Aladdin
Unless your name was Mel Blanc, a voice actor in Hollywood could enjoy relative anonymity, and although animation studios like Disney had been using celebrity voice actors for years – like Bob Newhart in The Rescuers, Vincent Price in The Great Mouse Detective and John Hurt in The Black Cauldron – they never really drew attention to themselves. That changed when the House of Mouse cast Robin Williams as the Genie in their adaptation of the best-known tale from One Thousand and One Nights, Aladdin. Even if Disney hadn’t shouted it at you from every movie poster and TV commercial that William was the Genie, you would have known anyway, and in the process the actor left an indelible mark on animation by being the only thing he could be: himself.
Like Williams himself, the Genie was larger than life, manic, easy with a song, and had a roulette wheel of celebrity impressions. Keeping up with a live action Williams is hard enough, but how was an animator’s pencil and brush supposed to capture that energy as Williams, a comedic ping-pong ball, bounced from one gag to another at break neck speed. A rarity for animation, Williams was allowed to ad lib many of the Genie’s scenes, and was given only scene and character descriptions to record dialogue from. Eric Goldberg, the animation supervisor for the Genie, would then cherry pick the best stuff and have the Genie animated to that. Given the precision required for big budget animation, such a process could have been a disaster, but instead it let a breath of fresh air into the sometimes stuffy halls of the vaunted Disney brand.
As for the performance itself, Williams went though about 50 different impressions, performed two of the film’s signature songs and stole almost every scene he was in. It didn’t matter that the kids wouldn’t know who Ed Sullivan or Rodney Dangerfield were, and it certainly didn’t matter that Williams was throwing around anachronisms like TV game shows, airline stewardesses, and “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” all that mattered was that Williams was keeping kids and parents alike in stitches nearly the whole time he was on screen. The result was a rare combination of character and talent that was so intertwined you didn’t know where one ended and the other began. It’s a benchmark that Disney and others have tried to reach for many times since the release of Aladdin, but rarely does it work as well.
– Adam A. Donaldson