Walking the Line: A Feminist Reading of Gendered Orientations and Voice in Disney’s Aladdin Films (1992/2019)

Aladdin (2019), Disney’s live-action remake of its eponymous 1992 animation, attracted attention due to the female protagonist’s fleshed-out role and its apparent attunement to feminist issues. Starting from the observation that its source was drenched in patriarchal ideology, which purportedly renders the adaptation dissimilar, this essay adopts a feminist approach to read the two films alongside each other. It scrutinises the phenomenological, gendered ‘orientations’ the narratives advance, and the cognitive ‘cultural narratives’ informing them. Applying the same theoretical concepts and methodological tools to both movies, it aims to gauge their feminist calibre. The analysis reveals that the animation enacts a decidedly patriarchal worldview entailing the curtailment of female motility and voice. As for the remake, it demonstrates that the film explicitly engages with some of the antifeminist issues underpinning its source’s ideology. However, because it ultimately merely reverses its predecessor’s patriarchal constructs without dismantling them, the remake is better understood with the label ‘postfeminist.’