I can open your eyes,
Take you wonder by wonder,
Over, sideways and under
On a magic carpet ride.
A whole new world,
A new fantastic point of view . . .
A thrilling chase,
A wondrous place
For you and me.
THIS IS A LOVE SONG, OF COURSE. Aladdin the street rat is taking Princess Jasmine on a flight into the liberating skyland of first love. But the Tim Rice lyric, riding the lush carpet of Alan Menken's melody, also defines the sorcery of movie animation. Artists wave the wand of a pencil over a piece of paper and, like the most genial genie, create unbelievable sights, indescribable feelings. "Don't you dare close your eyes!/ A hundred thousand things to see!/ Hold your breath, it gets better!"
And it does, in the Disney comedy-adventure Aladdin, produced and directed by Ron Clements and John Musker. Boy meets, loses and gets Girl in an Arabian kingdom of cotton-candy palaces, tiger-mouthed pyramids, wicked viziers, larcenous monkeys, misanthropic parrots, a truly magic carpet and a genie who changes shapes and personalities faster than you can say . . . Robin Williams! An enthralling new world.
The old world -- the one of current Hollywood movies and TV shows -- is in disrepair. In its tatty bazaar, peddlers hawk worn-out notions as if the items held their former glamour. Hoary formulas (sci-fi, sitcom) near exhaustion, and a smoggy dusk shrouds the industry like crape.
But for animation, this is a Golden Age. Not since the 1940s -- with Pinocchio and Dumbo from Walt Disney and the great cartoon shorts by Tex Avery at MGM and by Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones at Warner Bros. -- has the form been so commercially successful and artistically exhilarating. Moreover, at a time when mass art is fragmented, even divisive -- when virtually no species of entertainment has universal appeal -- the hip, comic ingenuity and emotional breadth of the best cartoons reunite the consumers of popular culture with Hollywood's surest instinct to please in a vast Saturday matinee of the spirit.
On TV, the prime-time success of The Simpsons (the medium's best-written series, no question, no competition) and the cult appeal of Nickelodeon's gross-out, only slightly homoerotic Ren & Stimpy is matched in daytime slots by cartoon shows from Disney and Fox. In commercials and music videos, in Nintendo games and as a top-selling portion of the videocassette market, animation appeals both to adults nostalgic for their Roadrunner days and to ) kids, whose attention span just about carries them from one frenetic cartoon frame to the next. "Video has made children discriminating consumers of cartoons," says Simpsons creator Matt Groening. "My son's seen Bambi and Pinocchio countless times, so he won't put up with bad TV animation."