In the 1992 version of Aladdin, all of the 'bad guys' were portrayed with heavy, obnoxious Arabic accents, including, at times, the lead adversary 'Jafar', while the protagonists, Aladdin and princess Jasmine, both spoke with clear Americanised accents and had Western-looking features.
The film is an adaptation of a folktale from the 18th-century, Arabic-language collection, A Thousand and One Nights. Twenty-seven years ago, Disney's animated version of Aladdin was the highest-grossing film of 1992, earning over $346 million in worldwide box office revenue.
Mena Massoud (Aladdin) is Egyptian, Nasim Pedrad (Jasmine's handmaiden) and Navid Negahban (the Sultan) are Iranian and Marwan Kenzari (Jafar) is Tunisian. Interestingly though, Naomi Scott (Jasmine) is a British actress whose mom is Ugandan with Indian decent, neither of which are Middle Eastern.
While some claim Jasmine is Arab because the movie opens with a song called Arabian Nights, others believe that the architecture in Agrabah is clearly based on the Taj Mahal, making Jasmine Indian.
The original Aladdin story was actually set in China. Aladdin is one of the stories compiled in The Thousand and One Nights — a collection of Middle Eastern and Indian folk tales, however, it did not appear in the original Arabic text.
Arabic and Persian are very different languages as expressed for example in the grammar (from the concept of verbs, to grammatical gender, to plurals ) Yet, both languages have also some features in common: They are written from right to left, they use the same alphabet (mostly) and the vocabulary overlaps: up to 40% ...
Jafar is an old, Arabic man who seems to appear crippled from the scarceness of his body weight and poor conditioned teeth, he wears a long white beard, dark skin, a big nose, and tired eyes. In the movie he is made out to be an evil character due to his appearance and Arabic dialect.
3. Aladdin doesn't come from Agrabah. In the both Galland's text and Richard Burton's popular 1885 English translation, Aladdin lives “in a city of the cities in China.” Illustrations of the tales from the Victorian era depict the story and its characters as Chinese.
Despite the setting of the film being in an Arabic mythical desert kingdom, Jafar, the villain, has a British accent. There is no reason for any character in the film to speak with a British accent, and thus one must assume it is done for an intended effect, similar to the choice of a British accent for Scar.
Princess Jasmine, a fictional character from Disney's animated film "Aladdin," is not explicitly identified as Indian in the movie. Instead, she is depicted as a resident of the fictional city of Agrabah, which is often seen as a blend of Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures and influences.
About this DVD: Mulan is a young Chinese woman who breaks tradition and joins the Imperial army, accompanied by her guardian dragon, Mushu, to battle an invading army. In Mulan 2, Mulan and Shang are engaged to be married and must journey to a distant city in a valiant quest to save their beloved empire.
On Oct. 15, Disney Plus introduced a new disclaimer that appears before older films like Dumbo (1941) and Aladdin (1992), warning viewers that the films include harmful stereotypes. The new message replaces the one that came with the original launch of Disney Plus late last year.
Ironically, the Agrabah Sultan's palace also resembles the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, despite being supposedly based in an Arabian country. The original Arabic folk tale of Aladdin was originally set in China, specifically an Islamic city in China (most likely an Uyghur kingdom in the Xinjiang region).
In the original animated film, the Sultan yells "Praise Allah" after discovering that his daughter, Jasmine, has finally found the man she wishes to marry. And Allah is also mentioned a few more times as the plot progresses, however the religious figure is not discussed in the remake.
Disney+ is committed to providing Closed Captioning (CC) or Subtitles and dubbing for a wide selection of our content. We support a wide spectrum of languages like English, Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian / Classical Arabic.
In Disney's nearly 100-year history, there has been only one Black Disney princess — Princess Tiana in “The Princess and the Frog,” a 2009 animated feature starring Anika Noni Rose. The singer Brandy starred in a 1997 made-for-TV film version of “Cinderella,” a remake of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.
Jafar displays narcissistic tendencies, his most obvious ones being his obsessive desire for power and sense of entitlement. However, his lust for power does not stem from a mere desire for authority (though this is a motivating factor), but rather an intolerance for subordination.
So it may come as a surprise to many to learn that Aladdin and his princess might actually be Chinese. In the original story, Aladdin is born to a poor tailor in “the capital of one of China's vast and wealthy kingdoms”.
However, as Jafar revels in his newfound phenomenal cosmic power, he finds out too late that Aladdin has tricked him into wasting his wish on becoming a genie, since genies are not free beings, and becomes trapped in a magic lamp of his own, which is sent into the Cave of Wonders by the Genie.
For the reasons listed above, among others, Arabic is a challenging language to learn. If you're an English speaker, you'll need to spend more hours studying Arabic than you would studying Spanish to get up to a similar level. But a harder language is not an unlearnable language.
Iran and Turkey are not Arab countries and their primary languages are Farsi and Turkish respectively. Arab countries have a rich diversity of ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities. These include Kurds, Armenians, Berbers and others. There are over 300 million Arabs.
