Aladdin is a cunning and handsome street urchin with a heart of gold who the audience of Disney’s Aladdin sees as a victim of his circumstances instead of through a dispositional explanatory lense. He’s the chosen one by the Cave of Wonders and is the only one who gains access to the all-powerful Genie. He is the valiant hero and helps rescue the kingdom of Agrabah. Jasmine is the most desired woman in all the land who has an independent mind and a strong desire to connect with her kingdom, and with Aladdin, she defeats Jafar. She turns down all the money and riches of the princes who came to court her to win her love. It is quite obvious that Aladdin and Jasmine are the “good guys” in the story, and Jafar, the sultan’s evil and greedy vizier, is clearly the bad guy, but even without ever seeing the movie or even hearing of Aladdin, anyone would be able to point them each out as such just by looking at them side by side. If you were to ask someone why they thought Jafar was evil, it would be hard to get a definitive answer because the decision is mostly made by the unconscious mental process that makes most miscellaneous decisions in our lives, and our developed schemas of good and bad characters have been built on what we have been fed about heroes, villains, and beauty standards all our lives.
Aladdin and Jasmine have small noses and round faces with chins that slide perfectly into a point. Jafar, on the other hand, has a long, stretched face with a large, hooked nose, dramatic facial hair and eyebrows, and a chin that sticks out beyond his face. It is worth mentioning that none of the characters display ethnic, curly hair, a characteristic common to the Middle East. Instead, they are animated to have tamed, untextured hair, resembling every other European princess created at that time. All these things seem insignificant, especially in a story that most of us are introduced to as children, but this representation is extremely damaging and helps to form the schemas that support our automatic characterization of “good” and “bad” characters.
Aladdin’s story is based in the Middle East, with characters of that descent, which you would think would possess characteristics of that region. However, it is only our malicious villain, Jafar, who has the prominent nose and chin that is most commonly associated with people from the Middle East, while our heroes Jasmine and Aladdin might as well be European with their small, delicate features and are only representing the Middle East because of their slightly darker skin. This type of character design plants a subconscious seed in the heads of everyone watching it that people who resemble Jafar are wicked and the people with features like Jasmine and Aladdin are the pretty, pure, and desirable personas. Given that most people from the Middle East, where the movie is supposedly set and where the people are said to be from, have Jafar’s more ethnic features, they are seen by Western culture as unattractive. Therefore, the only reason they do not look like Jasmine and Aladdin is because they are not the representation that they claim to be, but rather, most Middle Eastern children will find themselves looking more like Jafar and will think that they are inherently ugly. Media beyond Aladdin reaffirms the idea that only people with typical, Eurocentric features are wanted. This complex that grows inside every generation was not introduced by Aladdin, but it is one of the earliest examples we see in mainstream media of the ethnic features of the Middle East being disparaged and lauded as unpleasant. As a result, many children will have a deep-seated hatred and dislike of themselves that was placed there by society, and that grows into a festering self-esteem issue that is only worsened by every villain in the form of media that, again, has exaggerated ethnic features.
These “representations” in media create a cycle of abuse with their impossibility of escape as each generation unknowingly passes it down to the next. As children see that the villains share their features, they begin to see themselves as they see the villains. They are led to believe those behaviors are what they are destined for, which then reinforces the stereotypes in these movies. This causes the cycle to repeat. While it is not the same as what we have seen in the underlying racism of Aladdin, it has the same outcome, with the internalized and systematic racism being implanted within another generation, who will believe poorly in themselves. This pattern will continue until Middle Eastern features are used for a true form of representation that shows off the beauty we are constantly told by a brainwashed society that we don’t possess.
You have a very strong and interesting claim with a lot of great evidence to support it. Within reading your essay I feel you shifting between two different and yet also beautifully intertwined claims. One is the claim that imagery like Aladdin affects young children’s perception of their own beauty. The other is the idea that depictions like Aladdin cause young Middle Eastern children to think that all people who look like them are inherently bad or evil. these are both really interesting and strong ideas and I think they can both exist well in the same essay, but you may want to add little more distinction and connection between the two and make sure that both ideas are feeding into the same claim. I think that your main claim only really relates to one of these ideas (the issue of good and bad). You may want to rework your claim to include both of these ideas. You have a lot of evidence and analysis throughout your essay, specifically within your body paragraphs. One section of evidence I think could be moved, removed or changed is the exposition at the beginning about each of the characters. I think these descriptions could be shorter and more general here and then you could go into more detail later. Your introduction feels very heavy on evidence and it kind of buries your claim. I think this evidence could even just be shifted around and shortened a little bit.
The claim you make in your argument is really a good one. It was very clear that stereotyping in this movie leads to a negative self image to the people of middle eastern culture. In the opening paragraph where you go over the claim it was a very well thought out paragraph. However, there was a lot of evidence that could be used later on in the essay. Here you want to get the claim down to get the readers knowing sooner what this essay truly is about. My favorite claim brought out in this essay was towards the end where children of middle eastern culture will now see themselves as the bad guys. I thought this claim was astonishing because I would never see Aladdin being like this. It connects the stereotypes in the movie to the real world and how it actually harms society, not just talking about there are stereotypes and here they are. I just wish it was brought up sooner. In the essay it is in the last paragraph and towards the end. This can really help the essay if it is brought up sooner. It stood out to me at the end. When you bring up Jafar you can say that these kids will see themselves as the bad guys and American children will see them like that too.