Disney’s beloved character was designed after Tom Cruise

The concept of reference points in animation is common if you know, but it may surprise people who have little experience or knowledge of the history of the medium. Even the biggest and most talented illustrators have to start somewhere in creating a character, and it’s no different from the craftsmen who work for Walt Disney Animation Studios. During the early periods of Disney Animation, reference points were often actors or live animals. In the case of “Bambi” and “Dumbo,” for example, if you look at the 1941 movie “The Reluctant Dragon” (a film that was strangely censored herself for one particular animated detail)You can literally see animators watching how deer and elephants move so they can hold those minute details correctly when designing the title characters.

As the world approached the 21st century, however, Disney animators began to look not only to real people, but specifically. famous Real people in designing some of their cinematic characters. In fact, one such example you might not know before was when Disney animators were inspired by none other than the man on an impossible mission himself, Tom Cruise, when settling to look for the title character In their 1992 animated adaptation of “Aladdin.” Yet, although Cruise is one of the most famous people in the world by then (and it is still today), it should be noted that if Disney animators had succeeded, it would not have been an idea in anyone. .

In order to unravel all this, we need to bring in a little context and background. As with many of the Disney Renaissance period we need to start the late composer Howard Ashman. Ashman and his composition partner Alan Menken came to the studio in the mid -1980s to help bring a new version of “The Little Mermaid” to life. Undoubtedly, the iconic and fantastic songs of that film had a huge role in its success, but it should also be noted that Ashman and Menken were co-believed for writing the film’s overall script as well, not just the music. So, naturally, because “The Little Mermaid” is an undeniable success in the box office and with critics (even netting a couple of Oscars along the way to Disney), Ashman and Menken were brought back for movies is the future, starting with a Disney masterpiece in 1991 “beauty and the beast.” But due to the long run between when animated titles are actually approved and completed, along with Ashman’s tragic death of AIDS in March 1991 (months before “Beauty and the Beast” was released in theaters), it was Disney has already begun to develop on the duo’s next program. Title: “Aladdin.” While we all know and love “Beauty and the Beast,” he may surprise some people to learn that Ashman only worked on that film so that he could give his passion in “Aladdin.”

For a number of reasons, the version of “Aladdin” we are all familiar with far from the one that Ashman had predicted before his death. Key characters and songs from taking it did not survive the final cut; Perhaps the most famous example is Aladdin’s mother, who was enough presence to lead to a song that had a second life in the Broadway musical, “Proud of Your Boy.” Not just that the arch of the film changed, as the mood did; The exact Aladdin plan also changed itself. For animators like Glen Keane, as detailed in Los Angeles Times profile Back in the fall of 1992, Cruise was not the initial design inspiration for Aladdin, but another young star of the period: Michael J. Fox. Keane also noted that his Aladdin was “short in nature but with a large ego and many dreams.” However, the then executive officer, Jeffrey Katzenberg, was disappointed by how the production was progressing and asked for changes of all kinds, including making Aladdin more volatile and slightly more mature by using “Top Gun” as a visual queue for the redesign. (We can argue about how Cruise and Fox from the 1992 period were probably very different as performers, of course.)

At the time, Keane noted that while watching Cruise fulfill his need for speed, he sees “confidence, look in the eyebrows, which gives him intensity and at the same time a smile with an impish look” It helps fill Aladdin to the correct proportions. It is worth wondering how much of the end result is feeling like Cruise Versus Fox, of course, both because the impish intensity of the film appears. Much more incorporated by Robin William’s Living Wires, Genie than by the hero of the title. (Also, the Aladdin we see sometimes feels so much like a teenage girl McFly-esque compared to a slightly older but not less immature and young fighter pilot.) What feels’ It is irreversible, when you watch this “Aladdin,” he feels much more modern than the location in which his story takes place, allowing audiences to be easier With its battles as an orphaned “rat street” in agrabah.

The size of the changes that an animated film can go through is often huge, and almost always in ways we do not realize until long after the film is released. Disney is no stranger to such creative battles, as executives like Katzenberg can often be able to pair in and make a long list of winding up requirements completely overhaul a film from top to bottom . In an ideal world, the audience does not even realize the uneven way to complete it when they watch the film. These days, if you like, you can get a glimpse behind the curtain; Consider the late “Into the Unknown”, a Disney multi-part document for making “Frozen II,” which makes it much clearer how the confusing arch of that film came to be. For “Aladdin,” however, his own creative success is much greater than the reality he could have looked very differently at one time, to a large extent because the hero did not seem confident and mature enough. Disney animators, if you like, had an impossible mission to fulfill when they were forced to redesign “Aladdin,” and were prepared to take the challenge, thankfully.