Aladdin's Magic

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Goldberg had a giddy challenge with Williams and the Genie. Animator Randy Cartwright faced a daunting one: to create a character, the Magic Carpet, literally out of whole cloth. The Carpet has no head, no voice, and mere tassels for hands and feet. Yet it has a personality that puts most live- action stars to shame. It can mope, strut, cringe. It is a gentleman and a matchmaker. It holds and kisses Jasmine's hand. It makes zigzag stairs of itself at the end of Aladdin's ride with Jasmine and, as she stands on her balcony, coaxes the lad up to kissing level with the princess. "He's very sensitive," says Cartwright, "and always trying to please. It's abstract pantomime."

The man who paid for the Carpet, who gets to say no (and, more than occasionally, Wow!) to Disney features, is Katzenberg. "Animation films represent the heart and soul of the company," he says. "It's the blood that flows through this worldwide enterprise. And Aladdin is creating new blood." He is speaking in part as a movie executive; he knows that, where there's a popular Disney cartoon, there will soon be a sound-track album, a best-selling videocassette, a Genie cookie jar, a new ride to lure the customers to the Disney parks. He also knows that cartoon characters, and the folks who animate them, don't get gross profit points in the dozen theatrical rereleases and possible sequels. Last year the studio exhumed its 1961 feature One Hundred and One Dalmatians for theaters and took in $60 million -- most of it clear profit.

But Katzenberg is also a moviemaker, justly proud of his studio's work in reviving the American cinema's unique contribution to 20th century art. Aladdin, with its headlong, death-snubbing herobatics, is a cartoon Raiders of the Lost Ark. Today's best animators, excavating and restoring the medium of Walt, Tex and Chuck, are triumphant raiders of the lost art.

Animator: wonderful word. It means life giver. And, for the movies, life restorer.