It took Disney until their 31st animated feature film before they tackled stories from The Thousand and One Nights which, in retrospect, seems an odd delay – the stories, full of princess, genies and magic, may have had a decidedly adult bent at times, but had already been sufficiently sanitised to fit the Disney house style. When they finally tackled the stories with Aladdin, it formed part of their renaissance years and may qualify as one of the company’s most over-praised films. There’s little wrong with the film – though as we’ll see, it’s been dogged by controversy right from the start – and it’s as technically brilliant as its predecessors, The Little Mermaid (1989), The Rescuers Down Under (1990) and Beauty and the Beast (1991), but it feels rather lacking, not quite up to those exalted standards.

Jafar (voiced by Jonathan Freeman) is the cruel and ruthlessly ambitious royal vizier of the Middle Eastern city of Agrabah and is searching for a supposedly magical lamp in the Cave of Wonders. But the only person allowed to enter the cave is a “diamond in the rough” who Jafar comes to believe is a young street urchin named Aladdin (Scott Weiniger). Elsewhere, Princess Jasmine (Linda Larkin) is being forced to marry a prince instead of marrying for love and she flees the palace, running into Aladdin and his pet monkey Abu (Frank Welker). Aladdin is captured by the palace guards but released by a disguised Jafar and taken to the Abu cave where Aladdin helps to find the lamp, inadvertently freeing the Genie (Robin Williams) trapped inside. Using the Genie’s wishes, Aladdin is transformed into a prince in order to marry Jasmine. But Jafar is far from finished and while Aladdin tries to impress Jasmine, he also has to find a way to prevent Jafar from taking control of Agrabah.

One of the key issues here is that the film’s greatest asset, the tour-de-force performance from Williams, is also one of its liabilities. His larger-than-life freestyling tends to dominate the films and it’s invariably his scenes that people look back on with the most affection. Understandably so, but it masks the fact that there’s not a great deal else going on here of very much interest. It’s a curiously forgettable film. It’s many fans would of course disagree, but while it’s brilliantly made with some terrific set-pieces, the story and characters never grip as tightly as those from the earlier “renaissance” films. It’s enjoyable enough but… it doesn’t quite have the same “oomph” as The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast. The songs are more lacklustre (A Whole New World is the only really memorable one), the story a little threadbare and overly familiar, and the characters are hard to warm to.

in Jafar, it does at least have a one of the great Disney villains, played with an almost George Sanders-like sinister suaveness (one is reminded of Sanders’ Shere Khan in The Jungle Book (1967)) by Jonathan Freeman. He’s the only one of the voice cast that comes even close to matching the energy of Williams, who completely overshadows young leads Scott Weinger and Linda Larkin who are already handicapped by bland characters courtesy of John Musker, Ron Clements, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. Like it or not, Williams really is everything here and he makes the whole thing worthwhile. The animators seem to have been particularly inspired by his over-the-top outbursts, filling Genie with a real energy and vigour. It’s now looked at as the start of the vogue for casting big Hollywood stars in animation voice casts, a trend that still shows little sign of slowing down.

Williams fell out with Disney after they went back on an agreement over pay – Williams had agreed to work for “scale”, taking home $75,000 instead of the $8 million he was then able to command, but only if the company agreed to feature Genie in at least 25% of the advertising and not to use his name in commercials or likeness in advertising without paying him a fee. Having played fast and loose with these agreements, Disney angered Williams and he refused to return for the first sequel, though a public apology from new Disney boss Joe Roth opened the door for his return in the third film.

During the time that Disney was making Aladdin – and indeed for many years before – Richard Williams had been toiling over his own One Thousand and One Nights adaptation, the much troubled The Thief and the Cobbler (aka The Thief and the Princess, aka Arabian Knight), 31 years in the making, which was taken away from its director by distributors Warner Bros. who, will terrible ill-timing, released a compromised version the same year that Disney’s film came out. It led to unfounded and terribly ignorant accusations by some that Williams had simply ripped off Disney (the plots and characters are not dissimilar) which couldn’t be further from the truth.

But the biggest controversy surrounded the company’s decision to portray Aladdin and Jasmine as if they were mid-American white teenagers while the portrayals of the other characters, all just as Arabic as the leads, caused offense to many. Following complaints from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, insensitive lyrics in the opening song were changed and today the film is available on Disney+ with an opening disclaimer noting that the portrayals were “wrong then and wrong now” but that “rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.” That said, the opening song, Arabian Nights, retains the “new” lyrics.

Disney addressed some of the controversy surrounding the film with its 2019 live action remake that cast Egyptian-born Mena Massoud as Aladdin and black British actress Naomi Scott as Jasmine (Will Smith had the daunting task of stepping into Robin William’s shoes) which at least felt like more sensitive and appropriate casting. A live-action prequel, Genies, has been in development since before the remake but there’s been no sign of movement on that one for a while. There were though, two made-for-video animated sequels, The Return of Jafar (1994), with Dan “Homer Simpson” Castellaneta taking over as the genie, and Aladdin and the King of Thieves (1996), with Williams back in the role.

For all its faults, Aladdin still has many moments that impress, from the little in-jokes (look out for cameos from Beast, Sebastian the crab from The Little Mermaid, and Pinocchio) to the unimpeachable animation to some impressively scary stuff, as when Jafar transforms into a gigantic snake. And while the story is a little disappointing, it was another massive hit at the box office and for that generation of young fans who saw it at just the right age, of course it remains beyond almost any criticism. But something better was just around the corner as Disney were preparing to mix together elements from Hamlet, the Bible and Japanese anime pioneer Osamu Tezuka for an epic tale of set on the African savannah…