performer,
the spoken part here, of course, by Robin Williams.
PELL: And when we originally had the song, it was broken up into stanzas.
We revisited the narrator throughout the film at one point.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, the narrator originally was going
to play more of a role in the movie
and come back at various things.
MUSKER: The animation here was done by Duncan Marjoribanks,
who also did the character Abu the Monkey.
And he got done with the monkey in time to have time to do something else.
So the narrator generally was animated toward the end of the film.
CLEMENTS: I remember Duncan very, very much wanted to do the narrator
and was bartering anything he could do to get it.
PELL: And also, for Robin here, we brought in different props for him.
MUSKER: Right, this was a Jeffrey Katzenberg suggestion.
I had written some stuff, I think, and Jeffrey didn't like it
and he said, "This is what you gotta do, bring Robin in,"
"put him in a room full of junk"
"and have him improvise à la Jonathan Winters or something."
CLEMENTS: So we did that. He came in to do the narrator,
and we had tons of props and it was like a Robin routine.
He actually probably recorded about an hour of stuff
with the different props,
and what you have here is just a sampling
of the very best of that recording session.
PELL: Even just looking at the lamp
brings me back to Richard Vander Wende,
who was our production designer and brilliant at it.
But every detail, especially the lamp.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, Richard was a perfectionist and is a perfectionist.
MUSKER: And a genius, I think.
PELL: Absolutely. CLEMENTS: Yeah, yeah, very talented.
MUSKER: And we'll probably be talking about the color scheme
as we go through the film.
There's a lot of ideas in terms of the color
and how it's used and what the individual colors represented.
But, in basic terms,
I think blue represented water, which was good,
red represented heat, which was always bad,
and I think then there was gold, which was kind of bad
but was a little neutral, and green was a good color.
You can see how that plays throughout.
This sequence, there are some elements of this
that we were influenced by an early draft of the script by Linda Woolverton,
who had a sequence out in the desert like this,
and actually Don Yip, who is a very talented, tall Dutchman,
storyboarded this sequence, and a lot of the cinematics of this
Don created, as well as Rasoul Azadani, our head of layout.
There's a scene coming up that we think of Rasoul,
that's no longer in the movie.
But right here Jafar, for a long time, used to say, "Rasoul Azadani."
CLEMENTS: To make the cave open up,
and then some people got concerned
that it might mean something in Farsi or Arabic,
so we wound up having to lose it unfortunately.
MUSKER: It always got a good laugh at the employee screenings.
PELL: The Cave of Wonders is our first CG element in the film,
and Steven Goldberg was responsible for that.
MUSKER: Yeah, Steve Goldberg.
The rest of the treasure is yours, but the lamp is mine.
CLEMENTS: And I think this tiger's head that's here
is actually one of the first things of character animation done digitally.
It was done that way
so that the tiger's head would match the look of the backgrounds,
but it was all animated digitally.
(ECHOING RUMBLE)
MUSKER: T. Dan Hofstedt was the animator on this thief character.
He did a great job.
Again, Richard Vander Wende designed that tiger's head.
It was actually sculpted out of clay, and they did a 3-D digital scan of it
to try and put it into the computer.
It was a giant behemoth of a head there
that they actually took to a scanning place.
PELL: And we worked very hard to make sure that it didn't feel separate
from the 2-D element,
so we worked very hard to make it integrate into our 2-D world.
CLEMENTS: And Frank Welker, who did the monkey sounds of Abu
and who also did the monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark,
which is how we got him. But he also did the voice of the tiger here,
so that's two sides of Frank Welker.
PELL: He also did Rajah, the tiger.
CLEMENTS: He did. Right, right. He did Rajah as well. Multitalented guy.
PELL: Very, yes.
MUSKER: Now we also might mention here, Jafar.
The great animation on Jafar is Andreas Deja,
one of the great animators at the studio here,
who did Scar and various other characters.
Iago here is done by Will Finn, the very funny animator,
voiced by the inimitable Gilbert Gottfried.
Jeffrey did give us a little hard time with the voice.
(SHRILLY) "He sounds abrasive." (NORMAL VOICE) And we're like,
"Well, that can be entertaining in its own way."
PELL: Yes, there was concern about it being too anachronistic.
CLEMENTS: Although after we had cast Robin Williams as the Genie,
we felt we needed something fairly strong early on
to just balance the film out a bit,
so I think we felt Gilbert helped keep that sort of broad comedy aspect
and establish it early in the movie.
PELL: Jafar's voice was Jonathan Freeman,
a very talented actor.
MUSKER: Talented, and a guy who didn't fit the...
He looks nothing like Jafar.
PELL: He's a nice, nice gentleman, and a wonderful singer as well.
MUSKER: Right, terrific singer.
The voice of Aladdin here, Scott Weinger,
we went through a couple of different voices,
and Scott really had a great mix of just youthful exuberance
and cockiness, and likeability, appeal.
CLEMENTS: Howard Ashman, the lyricist on the movie
who wrote the songs with Alan Menken,
actually died early on in the beginning of this movie,
but he had written three songs before he died that are still in the movie,
Arabian Nights, the Genie's introductory song
and the Prince Ali song.
It's one of the cartoonier movies that Disney's made
in terms of the features, and it was designed to be cartoony
and it just seemed to fit the tone of that.
Eric was the very first animator on the movie,
and he had a lot of influence on the style of the movie
and the Hirschfeld aspect, which is a very fun, fluid way to draw,
very simple, very cartoony, I think very fun for the animators.
So I think that lent itself to that, too,
that there was something really fun about that.
And it's like, we are making a cartoon, you know?
There's nothing wrong with making a cartoon.
If you make a cartoon well, cartoons can be great.
(SINGING) ...snack, guys
Rip him open
MUSKER: So this song was based on a song that Howard and Alan did
called Babkak, Omar, Aladdin, Kasim,
which was about Aladdin and his three buddies.
It was a very jaunty tune,
and it didn't really work in the current storyline
'cause we'd cut those characters out.
But Ed Gombert, our head of story,
realized that, that would help us do this sort of action-y set piece thing
in a much jauntier way.
So he dug up the song that was already out of the movie
and said, "Why don't you use this as a template and storyboard it to that?"
Even though the lyrics didn't fit with this.
Then Tim Rice went back and rewrote the lyrics to work with the idea here.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, we were really struggling.
We had a few different versions that just didn't seem like they were working,
and then Ed really solved the problem.
PELL: Also, here we have Aladdin being the thief
And we spent many hours discussing how do we still make him...
MUSKER: Yeah, make him morally acceptable or likable or whatever.
PELL: Acceptable, absolutely.
MUSKER: The sort of Robin Hood-ness of all this was important.
MAIN GUARD: Get him!
PELL: So the scene at the end, after the song,
is imperative to answering that.
CLEMENTS: Right. The scene with the two little urchins
and the bread that Aladdin has stolen and the sharing with Abu,
and then he actually then shares his bread with the urchins,
as does Abu, that really helped,
I think, for us to really sympathize with Aladdin,
even though at the beginning of the movie,
his moral character may have a little loose edge to it.
But we realize it's just circumstances that he can't help.
And that's also addressed in the lyrics of the song here by Tim Rice,
as far as why Aladdin has no choice but to live this kind of life.
MUSKER: This is the scene that Amy was alluding to.
This scene was really put in to soften Aladdin's character
and to make it seem that he wasn't just out for himself,
but that his thievery... That he had a soft heart
and that he was in his own way sympathetic
to the plight of people less fortunate.
PELL: Well, he denies himself even here,
after working so hard for this piece of bread.
MUSKER: As opposed to Abu, who we said is a ruthless opportunist.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, Abu really wants to eat that bread,
but even Abu can't bring himself to go all the way after he sees
what Aladdin does.
MUSKER: He has to be dragged into it by a better impulse.
PELL: He still had the humorous element,
but his heart gave over in the end.
CLEMENTS: At least he got a bite.
I think there's something satisfying that at least Abu got a bite of that bread.
Ah, don't.
CLEMENTS: Now this is an interesting bit coming up.
PELL: Right there.
CLEMENTS: Those two guys on screen...
The guy with the red beard, who is kind of the roly-poly guy,
he actually resembles me quite a bit.
MUSKER: Yes, and the hatchet-faced guy
with the gray mustache is me,
John Musker, sort of
These are characters that Mike Cedeno animated of us there.
CLEMENTS: And we actually did the voices of the characters,
and it became a little Hitchcockian cameo in the movie,
once again, that no one really cared about except the staff enjoyed it,
and our relatives really, really got a kick out of it.
And we've since tried to do that in other movies,
somewhat less successfully, I think, but it worked nicely here.
MUSKER: This whole aspect of Aladdin as street rat and all that,
that was really pushed in the rewrites by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio.
I think that whole idea of him being sort of an urchin
who really wanted to validate himself
was pushed even more strongly by them.
CLEMENTS: And this scene with Prince Achmed,
I think, is a really critical thing in terms of Achmed's humiliation of Aladdin.
Where he says, "You are a worthless street rat"
"and basically that's all you'll ever be,"
that really helps us understand what Aladdin aspires to,
and that he is sort of trapped by his station in life,
which is a theme that goes throughout the movie.
All of the characters in the movie are trapped in some way,
and this is how we establish that.
MUSKER: I was gonna say, we struggled
with this song moment here a little bit,
and I think, ultimately, Alan came up with the idea
that it really would be a reprise,
because he didn't have enough time to state a whole, fresh song here.
So he wanted to draw on the melody that had already been established
and that was, I think, the right idea.
CLEMENTS: Yeah. Absolutely.
MUSKER: There just wasn't enough time.
CLEMENTS: Originally, we had done a version
where he did a whole, complete song,
a different song,
and it just couldn't sustain, at this point.
MUSKER: This palace, again, Richard Vander Wende's design,
and Jeffrey did harass us about them
looking like bagels on the top or something.
I've never been so insulted.
Oh, Prince Achmed. You're not leaving so soon, are you?
Good luck marrying her off.
PELL: You also had an underwear shot, which is almost...
CLEMENTS: Obligatory, yeah. PELL: obligatory, right.
CLEMENTS: And a lot of people have mentioned this doesn't make sense,
that the underwear in Rajah's mouth has the hearts on it.
Because if you physically ripped the prince's pants off,
it would be his pants, not his underwear.
PELL: It's funnier this way. That's why we did it.
MUSKER: So Princess Jasmine, Mark Henn was the animator,
a great animator who did Simba and Belle in Beauty and the Beast.
And Rajah was done by Aaron Blaise,
who more recently directed Brother Bear for Disney.
And the Sultan is Dave Pruiksma.
PELL: Also Mark Henn
and Aaron Blaise were both in Florida at the Florida studios,
so it was a challenge to keep all the characters on model.
I think that our staff was so terrific in being able to do that,
so that whether it was done in California or Florida,
they all look like the same character throughout the film.
CLEMENTS: I think the Florida studio was pretty new at this point,
and this was the first time, actually,
that we used some of the people in Florida in the actual production.
Not only did they do Jasmine and Rajah,
but there's a couple of sequences where they did everything in the movie.
PELL: I think the clean-up staff needs a lot of credit,
and that was led by Vera Lanpher.
And Renee Holt was in charge of Jasmine.
MUSKER: And they were really trying to get this calligraphic line,
this thick-and-thin line to the characters
to make it fit with calligraphy
and the Hirschfeldian line
that Eric Goldberg had really been pushing us toward.
CLEMENTS: There's no inking, but it's a beautiful thick-and-thin line
that really feels like an ink line, a beautiful calligraphic ink line.
MUSKER: This movie was done on the CAP system,
the computerized ink and paint system, so there are digital coloring used
and things to create an effect
of the multi-plane camera. The auto-focus thing
and a lot of the reflections you see in this sequence in the floor,
they were able to flop the images in the computer
and sort of blur them out and do all sorts of little mattes
and things like that to make it look as rich as it does.
Between Richard Vander Wende and Bill Perkins, the art director,
they were really cooking up ways
to soup up the production value throughout this.
Originally, the parrot was gonna have a British voice.
We wrote the parrot to have a British voice,
so he went from
this very mellifluous, British thing to... (MIMICKING PARROT SQUAWKING)
'Cause we thought it was a big contrast.
And then we saw Gilbert on something...
CLEMENTS: It was Beverly Hills Cop II, I think.
Just a little bit he did in that, but he made an impression.
And Douglas Seale does the voice of the Sultan,
the sort of befuddled sultan. I think he did a great job.
Also, in terms of Richard Vander Wende
and his color scheme, basically we loved everything,
all of Richard's color ideas, except possibly the outfit of Jafar.
The original outfit. I mean, he's still basically in reds and blacks,
but the original outfit was just bright red.
MUSKER: To go with his color scheme idea
of red being the color of evil.
In the desert, he had him completely in red,
and we thought he looked too much like a fire engine,
so we begged Richard to give him some black.
CLEMENTS: He relented, but that was about the only thing,
I think, where we questioned that.
But the use of color is just really amazing through the whole movie.
PELL: It's not only the color, but also lines.
When it's Jafar, it's elongated lines.
When you're with the Sultan, it's more round, cuddly.
CLEMENTS: They are very few straight lines in the whole movie,
which was part of the conceit of this Arabian calligraphic approach.
Almost everything is curves, except primarily Jafar.
MUSKER: We were trying to go for an analogy
of she's escaping from prison here,
so we had the long shadows of the cypress trees cast on the ground,
just to give you a subliminal prison effect here,
when she's leaving.
This whole idea of her going out into the city in disguise
came up more in the rewrite, after an earlier version
of the story had gotten mauled kind of,
and we had to come up with a different way to introduce the Princess
with Ted and Terry, again. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio,
who more recently did Pirates of the Caribbean, wrote that.
They suggested her really going out into the city
and mingling with the populace in this kind of Roman Holiday moment
that we have here now,
which really did give us a nice way to
contrast the secluded life of the Princess
with being out in the streets and meeting this kid of the streets here.
Okay, Abu. Go.
Try this.
MUSKER: This is a slight caricature of Zero Mostel here,
a little bit, that Dave Stephan animated.
(TAUNTING)
Why, you...
Get away from here, you cursed...
CLEMENTS: And Ellen Woodbury did the Abu through this.
Goodbye.
- Nice going, Abu. - (COOING)
MUSKER: We did let Abu have a few little words of English here and there,
just to make him communicate.
Pretty lady, buy a pot. No finer pot in brass or silver.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, we actually rigged this up in live action. It was very tricky.
MUSKER: This was a very difficult scene. It took a long time.
And a lot of it is what we call "on-ones",
which means Jasmine changes every frame, so she doesn't strobe.
So it took a lot of beautiful drawing by the clean-up department
to really carry it.
Mark Henn animates it.
CLEMENTS: Really beautiful animation that Mark did
throughout this bit, and Nik Ranieri.
MUSKER: Yeah, Nik Ranieri did those vendors
and this fire-breather here.
Nik, who also animated on Jafar,
and later... He had done Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast.
CLEMENTS: And he did Hades in Hercules, a memorable role.
Hello? Hello?
Oh, you must be hungry.
Here you go.
MUSKER: The voice of Jasmine here, Linda Larkin, we loved
the musical quality in her voice. She doesn't have a song,
but we thought her voice was very musical.
CLEMENTS: She does sing. MUSKER: We did have to fight for her,
'cause there were some questions about her voice,
'cause she does have an unusual voice.
But I'm married to a woman with an unusual voice,
so I voted for this one, and I really like what Linda did.
PELL: There was a tendency to go with what was known and comfortable,
and we really fought to have
a slightly different sound for our female lead.
MUSKER: This is a little wacky, just with the character design and whatnot,
'cause the guy on the left, his hands are bigger than their torsos.
And Chris Wahl animated these guys,
but we were able to kind of cheat it.
CLEMENTS: People from two different worlds.
MUSKER: It fits the cartoony style of the movie.
This movie has a cartoonier style than, really, most of the Disney films,
and it was really the Genie, actually, that was designed first
then that design was reflected
pretty much in all the character designs.
But there was some question about how cartoony you could go
and still maintain the believability in the story,
but we went pretty much, I think, as far as we felt that it was possible.
PELL: And Al Hirschfeld was an extreme resource for us.
MUSKER: Because of Eric Goldberg really pushing us in that direction.
He was a huge fan of Al Hirschfeld. More on that later.
PELL: Eric Goldberg, who designed and animated the Genie.
CLEMENTS: It's reflected mostly in the Genie,
but it is really in all the designs of the characters.
PELL: I want to mention Don Paul as well,
who was the head of effects,
and especially in a sequence like this where you see all the effects.
MUSKER: Yeah, this is a real effects showpiece of Don.
PELL: And if you look very closely,
the Persian influence on all the effects is extraordinary.
CLEMENTS: People don't realize
there's character animators who actually do the characters,
and effects animators do all the other animation, like lightning
and spark and water and fire and explosions.
MUSKER: The glow on Jafar there, which is nice.
CLEMENTS: And Don is a great effects animator
and did a wonderful job supervising all the effects in the movie.
Once again, some fairly bold color choices in this.
MUSKER: Yeah, they really wanted to go, Richard and Bill,
for the magenta sky here.
So, this is your first time in the marketplace, huh?
MUSKER: The animators, like on Aladdin and Jasmine,
there's a number of animators that worked on them
'cause there's so much footage,
so I think Tony de Rosa did a bunch of these scenes
under Glen Keane's supervision.
Hmm. I'm a fast learner.
PELL: We also liked that Jasmine was a strong, independent woman.
MUSKER: We did.
PELL: She chose to...
Whoa. Watch your head there.
Be careful.
MUSKER: We do try in this sequence, too,
to show that they both feel trapped,
they have this common bond that they're trapped,
Aladdin and her golden palace...
CLEMENTS: Yeah, earlier, there was the analogy
that Jasmine is like a bird in a cage,
and as we see her with the birds
and as the Sultan takes the bird from her, puts it back in the cage.
And then they both talk about, in a similar situation here,
how they are both trapped, but in very different ways.
She's a princess and he's kind of a street rat.
It's better than here.
You're always scraping for food and ducking the guards.
You're not free to make your own choices.
- Sometimes you feel so... - You're just...
- Trapped. - Trapped.
CLEMENTS: Glen Keane did a bunch of the animation on Aladdin,
so he came up with this whole little business here with the apple,
and rolling it off his arm and popping it over with his elbow.
Which is used later in the movie
as a way that Jasmine recognizes Aladdin.
My father's forcing me to get married.
CLEMENTS: Very romantic moment here, but a little comic relief
MUSKER: Counterpoint to it, yeah.
And we did show the movie to Steven Spielberg after it was done.
He saw it at a screening, we talked to him a little bit
and he said, yeah, whenever things got too gooey in the movie,
always cut to the monkey.
He thought that was a good idea. I don 't know if he would still say that.
CLEMENTS: It's been our experience that male leading men,
the straight leading men, are harder to do in animation
than the women.
MUSKER: You can slightly caricature the female movement
and look,
and the slight exaggeration just makes it more appealing.
But when you do that with the male figure, that slight exaggeration,
it's a little off-putting.
This character's name, I don't think he's ever mentioned in the move,
but we called him Rasoul, after our head of layout,
the mild-mannered Rasoul Azadani.
CLEMENTS: Although Rasoul is much nicer.
MUSKER: He is, yes.
He has better teeth. Rasoul has really good teeth.
PELL: He's very talented
because of all the different multi-planes in this movie.
MUSKER: Right, Rasoul has such a great cinematic sense,
so a lot of, particularly the action set pieces,
where the camera is,
the low eye-levels in a lot of these shots
and where the camera was stationed, the camera movement,
Rasoul was a huge influence in shaping all that.
CLEMENTS: Rasoul was great casting for this movie as head of layout,
since he is actually Iranian and from Isfahan in Iran,
and really knows the architecture and designs really, really well,
and actually went back to Iran in the early stages
as we were visually developing the movie, for research.
MUSKER: We did have a discussion with Richard on that,
I remember, 'cause, yeah, there was a fire going in the fireplace in the desert.
He's like, "That's the thematic idea."
"But, Richard, do we need the fire?"
He's like, "It's gotta be there." "Okay, we'll put the fire in."
PELL: And if you notice, again, here we are in the castle,
but we're in Jafar's part of it,
so it's the long lines, the deep red.
I can't breathe, Jafar.
CLEMENTS: Also, do you notice the little jewels on Jafar and on Jasmine?
That's a little Richard touch.
They each wear a jewel, as does the Sultan.
It's a very simple design,
but it beautifully makes this feeling of a very shiny jewel effect
achieved in a very simple way.
What do you mean?
Sadly, the boy's sentence has already been carried out.
CLEMENTS: Jasmine is dressed in the bluish-green,
because she's good.
- By beheading. - No.
PELL: And even the cinematography reflects the characters
and the angles that you look.
Jafar is often from below.
MUSKER: I mean, the basic Disney approach we grew up on
was to try and really tell the story visually,
so that even without the dialogue, you can follow the film,
and the camera movements and all that
would help communicate the story,
and that's what we really tried to do.
CLEMENTS: Particularly in scenes like that,
that are really dialogue scenes
that could be done as two characters just talking to each other.
There's a lot of thought put into visual storytelling,
to let the visuals communicate.
So that you could turn the sound off
and still know what's basically happening.
PELL: And I think Ron and John deserve a lot of credit for that.
That's Ron Musker.
MUSKER: As others have known to call us.
Please, get the names right.
MUSKER: This was a multi-plane shot,
with all these things moving in the foreground.
Although, again, it's through the CAP system,
so all these different levels can be composited in the computer.
So you've got this moving foreground that's moving at a different speed.
It was a nightmare of registration.
We call it "registration" when we have to fit a character"
to the background or to another character,
and his wrists and those stocks on the wall
were just very problematic
when they went to clean it up.
CLEMENTS: No one will give it a second thought, but it was tough.
MUSKER: And the shadows falling over him...
Oh, this was a hard thing.
CLEMENTS: Duncan Marjoribanks animated Abu in this section,
and I think one of his best scenes is coming up right here, yeah.
MUSKER: Duncan always had this thing about dressing in drag.
No, he didn't really, but he... Whatever. He's a tall Canadian.
PELL: If you see Duncan, he's a very manly, tall...
MUSKER: A manly, burly lumberjack of a Canadian guy.
CLEMENTS: Duncan also was the lead animator
on the crab in The Little Mermaid,
so this was his second sidekick for us.
PELL: He's a very big guy who does very petite characters.
CLEMENTS: Well, then I think he did the bad guy in Pocahontas,
just as a change of pace.
He got to do a large character.
MUSKER: This, who, actually, we learn is Jafar in disguise,
was animated by Kathy Zielinski,
who is really good at quirky, dark characters, villains.
She later did the villain in Hunchback of Notre Dame.
PELL: And Kathy was pregnant during this.
MUSKER: Kathy was pregnant during the making of this,
so she did her climatic scenes,
we'll see later in the film as she was about to give birth,
so it gave an added sense of urgency, I think, to the whole thing.
And Kathy, she had a thing about teeth in her scenes.
She always said, "The more teeth, the better."
Whoever has the gold makes the rules.
CLEMENTS: This is a great scene.
MUSKER: Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio did a lot of the writing in this scene,
which has to do with the whole,
"Whoever has the gold makes the rules."
That was Ted and Terry's line.
So we had a little smoke effect in the moonlight there,
just to keep it alive.
CLEMENTS: Big scope shots.
MUSKER: We didn't have that many wider shots,
so we wanted to have some in here before we cut in close.
CLEMENTS: Probably the reason we didn't have more scope shots like that
is our length problem, which is traditionally
we've always got more movie than we have time to tell,
so we're constantly looking for ways to shorten it.
Certainly that was true of Aladdin, I think.
It tends to be a fairly fast-paced movie,
and it would be nice to say that was totally an artistic choice.
I would say somewhat an artistic choice,
but somewhat, we just had more story than we had time.
PELL: We would have to have meetings where we'd go through it editorially
and say, "We have to cut out a second here, a second there,"
'cause, of course, that's a lot of animation
and we had to fit within a certain time period.
CLEMENTS: And animation is expensive,
so we were always looking for anything that we might be able to trim.
PELL: That big scope scene was great, though,
in showing the effects again,
and also, if you look, you can see the Persian...
MUSKER: Yeah, the little spirals are done in a Persian calligraphy.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, Don Paul really brought that consistency,
so that even things like smoke and fire,
they still always follow the same design elements.
PELL: Here is another of our computer-generated elements,
the Persian carpet.
MUSKER: Yeah, it was actually animated by Randy Cartwright,
and he would do it on paper,
actually, and then Tina Price would help wallpaper
our elaborate pattern on it to give it the Persian effect.
So it was a combination of hand-drawn and CG, in a way.
CLEMENTS: Once again, one of the early uses of CG for a character,
and it really could not have been done any other way.
It was a perfect use of that,
'cause no artist could have drawn that pattern frame by frame.
MUSKER: Just like any character, there's a lot of Randy in this.
Even though it's just a carpet, it's like a playing card.
But the way it sneaks around here and the playfulness of it
and the entertainment sense of it, that's really...
As well as the storyboards here, Ed Gombert did that really...
CLEMENTS: But it is really just, "I'm giving personality to a rectangle."
The carpet is a rectangle
and he doesn't speak, so it's totally a mimed performance.
It really shows a good demonstration of the animator's art,
where if you give something a personality, it comes alive.
MUSKER: These were the first scenes we did of the carpet in the movie.
Every character, you pick a certain sequence
that's going to establish its...
It may not necessarily be its first sequence that appears in the film,
but in this case, this was the first stuff we did on the carpet.
CLEMENTS: This was one of the first sequences to
go into production on the whole movie.
MUSKER: Right, 'cause it gave us all the...
You like to play off one character off another,
so this gave us a chance to play the monkey off Aladdin, off the carpet.
PELL: Also, Tina Price was experimenting with the texture mapping
to see how we could make it work.
MUSKER: Yeah, on the production system.
PELL: On the production system.
CLEMENTS: With anything new like that, there is a lot of question,
like, "Can it be done?"
"And if it can be done, is it viable within the production system?"
MUSKER: We did have to sell Jeffrey on the carpet 'cause he was like,
"Do I want to pay all that money for a bunch of squiggles?"
I remember was his quote. But we're like,
"When you see it, you'll like the squiggles. Trust us on this."
CLEMENTS: Yeah, there was also some question for a while
whether the carpet should talk or the monkey should talk.
Because in storyboards
they weren't really coming off
the way they do now in the finished film,
and we had to say, "Trust us, when they're animated,"
"there's going to be an added dimension that you're not getting yet."
And, certainly, once the carpet was animated,
it was much more obvious that the effect was gonna work.
PELL: This, also, is a sequence
that shows Richard's use of color and the contrast.
MUSKER: And Richard did design the walls of this place.
I remember him looking at crystallized caves and stuff.
He had stills of real caves, a very interesting thing.
This sequence, because it was one of the first in production,
there are some Aladdins that were animated very early on,
and then had to be cleaned up when we changed the model later on.
So you'll see some variation in the way he's drawn,
if you're really looking closely.
CLEMENTS: There definitely is a Raiders of the Lost Ark element,
and when we talked to Steven Spielberg,
we actually referred to that, were a little apologetic about that,
and he said, "I stole all that from other movies."
It's like, that's the way it works.
Abu! No!
This is really an effects tour de force
that we're getting into here once again with Don Paul and his crew.
Because this was one of the first sequences to go into production,
it had the luxury that you really could go all-out
in terms of effects.
MUSKER: So it's a combination of hand-drawn and computer effects.
The lava that you see on the ground is CG bubbles and texture there,
but there's other hand-drawn elements.
PELL: And James Tooley did these.
MUSKER: James Tooley coming up on this...
CLEMENTS: Roller coaster ride.
PELL: He did the computer-generated images in this.
MUSKER: And Ted Kierscey did a lot of the lava here,
the hand-drawn elements, the lava explosions. Ted did a lot of that.
PELL: And we sent the layout group and the effects group on...
MUSKER: We were trying to get Holt to sign that shot, but it's gone.
PELL: They went on a roller coaster ride with a camera and took pictures, too.
CLEMENTS: Rasoul actually went to Magic Mountain
through this part, to do research.
MUSKER: That's an amusement park here.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, in California.
- 'Cause the feeling was to be... - MUSKER: He left the lens cap on.
CLEMENTS: He had to go through twice because he left the lens cap on.
But we really wanted this to be kind of a roller coaster ride for the audience.
Some of these effects are pretty standard now,
but at the time they were innovative
and nothing like that had ever been done before.
This is probably the biggest effects sequence in the movie.
I always liked this shot of the tiger in,
and in terms of Aladdin's cue,
I think that the music through that is really good.
MUSKER: Yeah, Alan Menken did the underscore
for the movie as well as the songs,
so this gave him a chance to strut his action-adventure stuff here.
CLEMENTS: Two Academy Awards, for both Song and Score.
First give me the lamp.
(MANIACAL LAUGHTER)
CLEMENTS: We didn't talk earlier about that first shot of the lamp.
How many times we redid that first shot of the lamp.
MUSKER: I don't know what the problem was, but it took... Oh, that.
This one, too, when he was handing it off,
took a lot, but I can't remember why.
PELL: That was a discussion about the close-up of his eyes,
of Aladdin's eyes.
How to get at a more emotional moment in here.
Just by adding that close-up, it added just what was needed.
(ROARING)
MUSKER: We wanted this contrast after all that racket
to have this moment of near silence while the track disappears.
I... Where is it?
No.
No!
CLEMENTS: So this scene actually was one
of the last scenes added in the movie.
It wasn't there for a long time. It was a controversial scene.
I think Jeffrey wanted this scene particularly because
he felt we'd been away from Jasmine and the Sultan too long
and we needed to get back to that.
At the time, I think, because we were in such pressure on length,
we weren't sure it was necessary.
But in retrospect, I kind of feel like it was probably a good idea
- just to bring that thread back in. - MUSKER: Remind us of her story.
PELL: And I think more so this segment
is where you see Aladdin change in his design
'cause this was the earliest in production.
And Aladdin started out looking a little younger,
and we realized once Jasmine was designed and was looking so spiffy
that she wouldn't be attracted to a young-looking Aladdin,
so we aged him up.
CLEMENTS: Originally, we were thinking of him
as kind of a Michael J. Fox-type.
And then Jeffrey said, "No, he's Tom Cruise,"
and we kind of went through a little bit of a Tom Cruise makeover.
Of course, there's a lot of makeovers nowadays,
- but that was hard. - (PELL LAUGHING)
PELL: It wasn't an extreme makeover.
CLEMENTS: But the cleanup people had to remake him in this section.
And here he comes, the Genie of the Lamp.
MUSKER: And Eric Goldberg, the lead animator on the Genie,
who designed the Genie and helped sell the concept,
really pushed us in this... Al Hirschfeld,
the noted caricaturist of The New York Times,
Eric was a huge fan of his
and he really was influenced by that in designing the Genie,
and that fed into the other designs of the film as well.
CLEMENTS: I think Robin Williams... One of the first ideas
that we had on the movie was actually
that Robin Williams could be the voice of the Genie,
and it was a big question of whether we would be able to get him or not.
We actually wrote the first version of the script with Robin in mind.
A lot of people wonder, "How much of Robin was ad-libbed?"
And the truth is not a single word.
It was all written almost to the syllable and he followed the script exactly.
MUSKER: He's lying through his teeth.
CLEMENTS: It actually was written to begin with in a Robin form,
but then Robin would take the script as written
and do it a few times, and then start just playing with it
and improvising and coming up with so much material,
so much great material, of course.
Isn't that the Governor of California?
MUSKER: The Governator? Yeah.
Well, there were discussions at the beginning,
how close, when Robin does his celebrity voice,
should we caricature that person?
At first, we were more reticent,
and then we realized, upon prodding from Eric,
I think, that's part of the fun of all this, even though...
CLEMENTS: No one will know who Ed Sullivan is.
PELL: Yes, it doesn't matter. They're just a funny character.
CLEMENTS: But, yeah, we found people laughed
even if they didn't get the references.
MUSKER: And they could understand the cash register,
but they might not get Groucho Marx here, or You Bet Your Life.
So Robin singing here was a new thing for him.
I don't believe he had ever sung. Well, no, Popeye, he had sung,
but kind of the narrow band of musicality.
PELL: It wasn't the thing he was most comfortable with.
CLEMENTS: We were thinking, sure, Robin can sing
'cause he can imitate anything,
so all he has to do is imitate a singer,
but he was a little nervous about the singing
and really worked hard on it.
MUSKER: We worked with David Friedman, our musical director.
Robin would rehearse in the evenings after shooting all day
and doing test footage for Hook,
where he was hung on wires and exhausted.
He was staying at Barry Levinson's house in Beverly Hills, I think,
and we would go there at 9:00 or 10:00 at night with the piano,
and he'd be, "No, go ahead. That's fine."
CLEMENTS: He'd drag in just looking completely exhausted,
like the last thing he ever wanted to do was rehearse these songs,
but then he pulled this energy from somewhere
and he'd be great.
MUSKER: He threw himself into it, and the lyrics on this song are so great,
Howard Ashman lyrics,
just one gag after another on these lines.
It plays with food. Howard's lyrics often had fun with food jokes,
baklava and all this.
PELL: I also think one of the ways that you made Robin feel more comfortable
would be to say, "Sing it with an accent."
- Sing it again with a different accent. - MUSKER: He could shift personas.
We had a little section where he's a western guy
and he was Cab Calloway.
CLEMENTS: It was the same thing as the dialogue,
he would sing it different each time
and try different things each time he sang it.
PELL: We should also mention Danny Troob.
MUSKER: Danny Troob's orchestrations on this, and really...
CLEMENTS: Throughout the whole movie, but this is some of the...
MUSKER: The original demo of this was just a piano track,
and then Danny Troob went wild
with the big, brassy sound of this thing.
It became bigger in scale,
and so the visuals had to come up to the scale of his orchestra.
PELL: The music talent was amazing. Between Tim Rice
and Howard Ashman and Alan Menken and David Friedman and Danny Troob,
we really had an incredible, incredible team on this show.
- This took a lot of animation. - (CHUCKLING)
And this was the first sequence we did complete,
and it served as kind of motivation for all the animators on the picture
because it's so energetic and just works so well.
CLEMENTS: And it got shown outside of the studio a little bit.
I know that it was screened at CalArts and other places.
And I think it got a great reaction,
and just the reaction to this sequence really was encouraging to everybody,
that this whole idea might actually work.
MUSKER: We struggled with the end of the song, too,
trying to get the appropriate button for it.
I think it was Eric who just, "Just forget it."
"Just stick an applause sign in. He's so shameless, it's possible."
I'm like, "You know what? You're right. That's the way to do it."
Ah, almost.
MUSKER: Kids in the audience, that's William F. Buckley.
Like?
Ah, rule number one, I can't kill anybody.
So don't ask.
Rule number two.
MUSKER: And he does Peter Lorre coming up here,
but in this case, we just made him look like a big grotesque guy, and not...
You have a little Yiddish there.
You got the whole shebang there.
Eric had to explain to us the Yiddish, us Catholic yo-yos
that don't know what ponems are.
Other than that, you got it.
- Hmm. - Oh!
CLEMENTS: And this Robert De Niro bit
that the Genie goes into here was a lot longer,
and Robin was having so much fun with this.
It would have been funny to use the whole bit
'cause he went on this extended rant
that was one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen.
But we couldn't use the whole bit, but I think we still used enough of it
that you get it pretty well.
Did you rub my lamp?
Did you wake me up?
MUSKER: Robin's a friend of Robert De Niro.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, he had just done... What was the film with Robert De Niro?
PELL: Awakenings. CLEMENTS: Awakenings. Right.
So he had Robert De Niro on the brain.
MUSKER: We did see this film with Martin Scorsese in New York,
and were watching his reaction as this was going to come up
and he was laughing quite a bit.
So we thought it was okay that we had...
He was amused that it was Robert De Niro there.
PELL: I think it's important, while we're in the Sultan's castle,
while it's still under the Sultan's reign,
that you look at the color and the shapes
- of the pillars and the backgrounds. - MUSKER: The background painting.
CLEMENTS: This background is one of the most beautiful
backgrounds in the movie.
Ian Gooding, who we've worked with on other films as well,
painted this background.
MUSKER: Jasmine's outfit, this mint greenish outfit,
came from Persian miniatures. It was Richard's suggestion
to use that. We liked it. Of course Amy, who's sitting here, she won't mention it,
but she gave us such a hard time about that bare midriff,
but ultimately she...
CLEMENTS: This has sort of become a fashion statement.
PELL: And I think you did it.
- You affected fashion from... - MUSKER: Yeah, all these younger...
My daughter now has the bare midriff that I can't stand.
PELL: That's right. It's because of you.
MUSKER: I should've listened to you.
- (ALL LAUGHING) - Boy, was I wrong.
I had gotten that lamp.
"I will have the power to get rid of you."
MUSKER: When Gilbert did this imitation,
I couldn't believe how accurate that was.
(CHUCKLING)
Yes, that was Gilbert's tour de force,
him imitating Linda Larkin as Jasmine.
Only until she finds a chump husband.
Then she'll have us banished.
Or beheaded.
BOTH: Eww!
MUSKER: That's our homage to Lucille Ball there.
What if you were the chump husband?
What?
Okay, you marry...
MUSKER: When we recorded Gilbert, as I recall,
they had to back away the microphones
'cause he's a diminutive guy, but a powerful performer.
I become the sultan.
- The idea has merit. - Yes, merit. Yes.
And then we drop papa-in-law and the little woman off a cliff.
Yaaah!
CLEMENTS: The guys really enjoyed this laughing bit.
They actually recorded that with the two of them together.
MUSKER: They would laugh for about 15 minutes straight.
(CHUCKLING) They just went on and on.
MUSKER: This is our oasis sequence.
This is one of our simpler sequences, arguably,
in that we didn't have a lot of effects
- and it was a little simpler. - CLEMENTS: Rasoul was really happy
'cause the same background is used over and over and over.
But its fine, and it saved us some money,
and it's a nice background, so it looks great.
Now, about my three wishes.
CLEMENTS: This was, there again, Ted and Terry's thing
of how they could get out of that thing and not use up a wish.
It solved a big problem.
In the earlier version of Aladdin, we had the idea of unlimited wishes,
which is actually the way it is in the Arabian Nights story,
which was the idea that once you get a genie,
you can just wish for as many things as you want.
The good thing about that is from a visual fantasy standpoint,
you can do a lot.
You can do anything you want, as long as you want.
But I think rightfully, in terms of the adjustments to the story,
the three wishes seemed better and became important,
but the challenge was then to figure out ways within the three wishes
that we could still get all of the fantasy and magic.
By going with three wishes, it raised the stakes,
so each wish was really important.
It gave a rising action to the movie where the climax...
When you're down to your last wish, it would have more import.
The ending wouldn't work if he could have a million wishes.
The ending really became more powerful
when he only had one left to use.
MUSKER: He can't wish for more wishes,
that was one of the rules, so you couldn't get around it that way.
Such a thing would be greater than all the magic
and all the treasures...
CLEMENTS: The question with the Genie, as broad as he is,
I think we wanted the audience to feel
that this really meant something to him. His freedom was really important.
I think Robin did a good job of selling the sincerity of the things,
when the Genie had to be sincere.
- This is a great bit. - (CHUCKLING)
Robin threw that in, that little Pinocchio bit.
MUSKER: And Eric really picked up on it.
PELL: And it got so...
The laughter was so strong the first preview
that we actually had to add a few seconds to it.
MUSKER: You're right.
CLEMENTS: There were several places like that,
which I guess is a good problem to have,
but there were several cases after the first preview
where the audience laughed so hard at certain things,
you missed huge stretches of dialogue.
So we had to try to open things up,
so you could at least get some of it.
And this hair. Wow.
And her smile... (SIGHS)
Ami.
C'est l'amour.
But she's the princess.
To even have a chance, I'd have to be...
Hey, can you make me a prince?
CLEMENTS: This is actually some of the first Aladdin animation
done in the Tom Cruise mode,
as I remember, that this was where he got his makeover.
PELL: So we just passed...
MUSKER: Sebastian making a cameo?
PELL: You try to have some inside jokes.
CLEMENTS: And then Alan threw in a little homage to Under the Sea
in the underscore, too, which helped the audience get it.
MUSKER: In every animated film we've done,
we've tried to find an angle
that makes it better to do an animation than a live action.
Certainly in these days of digital stuff,
that line has gotten blurrier and blurrier.
But certainly then we said, "How can we do the Genie in a way"
"that they wouldn't have done in any of the"
"live-action film adaptations of it? What can we do with that character,"
"as well as others like the carpet, that you just wouldn't do?"
So that's why we really thought Robin was ideal, with his mimicry,
his speed, his quickness, his improvisational ability.
It's great to have an improviser in animation
because the voice is always recorded first,
so whatever he comes up with, we can write around and write to.
CLEMENTS: But it was risky, too, and I think we knew that
'cause we knew we were a little bit jumping off the cliff.
Because in order for that to work, the film had to be a comedy
and it had to have a tone that was a little bit looser, I think,
than any Disney film that had been done up to that point.
GENIE: He's got the outfit. He's got the elephant.
But we're not through yet.
Hang on to your turban, kid. We're gonna make you a star.
CLEMENTS: So if you look closely, you can see the Beast there.
We're just passing him now, from Beauty and the Beast.
MUSKER: Rewind that and look at it, you'll find the Beast in that pile of toys
that he just stacked up there.
a solution to the problem with your daughter.
Awk. The problem with your daughter.
Oh, really?
Right here.
CLEMENTS: I think Rasoul was in charge of any of the Arabic writing,
- like on this scroll. - MUSKER: Is it real? I don't remember.
CLEMENTS: I don't think the scroll is real,
but there are places where we do have real Arabic writing,
and we were always nervous that there might be something said
that someone in Iran might read and be concerned about, yes.
"A princess must then be wed to..."
Hmm. Interesting.
What? Who?
The royal vizier.
Why, that would be me.
CLEMENTS: No, I don't think that's genuine Arabic writing. (CHUCKLING)
MUSKER: No, I think it might... Maybe Rasoul did it.
I don't remember now.
We have our Don Paul effects here
with the squiggles in the snake's eyes.
I will order the princess to...
But you're so old.
The princess will marry me.
MUSKER: I did do a caricature of this scene
with Ron and I as the Sultan and Jafar,
talking about making changes to the movie.
CLEMENTS: Oh, yeah.
MUSKER: Now this is this great song that Howard and Alan...
Howard did write this new song for this version of Aladdin,
and threw everything from every Macy's Day Parade he could
into the whole production value of it.
CLEMENTS: We looked at Cleopatra and other things for inspiration.
MUSKER: There was originally a long intro
that we cut out and we went right to the song.
PELL: When we recorded this, Robin Williams came in
and he made up a song called Prince Jeffrey.
MUSKER: Oh, yeah, that's right. CLEMENTS: Oh, yes, that's right.
We should get that.
PELL: And he was making it up on the spot.
It was so impressive.
(GENIE SINGING) Prince Ali, fabulous he
CLEMENTS: Yeah, this was Howard Ashman.
This was, I think, the only song we used in the movie
that was written after Howard had gotten sick, but before he died.
But it's one of the best songs.
Even though Howard was very sick when he wrote this song,
he did a fantastic job on it.
(SINGING) Prince Ali, mighty is he Ali Ababwa
CLEMENTS: Sort of a press agent. The Genie is Aladdin's press agent
and is selling him to the people of Agrabah.
MUSKER: We divide the movie up, Ron and I do.
When we are directing it,
we pick different sequences in the film, so Ron did this one.
For example, I had done Friend Like Me,
this was Ron's tour de force here.
CLEMENTS: We both got to do one Genie song.
Has he got a zoo I'm telling you
It's a world-class menagerie
CLEMENTS: I'm sure all kids know who Ethel Merman is,
- but this is the Genie as Ethel Merman. - (CHUCKLING)
Robin would pretty much come up
with those different personalities himself,
and then we'd find visuals to go with it.
You can see that Jasmine is not shallow
- like a lot of.. - MUSKER: We are.
(SINGING) And to view them he charges no fee
He's generous So generous
He's got slaves He's got servants and flunkies
MUSKER: The lyrics to this are great.
But the production value was, yeah, a slight nightmare.
PELL: Yes, this was a major, major sequence
that kept everyone busy for a long time.
MUSKER: Many, many animators worked on this.
PELL: But worked out brilliantly.
CLEMENTS: Still one of the earlier things done
in the movie because it was a song.
Heard your princess Was a sight lovely to see
And that, good people, is why
MUSKER: The reflections in the floor, that production is really cool.
CLEMENTS: Howard always loved these little lyric things
where you go through a string of things,
and that's very Howard in terms of these quick images.
Yeah, lightning quick.
PELL: The list song.
CLEMENTS: Like Under the Sea, where he lists
all the different band of characters
and of fish.
Absolutely marvelous.
(CLEARS THROAT)
Your Majesty...
PELL: Prince Ali was such big production values,
and our production manager, Alice Dewey,
really helped coordinate all of it to get it done.
I mean, that's true of the whole movie.
MUSKER: One of the ways is, in a sequence like this
now playing, obviously it's fewer characters,
we didn't have tones on the characters. We did have shadows,
but we tried to restrict the amount of effects in a scene like this.
Just sneak as many as we could get away with in.
CLEMENTS: It was really a challenge 'cause budget-wise,
we were on a pretty strict budget,
particularly for the early part of the movie.
And so it was really trying to watch everything and pick our spots,
and Alice and Amy and everyone really helped
in terms of putting it where it counted
and in the most effective way possible.
MUSKER: This is, yes, our Masterpiece Theatre sequence
where we insisted on only getting
the most elevated gags possible in here.
PELL: One of my favorite gags is here, where Brian Ferguson
- animates Iago clunking in. - MUSKER: This one coming up here?
PELL: Yes, the one coming up. CLEMENTS: With the little Sultans?
PELL: The little Sultans around his head, yeah.
MUSKER: Yeah, Brian Ferguson, another Canadian,
tall, eccentric Canadian animator.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, this was Brian.
Out of the way. I'm coming in to land.
Jafar, watch this.
- Spectacular, Your Highness. - That was lovely.
MUSKER: That's fun with the voice actors, like on Douglas Seale,
when we just had him ad-lib all his... (WHOOPING) Flying around.
It's just fun for an actor, I think, on the recording stage
'cause they can be so free with their improv-y type stuff.
- I don't trust him, Sire. - Nonsense.
One thing I pride myself on, Jafar, I'm an excellent judge of character.
Oh, excellent judge. Yeah, sure. Not!
CLEMENTS: Even when we did that, I think we thought it would be David.
MUSKER: An homage to Wayne's World.
I think Mike Myers later sued the studio for...
No, he didn't really.
CLEMENTS: But that was something... PELL: It was a concern.
MUSKER: It was an issue, yeah.
Would it be too topical? Fortunately,
it still is as alive today as it ever was. Isn't it?
PELL: Not. MUSKER: Not.
- (ALL CHUCKLING) - Yeah, right, there you go.
I do like her standing up to him, and all these guys...
CLEMENTS: I like this scene of them all being awkward.
MUSKER: I think, actually, this was influenced
slightly by The Dick Van Dyke Show,
if any of you know the one with the dance hall sequence.
It's a long story, but check your Dick Van Dyke DVDs
and you'll see what I'm talking about.
I think it's time to say good-bye to Prince Abubu.
MUSKER: It was fun coming up with malaprops,
or just different names for him.
ALADDIN: What am I gonna do?
MUSKER: Here's our Rodney Dangerfield moment coming.
CLEMENTS: I think people still know who Rodney Dangerfield is.
I think this is a fun little bit with the chess,
the two of them playing chess.
MUSKER: Like in a sequence like this, we wrote this line,
"I can't believe it. I'm losing to a rug."
But he did it as Rodney,
and that was Robin's addition to the scene. The line.
CLEMENTS: And same as this.
He did this actually as John Wayne, as well as Jack.
MUSKER: Yeah, and then in the editing room,
we had things to play with.
No way.
MUSKER: And I think we made a good choice with Jack.
CLEMENTS: And this is my favorite gag that never got a laugh.
I thought, "Oh, this will be funny, he turns into a lamp."
For whatever reason, no laugh ever.
But it's a sure thing.
MUSKER: I will take responsibility for that.
I thought it would be funny.
CLEMENTS: A lamp on your head is a sure thing.
MUSKER: How could you be funnier than that?
Okay, I'm gonna go see her.
I just... I gotta be smooth...
PELL: I also like the chess game in the beginning
because it establishes the friendship between the Genie and...
MUSKER: Yeah, a little relationship between them.
PELL: And that continues in the end.
MUSKER: There's a canopy over her bed,
which is really meant to echo the birdcage
that's out in her garden, 'cause we had this whole visual analogy going
that Jasmine was a trapped bird waiting to get free.
And Bill Perkins, who was our art director, really came up
with that visual idea of really trying... Even within the palace,
that she was confined and she was really looking for a way out.
That was Bill's idea,
and he, throughout the film, looked for visual things to support the story.
CLEMENTS: Now we get to this... MUSKER: Urban myth.
CLEMENTS: The urban myth, the controversial thing
where there's a little bit of Aladdin ad-libbing offstage.
Many, many people believe that he says,
"Good teenagers take off their clothes", and he does not say that."
We did not record that. We would not record that.
But it is an urban myth.
It actually is an ad-lib that he...
MUSKER: Yeah, Scott Weinger, the actor, actually said,
"Good tiger. Take off. Scat. Go."
And it was all ad-Liby, improv stuff he did to fill in a gap
because we had, in fact, lengthened the scene,
and we needed more dialogue to continue through it.
So that's really what he's saying.
CLEMENTS: And Jasmine looks at him kind of
strangely right after you hear that line,
but the reason she looks at him strangely is
because his turban has come off, so she's actually thinking,
"He looks kind of familiar", in that brief glimpse of him without his turban."
It has nothing whatsoever to do with what he just said.
- punctual. - Punctual.
- Punctual? - Sorry.
- Uh, beautiful. - Nice recovery.
Hmm.
I'm rich, too, you know.
Yeah.
MUSKER: I like the interplay between the characters.
We were really trying to build up the romance here,
but this playful thing between the two of them,
and yet her being this strong, independent...
CLEMENTS: And then Genie as the bee adding
little comic buttons within the...
A prince like you.
CLEMENTS: This is nice animation.
stuffed shirt, swaggering peacock I've met.
Mayday! Mayday!
JASMINE: Just go jump off a balcony!
- What? - Stop her. Stop her!
- Want me to sting her? - Buzz off.
Okay, fine. But remember...
MUSKER: I seem to recall Robin doing a few off-color ad-libs here
and there that we did not use.
- CLEMENTS: Not just in this part. - (LAUGHING)
Throughout the movie there was a lot of, "You can't use that."
just some prize to be won.
You should be free to make your own choice.
I'll go now.
- No! - What? What?
How...
How are you doing that?
It's a magic carpet.
CLEMENTS: So here, I know we discussed it a lot,
we wanted to make sure
the audience would get the connection here,
so we staged it...
MUSKER: We tried to parallel the staging.
Yeah, the earlier scenes.
CLEMENTS: He says, "Do you trust me?"
Sure. Do you trust me?
CLEMENTS: And then we cut to her exactly like we did before,
and then we cut to him exactly like we did before.
Do they get it? I don't know.
MUSKER: And it's starting to dawn on her,
"I think there's something going on here."
CLEMENTS: Just a connection is made.
MUSKER: This song we're moving into,
A Whole New World was written by Alan with his new collaborator,
Tim Rice, and it was a really big moment, I think,
for Alan to write without Howard Ashman in this case.
And Tim really did a wonderful job on the lyrics in this,
and the feeling of this expansive...
We always envisioned a big, open-vista, visual
set piece here, but we didn't know what the musical statement would be.
PELL: And they were honored with the Oscar for this song.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, and Chris Montan, who was the music...
MUSKER: The maven of music. CLEMENTS: in terms of this, I know.
He was the first one to hear this,
and he told us before we ever heard the song
that they had come up with something amazing and memorable,
and it was gonna be great, and he was right.
PELL: I think the animation in this sequence
is beautiful. The backgrounds,
which Kathy Altieri was in charge of all the backgrounds.
The whole background team was just so talented.
MUSKER: It was a difficult movie to paint,
but they really rose to the challenge.
CLEMENTS: I remember her describing this one scene,
we wanted the effect of ice-cream clouds.
MUSKER: Yeah, the snow-cone effect,
and Scott Santoro's animation... Or was it Ed? It was Scott Santoro.
PELL: And also, as you said before,
even though you have romantic moments,
there's humor throughout
that cuts it every time it gets a little too sappy.
MUSKER: Yeah, and Lea Salonga did the vocals on this song.
Linda Larkin does not sing, or at least sing
with the kind of range you got here.
So Lea did an absolutely fantastic job with her soaring soprano.
CLEMENTS: Lea Salonga of Miss Saigon.
I guess she won a Tony for that.
MUSKER: Again, Brad Kane is doing the vocals for Aladdin.
Every moment red-letter
BOTH: I'll chase them anywhere
PELL: And yet they match the speaking voices beautifully.
It's seamless.
CLEMENTS: And there's Aladdin doing that little apple thing again.
- Once again. Now she knows. - MUSKER: Now it's like,
- "He's that guy." - CLEMENTS: Now she's sure.
That's where we'll be
A thrilling chase
MUSKER: I got to direct this song,
so I did try and make this thing work at the end. Time it to the music
so that this little thing on the carpet there,
just works with the little twinkle and the little fireworks introduced
to give it a little button at the end. Transition into the...
They've gone around the world,
and they've wound up in the Forbidden City.
It's The Last Emperor.
You're gonna see Bernardo Bertolucci climb over the back of that in a second.
I think there's fun stuff on the carpet in this
that Randy did that's a counterpoint.
Randy Cartwright animating the carpet. Just little reactions.
CLEMENTS: Some nice interplay with Aladdin and Jasmine.
MUSKER: Yeah, great stuff between the two of them.
Really good expressions.
PELL: This sequence, even in rough pencil animation,
was just beautiful to watch. The acting in it was so clear.
- And Mark Henn... - MUSKER: Mark Henn and Glen.
PELL: and Glen Keane did just a beautiful job on this.
The truth?
MUSKER: I like this next scene, "Yeah, come on."
The very distinctive reaction on her that I really love, the way Mark did that.
I sometimes dress as a commoner, um,
to escape the pressures of palace life.
MUSKER: And Scott's vocal performance in this, I think, is really fun.
And as well as Linda's.
All the elements came together,
and then the fireworks just gave this neat visual thing.
We had to go through this nightmare of coordination,
though, that I think Ron was more involved in than I was,
even though I think I did this sequence.
"Okay, we'll have blue in this scene,
"then we have to decide. This is red." And it's like, "Just let them do it."
But somehow it had to get mapped out,
which was a slight horror, as I recall.
'Cause a lot of them, the transitions went over cuts,
which was the big nightmare.
CLEMENTS: I think in terms of the musical score,
this is a really beautiful little...
MUSKER: Really tender violin thing.
The orchestrations, Danny Troob's and Alan's composing here,
really tender, sweet.
my handsome prince.
MUSKER: Tony Fucile was the animator who did these scenes,
really a wonderful draughtsman, and a fairly soulful kiss,
which I always thought was good, as kisses go.
And this look back, just like the little button to this. The music there.
PELL: I thought, storytelling-wise, this transition was just terrific.
She left with such an "Ah" feeling."
Yes!
CLEMENTS: A good date. (CHUCKLES)
For the first time in my life, things are starting to go right.
PELL: No, they're not.
(MUFFLED) Abu. Abu.
MUSKER: Yes, it's the ham-on-a-string sequence.
I'm afraid you've worn out your welcome, Prince Abubu.
(MUFFLED) Why, you...
Make sure he's never found.
CLEMENTS: A pretty nasty Jafar there.
This was actually a Ted and Terry idea, I think.
Originally, we'd had a different way that Aladdin was taken out,
but they wrote this idea of him being thrown into water,
and it's pretty uncomfortable, I think.
MUSKER: Of course, Robin here,
his whole mock German that he came up with on this was very funny.
That was not written to be German necessarily.
I think that was Robin's...
It's coming up, when he does his submarine thing later.
Al?
(GASPING) Al! Kid...
MUSKER: Actually, all this calling of Aladdin, "Al",
that was something Robin did ad-lib.
CLEMENTS: In the first session, he just threw that out.
MUSKER: And then we wrote to it. Once we heard it,
we decided, "Wait, we could actually take advantage of that"
"in terms of their relationship"
"and what Aladdin means versus Al in terms of the..."
Yeah, that's his homage to Sid Caesar, there, I think.
(COUGHING)
CLEMENTS: We get their relationship, a nice, warm moment between them.
I, uh...
I...
- Thanks, Genie. - Oh, Al.
I'm gettin' kind of fond of you, kid.
Not that I wanna pick out curtains or anything.
CLEMENTS: A little controversy about that line.
SULTAN: Jasmine.
Oh, Father, I just had the most wonderful...
PELL: At first the idea of not having a mother, we thought,
"No, every animated movie doesn't have the parents.
- "We don't wanna go that route." - MUSKER: Yeah, here we go again.
"My mother's gonna kill me."
PELL: But there is some emotional element
that worked, especially in terms of the street urchin.
MUSKER: Had to prove himself, the low self-esteem.
Or the guy who's really being denigrated on the street,
and he questions himself, even. "Am I really the guy they say I am?"
"And I don't think I am, and I'm going to prove to people I'm not."
CLEMENTS: And the diamond-in-the-rough thing
kind of resonates, I think.
Even among teenagers,
I think there's a thematic thing there that is valid.
On the surface, you can seem like you've really been dealt
a poor deck of cards,
but really what's inside is what's the most important.
Sometimes people in very unfortunate circumstances
can find that they are a diamond in the rough,
if they can find what's inside them that's valuable.
So I think that message...
MUSKER: And the basic message that came through in the rewrite,
stronger perhaps, was the whole, just sort of "Be yourself" idea."
PELL: Owning who you were.
MUSKER: Really celebrate who you are,
and don't try and be something else, which I think is thematically something
that people, including teenagers and kids, can relate to,
just because there's often pressures
to be something other than you really are.
PELL: I also think it's timeless,
and that's why Aladdin has stood the test of time.
MUSKER: I think the topicality, the humor and that,
that comes and goes and all that. But I think the themes work.
And I do still think it's still funny today. (CHUCKLING) So that helps.
CLEMENTS: Some nice Sultan animation in this,
and Douglas Seale, again,
did a nice bit here where he gets all excited.
PELL: David Pruiksma. MUSKER: And Barry Temple as well.
Barry Temple did some of this in here. Am I remembering that right?
CLEMENTS: Yeah.
Barry Temple was in Florida, so he actually, probably did this part.
PELL: But David Pruiksma was the lead for the character.
I didn't know if you had mentioned him earlier or not.
He was a major influence on the character.
CLEMENTS: Once again, the theme of being trapped.
I think we were pushing the idea that you can be trapped by success
as well as being trapped by failure.
MUSKER: Jonathan Freeman, the funny thing is,
we heard Jonathan Freeman's voice before we ever saw him.
He auditioned in New York for the part.
And we had no idea what he looked like.
We heard his name and we just thought,
"Wow, this is a cool, great dramatic voice,"
and we pictured this rail-thin,
whatever, Vincent Price. Whatever.
CLEMENTS: The voice fits the character
much more than it fits Jonathan Freeman.
MUSKER: And then we saw Jonathan Freeman, and he's handsome,
but a rounder-than-he-is-angular sort of a guy,
and yet he brought such a fun, oily...
He just went to town with the voice.
He was a stage actor,
so he brought a stage actor sense of timing and delivery and all that.
And that was really fun for Jafar.
Huzzah!
(SINGING) Hail the conquering hero
CLEMENTS: I wondered if this gag coming up was going to date,
but I think people will still get it.
This is the...
You've just won the heart of the princess.
What are you gonna do next?
CLEMENTS: They're still doing that?
MUSKER: Alan did the little musical quote there. That was fun.
(WHISPERING) Psst. Your line is...
MUSKER: This is probably the biggest breaking
of the plane we did in the movie,
where we said, "This is really a movie."
Reading from the script, and it was something you don't see
in most of the others, and it was a calculated thing.
CLEMENTS: We actually discuss that stuff,
even though it's taken for granted,
just how far can we go?
How far can we not go? And I think that actually is the farthest,
but we felt within that scene you could do it
and get away with it.
Our conceit with the Genie was basically that
because he was almost like a god-like figure
who transcended space and time,
he could know all the cultural references of any time,
and even though the other characters wouldn't get his humor at all,
he somehow thinks that's funny. But the idea that...
MUSKER: He's trying to entertain himself
CLEMENTS: Right, yeah, he's been cooped up for thousands of years,
and he has an audience now and he wants to be entertaining.
But he's read the script? I mean, that's...
PELL: I think you both achieved great emotion in this scene,
not only with the script, but the visual of his size going down.
MUSKER: I think it helped to have them to cut to, Abu as the elephant
and the carpet, to get a little bit more of an audience cue
and to get more sincerity and warmth in this.
PELL: And their disapproval coming through, too.
And also puts him alone, again.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, he's isolated now. He's gone past where he should be.
Robin's acting on that
and Scott's acting was very strong and sincere.
And there, again, that was Robin. When the sincere moments came,
he played them very straight, and that was very effective.
MUSKER: I remember, this sequence, we fooled around with a little bit.
Ed Gombert, I think, came up with the idea
of this bizarre Iago on the stilts, posing as a flamingo.
I seem to remember Ed cooking this up.
Or at least this gag. I can't remember.
- (GOOFY CHUCKLE) - You got a problem, Pinky?
Jerk.
- MUSKER: I'm still amused by that. - (PELL CHUCKLING)
Boy, Jafar's gonna be happy to see you.
(IMITATES JAFAR) "Excellent work, Iago."
Ah, go on.
"No, really. On a scale of one to 10, you are an 11 ."
MUSKER: Our homage to Gary Franklin.
I don't know, is Gary Franklin still around?
He was a film critic out here in Los Angeles who did a whole scale.
"On the Franklin scale of 1 to 10, 10 being best,"
"I give it a whatever."
Now there are many critics, I guess,
but Gary Franklin out here was the guy that used to do that.
CLEMENTS: I've always had parrots as pets,
and I testify that when they talk,
they are very good mimics.
They can actually do that.
MUSKER: In terms of their relationship here,
I do like this little sequence here,
even with her primping him.
I've gone through this myself,
somebody tries to put you together before you go onstage.
(CHEERING)
Look at them...
PELL: And it was her change of costume,
where she finally had her midriff covered.
CLEMENTS: You were happy then, I think, Amy, weren't you?
You know, Al, I'm getting really...
CLEMENTS: She actually does have a few changes, but it took a while.
will be played by a tall, dark and sinister ugly man.
- I am your master now. - I was afraid of that.
Genie, grant me my first wish.
MUSKER: This is where we did...
A lot of rewriting happened here from the earlier version
because, really, there was the whole idea of Jafar becoming Sultan
and using the limited wishes and all that.
CLEMENTS: This was really the trickiest part
of the movie in some ways to solve,
and I think we had the whole movie all together
while we were still struggling with the story in this part.
One of the big questions was, is Jafar going to have a song?
Can he have a song? We wanted...
Jonathan Freeman is such a great singer.
We wanted him to have a song.
There are actually several versions
that Alan wrote of a song here, along with Tim,
but all of them seemed like
it just slowed things down a little bit too much.
And then finally, I think, maybe it was Alan who came up
with just doing the reprise of the Prince Ali song here.
MUSKER: I think he felt that the length of time we were gonna devote
to this in song had to be brief enough
that he couldn't come up with a whole new melody
and have it land and not feel like an interruption.
So he used a reprise of Prince Ali.
This is Alan's idea to go back to that melody.
And I think that worked in terms of not asking the audience
to digest a whole new musical motif
CLEMENTS: At least we got to hear Jonathan sing for a little bit.
PELL: But the action is going so strong at this point,
you wanna know what's going on.
MUSKER: We're going into the third act here.
PELL: We needed to just keep it moving at this point.
MUSKER: Right, you couldn't stop for a song so much.
So it had to be a quicker story element.
Genie, stop!
Ladies and gentlemen...
CLEMENTS: That was, I think, the unique thing about Jafar,
was he was a malevolent guy behind the scenes.
The guy in power, the Sultan,
is a little bit inept and a little bit fumbling,
and it's really the guy behind it,
the number-two guy, who secretly wants to be number one.
And he's so officious and he's totally two-faced.
PELL: And, again, all the colors are changing.
Even the blues have tints of red.
(SINGING) Read my lips And come to grips with reality
MUSKER: My homage to Johnny Carson's coming up here,
with the golf swing at the end.
Whose lies were too good to last
CLEMENTS: We always intended for Jafar to have
a great villain song in the movie,
and we went from Humiliate the Boy to, I think, several other songs.
I think there were more versions of the Jafar villain song written for this
than anything else in the movie.
We finally settled on a shorter version of Jafar's villain song
that actually became just a reprise of the Prince Ali song.
Give me adequate cause
MUSKER: We wanted him to slap him just to make him that much nastier.
Give him a little physical abuse.
He is the bad guy after all.
Here's the Johnny Carson.
That was the end of his monologue all the time.
No one would care, but I...
CLEMENTS: Well, also, Iago does little Ed McMahon bits throughout,
so there's a lot of references.
PELL: That wonderful laugh at the end that Jonathan... It's so great.
CLEMENTS: He loved the laugh. Could not get enough of that.
MUSKER: This was animated in Florida, again.
Rob Bekuhrs was the CG supervisor in Florida
who animated this whole parapet tumbling down the slope.
We did want to get snow just 'cause we thought it was such a contrast
with the desert environment we had been in,
and you'd been in that for so long.
It was just nice to get away and to make it this exotic,
completely foreign locale.
CLEMENTS: So this was really some of the first sequences animated
by the Florida studio,
then they went on to do Mulan and Lilo & Stitch.
MUSKER: Yeah, full movies.
I mean, this was sequences within a movie,
and ultimately they did their own films and did a great job on those.
PELL: This was another very emotional moment,
when his best buddy is in danger.
It just adds to the humanity of Aladdin.
MUSKER: Right, makes him more likeable here.
Carpet.
MUSKER: Poor old carpet.
CLEMENTS: I think this gag coming up is based on a Buster Keaton bit.
MUSKER: Where the house falls around him,
and he manages to be standing.
It's great, one of the classic sight gags of the silent era.
- And we stole it. - (CHUCKLING)
CLEMENTS: Although here it's not so much a gag
as how clever Aladdin is to figure out...
How clever is he to watch that...
MUSKER: Richard Vander Wende was this unbelievable painter.
His command of light and shadow and reflected light
and his rendering skills were the most amazing thing.
CLEMENTS: Color. His color sensibility.
MUSKER: His colors were just exceptional.
CLEMENTS: Now everything is red, 'cause Jafar has taken over,
so the progression of red has consumed the movie at this point.
PELL: And also, the columns in the palace
are much more elongated than when the Sultan was there.
CLEMENTS: Yeah, he redesigned everything.
MUSKER: Sue Nichols, our storyboard artist, did this sequence,
and she did a lot of great stuff in the boards
that then we tried to get in the animation,
in terms of some of the attitudes here and the ideas.
His repellent attempts to take advantage of her.
I'll teach you some respect.
CLEMENTS: Nasty.
No. Genie.
I have decided to make my final wish.
MUSKER: A subdued Genie, something we haven't seen very much.
He's a beaten guy.
CLEMENTS: And the second appearance
of William F. Buckley is coming up.
MUSKER: You didn't have enough.
- There was a groundswell... - CLEMENTS: Yes, we gotta have more
- William F. Buckley. - of conservative Republicans
who wanted... The National Review readership was demanding, please.
CLEMENTS: I know when we first brought
Robin in and we worked with him,
there was some question if he should do some sort of persona
as the Genie in neutral.
If he should have an Arabian accent
or play him as a character.
I think we tried a few things, but it seemed really obvious
that, no, the Genie is Robin in his own mode.
You think of a personality like Robin,
if he were trapped in some sort of prison
for years and years and years, just what a sad thing that is,
just because of the energy and the impulse
to just entertain and be a bright light.
We have all the stuff we did with Robin that we didn't use.
I think there was probably more recorded for this sequence
than any other part of the movie.
JASMINE: Cute little gaps between your teeth.
MUSKER: We had him cheering Aladdin on.
He did all sorts of variations.
He was Patton. He was Sylvester Stallone.
A fight promoter.
CLEMENTS: We actually ran the whole sequence
for him in storyboard form,
and he would just do commentary.
MUSKER: Howard Cosell.
CLEMENTS: He did tons of totally hilarious stuff,
and in the end, we only used just a smidgen,
'cause it just felt like if we got too carried away with the Genie,
it would take away from the seriousness of the situation here.
MUSKER: Most horrifying scene in the movie there,
the kiss with the bad guy.
Fortunately, the monkey could react like we did.
CLEMENTS: Like the whole audience did.
MUSKER: The audience did give a big vocal reaction.
We were trying to work with their reaction and let it play out for a little bit.
Get the lamp.
No!
Ah, ah, ah, Princess. Your time is up.
MUSKER: He's doing his James Bond villain lines.
CLEMENTS: A lot of puns, a lot of puns. MUSKER: Just kill them with puns.
It always works.
Oh, nice shot, Jaf...
Don't toy with me.
MUSKER: Another one.
Abu!
JAFAR: Things are unraveling fast now...
MUSKER: (CHUCKLING) He won't stop. It's just...
Get the point?
(LAUGHING)
(STRAINING)
I'm just getting warmed up.
(LAUGHTER)
MUSKER: Okay. It's not Eugene O'Neill, all right?
CLEMENTS: It's Jafar's character. He just loves those.
Take my villain, please.
MUSKER: So now this is where we talk about
Kathy Zielinski animated this scene of him transitioning into a snake
just as she was about to give birth to her daughter Jennifer, I think.
Her water broke as she was animating this, I think, it was.
AMY: She handed in her final scene, and then her water broke.
MUSKER: All for the cause. Way to go, Kath.
(SINGING) Rick 'em, rack 'em, rock 'em, rake
Stick that sword into that snake
You stay out of this.
Jafar, Jafar, he's our man. If he can't do it... Great!
MUSKER: In films, often in the third act, you have what's called a ticking clock,
where you're trying to prevent something happening
and you're cutting to something that's marking time going by.
So here we have a literal one
with the hourglass, which helped achieve that.
PELL: A literal.
MUSKER: A literal or a silent ticking clock.
CLEMENTS: And then Andreas did
a lot of the climactic stuff with the snake.
MUSKER: Yeah, the snake. It was fun to reinterpret Jafar as this reptile.
Without the genie, boy, you're nothing.
PELL: I know that we were concerned at one point, how scary is it?
Is it too scary for kids?
But, ultimately, I think we found the balance.
MUSKER: We tried to leaven it with humor
and make a balance between the scariness and the humor.
Face it, Jafar. You're still just second best.
CLEMENTS: We were really worried as this was going in front
of the ratings board if we would get a PG rating.
And we were relieved when we got a G rating.
But at the same time a little disappointed. (LAUGHING)
Maybe this wasn't as powerful as we wanted it to be.
MUSKER: So we demanded a recount, didn't we?
Genie!
All right, your wish is my command. Way to go, Al.
CLEMENTS: Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, the writers,
came up with this bit at the end
where Aladdin tricks Jafar.
It was set up earlier in the movie, where they have the line,
"It's all part and parcel of the whole genie biz,"
"phenomenal cosmic powers... Itty bitty living space."
And Aladdin turns that on Jafar here.
So that the idea is that becoming a genie means
that you have to live in a lamp.
The universe is mine to command, to control!
MUSKER: It's the downside of being a genie.
CLEMENTS: It's his way of tricking Jafar.
You wanted to be a genie, you got it.
What?
And everything that goes with it.
CLEMENTS: It can't be fun being cooped up in that lamp
with Gilbert Gottfried for all eternity.
You're the genie. I don't want...
Itty bitty living space.
Al, you little genius, you.
MUSKER: The magic of animation restoration.
(CHUCKLING)
CLEMENTS: I know there was huge concern as we got into color timing
and doing our first release prints of the movie.
It was tricky to retain the color intensity,
particularly of some of the reds that we had.
I think Richard was concerned about it.
Even to maintain from answer print to release print,
which is what goes out into the theaters,
that there was danger of not getting the full effect.
Very nice musical bit here, too.
Some nice animation as we get into the finale.
about being a prince.
I know why you did.
Well, I guess...
PELL: There was a lot of discussion about the ending,
whether it should end in a wedding or not.
MUSKER: At one point, with Howard Ashman's original reprise,
there was a wedding, and people were invited or something,
but we weren't sure, like, "Should we do that or not?"
'Cause there was a question,
"Was the narrator gonna come back at the end?"
It was all back and forth.
Hey, it's only an eternity of servitude.
This is love.
Al, you're not gonna find another girl like her in a million years.
CLEMENTS: When we did this, we weren't expecting any sequels,
and there have been a couple video sequels
to Aladdin done since then.
Which is good because what happens at the end is vague.
I mean, it almost implies a wedding, but not completely.
MUSKER: Yeah, it's not explicit.
Genie, you're free.
MUSKER: We were trying to look for a visual symbol
to symbolize his freedom from his shackles,
and we came up relatively late,
I think, the idea of him losing his arm bracelets
to just somehow visually communicate
- that he was no longer imprisoned. - CLEMENTS: Which is good.
Although he loses a lot of his character
- without his arm bracelets. - (LAUGHTER)
Yeah, he's naked without his arm bracelets.
MUSKER: He looks sort of naked somehow. But so much freer.
Wish for the Nile. Try that.
- Uh, I wish for the Nile. - No way!
MUSKER: I remember just before the film was going to be released,
we were meeting on another project with Jeffrey,
and Ted and Terry were there, and Jeffrey was saying,
"I don't know, I got a good feeling about this."
"Everybody I talk to says they wanna go see it."
This was literally the week before it was gonna come out.
He's just like, "You never know on these things."
"Are the movie gods gonna smile on you or not?"
"But I'm telling you, everybody I see is curious about the movie"
"and they wanna go see it."
Me, too, Al.
CLEMENTS: This is, once again, the sincere Robin,
where he can pull back and really, really play it very warmly and sincere.
That's right.
You've certainly proven your worth as far as I'm concerned.
CLEMENTS: And in terms of everybody being trapped now,
the Genie has been freed of his trap
and Aladdin's been freed,
and now the Sultan, actually, we realize...
He realizes that he's imposed these rules on himself,
and he can change them if he wants to.
So in a way, it frees him from his trap, which frees Jasmine from her trap.
All the characters in the film that were trapped in some way
are now freed, except for Jafar, which is just as well.
This was Eric Goldberg's bit, dressing up the Genie.
Actually, the Genie is wearing the same outfit
that Robin Williams wears in a film that was done for Walt Disney World.
MUSKER: Back To Neverland, which was produced by Don Ernst,
who has produced this movie.
Our homage to Don Ernst there.
Jerry Rees directed the piece and Don Ernst produced it,
but that's what Robin was wearing in the live-action film
for the theme park.
CLEMENTS: And here's where we leave. We have this thing,
"Are they getting married or not?"
There's a big celebration, but we'll never know for sure.
MUSKER: In an earlier version of this that we previewed,
we did have a reprise finally here, with the narrator coming back and singing
Arabian Nights, and Jeffrey did give us a hard time, and rightly so.
He said, "Guys, your movie's over. Your movie's over."
"People were getting up. They were putting their coats on."
CLEMENTS: So we lost the idea that used to be here
that the narrator actually came back in the end,
and then turned into the Genie.
So, originally, the narrator was revealed
to be the Genie in the end of the movie.
But now he's not.
PELL: It's very hard to give up something before you think it's perfect.
And yet, we had a schedule to keep and we had a due date.
So it's very much about keeping everything moving
and reaching your schedule and getting everything done on time.
So the challenge was
to make the best movie possible in the time allotted.
Dan Hansen was also integral
to getting different areas coordinated into it,
especially in the earlier stages of layout and design.
MUSKER: This is the first movie, I think, where we created a new position
that subsequently is on a number of Disney films, the artistic coordinator,
where he really helped pull different departments together
to really make sure that it all worked in terms of
continuity and design issues.
CLEMENTS: And really solved problems
that involved both technical and creative problems,
in terms of just how to achieve things
and make sure it worked within a production process.
MUSKER: The clean-up animators on this have
done such a great job and, of course,
hand-drawn animation relies on the draughtsmanship
not only of the animators, but particularly of the clean-up department.
And this movie really couldn't have been what it was
without the people who really spent a lot of time crafting these drawings
and not just making the characters look proper, look well-drawn,
but have an aesthetic appeal, in addition to that.
CLEMENTS: A cartoonier movie, in some ways,
is easier to do than a more realistic movie,
but we complicated it here slightly
because even though we're a cartoony movie,
the line quality, we were asking for a very elaborate,
beautiful line quality in the clean-up. The staff really embraced that
and really made that work and they did just a beautiful job.
PELL: I think we had the créme de la créme of the artists.
It was the last film where all the team was all together.
MUSKER: Yeah, after this, there were more fragmented productions,
'cause they overlap things more.
So some people went off to do one film and others stayed on another film.
But we had an all-star team of people in many areas,
- both animation, layout... - CLEMENTS: Up to this point,
it was pretty much the same crew that worked on each film,
so most of the artists who worked on this film worked
on Beauty and the Beast, as well as Mermaid and Rescuers Down Under.
But after this, then it started to break up into more varying units
that were on different films going on simultaneously.
PELL: Also, we had an incredible production team
that have all gone on to either produce films or production manage.
We really had a terrific team all the way around.
MUSKER: But the great thing with the release too is
that it opened around Thanksgiving.
It did well at Thanksgiving, but then it played through Christmas,
and then, in fact, its best week, I think, was the week
either between Christmas and New Year's, or right around that time.
They added theaters, and so it just played out.
CLEMENTS: It wasn't a film nowadays that exploded in its opening.
It had a very good opening, but not like you see nowadays.
And it was in a smaller amount of theaters,
as it opened over Thanksgiving.
But it actually didn't become the number-one film
until around Christmastime,
and then it stayed number one for quite a few weeks in a row.
MUSKER: And, of course, it was exciting, as it was in the preview,
to see it cross over in terms of its audience.
That it wasn't just parents and kids.
I mean, there were single people that went to see it.
People went on dates to see it.
It really sort of helped expand the audience,
as Mermaid had
and Beauty and the Beast certainly did.
This did, and Lion King did as well.
It was great just to see
the stigma of animation being just a kid's medium
kind of get peeled away by these various films,
which, when we were making the film, certainly we just thought,
"We're making this movie for ourselves,"
"and we're trying to please ourselves in terms of our own taste"
"as an audience and hope that other people will like it."
CLEMENTS: We wanted it to be fun and entertaining
and for the audience to really have a good time.
I think they did, for the most part.
- This is Amy Pell. - And John Musker.
And Ron Clements, and goodbye
and thanks, everybody, for being with us for this.