Disney's Aladdin is a story about a street thief who finds a magic lamp, wishes to become a prince, and spends the rest of the film discovering that the wish was unnecessary. Aladdin is already brave, clever, kind, and resourceful before the Genie shows up. He shares his stolen bread with hungry children. He outsmarts the palace guards. He survives in a city that offers him nothing. The lamp does not give him qualities he lacks. It gives him a disguise that hides the qualities he has.

John Musker and Ron Clements, the film's directors, built Aladdin around the tension between identity and aspiration. Aladdin believes he needs to be a prince to deserve Jasmine. Jasmine has spent her entire life surrounded by princes and wants nothing to do with them. The irony is structural: the thing Aladdin thinks he needs to become is the thing Jasmine is trying to escape. Dr. Jack Zipes of the University of Minnesota, in his study of fairy-tale adaptation, has noted that the Aladdin story has been retold across cultures for centuries, and Disney's version strips the tale to its most American core: the belief that who you are is less important than who you can convince people you are.

The Genie and the Cage

The Genie is phenomenal cosmic power in an itty-bitty living space, and that description applies to Aladdin as well. Both are trapped. The Genie is bound to the lamp. Aladdin is bound to poverty and the social system that says a street rat cannot speak to a princess. Both use performance to cope with their confinement, the Genie through comedy, Aladdin through deception. And the resolution of both stories is the same: freedom comes from someone choosing to set you free.

Aladdin's third wish, freeing the Genie, is the moment the film earns its ending. He gives up unlimited power to keep a promise. He chooses friendship over advantage. And in doing so, he demonstrates exactly the quality that made him worthy of Jasmine's attention in the first place, a quality that had nothing to do with palaces or elephants or Prince Ali Ababwa.

The Diamond in the Rough

The Cave of Wonders accepts only the diamond in the rough, a person whose worth is hidden beneath an unpromising exterior. This is Aladdin's entire arc compressed into a single metaphor. The world sees a thief. The cave sees potential. And the film argues that the difference between the two perceptions is not magic but attention.