Orientalism is a uniquely prickly and far-reaching topic in media analysis, and out of the countless artworks and stories that have contributed to constructing the West's stereotypical image of Asian cultures, Disney's "Aladdin" is a particularly crucial case study. An adaptation of a controversial, centuries-old tale whose popularization in Europe and the United States mirrors the very way in which Orientalism developed throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the 1992 Disney film is chock-full of exoticism, stereotypes, and racist reductions of Arabs into seething aggressive men and silent, oversexualized women.
The Guy Ritchie-directed 2019 remake attempted to fix all that — and increase the film's global box office potential — by doing away with harmful stereotypes and turning the film's made-up setting of Agrabah from a caricature into a respectful and agreeable celebration of "Arabia." But, in the process, it fell right into what many commentators saw as a different form of Orientalism — one in which the Middle East gets sapped of all specificity or texture, scrubbed of "controversial" elements, including Islam, which got a few passing references in the animated film but goes utterly unmentioned in the remake, and ultimately flattened into a fantastical, amusement-park version of itself, with boundaries of acceptability dictated by Western tastes.
The fact that the film liberally conflates Middle Eastern culture and Indian culture as though interchangeable, staging Bollywood-cribbing musical numbers and casting British Indian actress Naomi Scott as Jasmine, didn't help its case much either.
