Today we focused on familiarizing ourselves with Disney's Aladdin (1992)movie and the original tale it is adapted from. During the beginning of the morning, we spent time writing blogs and/or reading our independent reading books. After that, we were introduced to the assignment that will be the culmination of all that we've learned during this A-term: a presentation. Then we watched Disney's Aladdin (1992) from which arose a lot of questions around Princess Jasmine, and comparisons between this tale and the Cinderella tale, since they're both rags to riches type stories.
When we came back from lunch we read about the original Aladdin tale. It's one of many tales from A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, a book that contains a number of various stories from Asia. We then read the original Aladdin tale called The Story of Aladdin, or The Wonderful Lamp. What I found most interesting about this story as compared to the other fairytales we've read, is that Aladdin starts out as a deeply flawed protagonist who due to extraordinary circumstances and luck learns and grows as he gains more knowledge. This is pretty different because in most of the other stories we don't really learn anything at all about the characters and they're totally stagnant throughout the story. Lastly, we read an article about the racism and controversy around the 1992 movie, and how it perpetuates a number of harmful racist stereotypes about West Asia.
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