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The studio was just regaining its animation stride in 1989 when lyricist Howard Ashman (who with Menken wrote the songs for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast before dying of AIDS last year) suggested a Disney cartoon musical of the Aladdin story. After he wrote six songs and a story treatment, Musker and Clements (The Adventures of the Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid) took over. But something was wrong with the story. "It just wasn't compelling," Katzenberg says. "Aladdin's journey didn't engage." At first, the hero had a mother with a personality forceful enough to overwhelm the callow hero. But then, every character and event did. "We would look at the story reels," Katzenberg said, "and even Jasmine was blowing him away." A year into development, the boss junked the script.
Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio made Aladdin "a little rougher, like a young Harrison Ford," and dispensed with the mother. Jasmine was also made stronger, and the Genie's wish capacity was reduced from "unlimited" to the traditional three.
These decisions were relatively simple to implement. But the drawing process is exacting, medieval labor, even in an era when computers can paint the backgrounds; an animator will spend a full day on a single second -- 24 drawings -- of character movement. To devise and execute the Genie's production number, A Friend like Me, supervising animator Eric Goldberg (the man in charge of the Genie's scenes) made perhaps 10,000 drawings.
Casting is as crucial a decision for cartoons as for live-action films. Aladdin's voice cast includes curmudgeonly comic Gilbert Gottfried as Jafar's parrot and Lea Salonga, the original Miss Saigon, as the singing voice of Jasmine. But the true inspiration was to have the Genie voiced by Williams, whose comedy routines pinball from one manic impression to another. Every time Williams would lurch into a new character, even if for a second, the Genie would assume that form. In five recording sessions spanning 15 months, Williams simply revolutionized cartoon voice acting. "Until now," Katzenberg notes, "we have been entertained by hearing the genius of how Robin's mind works. Now, like an erupting geyser, in full living color, we get to see him thinking."
In his half an hour onscreen, the Genie makes dozens of eyeblink metamorphoses: a Scotsman, a Scots dog, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senor Wences, Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marx, a French waiter, a turkey, the crows from Dumbo, Eddie (Rochester) Anderson, a rabbit, a dinosaur, William F. Buckley Jr., Robert De Niro, a stewardess, a bashful sheep, Pinocchio, a magician, a Jean Gabin-style Frenchman, Sebastian the crab from The Little Mermaid, Arsenio Hall, a finicky tailor, Walter Brennan, a TV parade host and hostess, Ethel Merman, Rodney Dangerfield, Jack Nicholson, a talking lampshade, a bee, a U- boat, a one-man band and a quartet of cheerleaders. Many of these apparitions show up in the Cab Callowayish A Friend like Me, a showstopper in which the Genie displays his awesome versatility.