Artefact Three Commentary

One of our artefacts is a short 30-second animation showing the transition between different Aladdin imaginings, the original 1992 film, and the musical adaptation, ending with the live-action film, making clear the significant changes in colour, style, and tone between the different versions of the same scene, the carpet ride during the song “A whole new world”.

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This short animation layers these multiple versions of Aladdin using distinct parallax layers, creating an illusion of depth and movement in previously flat 2D animation, to segment between the different styles of animation and to also serve as a nostalgic element which links to the original way Disney animations were produced through the multiplane camera creating more depth in their 2D animations from the 1930s onward.

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At its heart, the animation is designed for nostalgia, an element we highlighted as important for fans of the live-action, through research of pre-existing fan forums such as AVforums.

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The animation does not just mirror the past methods for telling this story, it aims to produce a dialogue with viewer of how the evolution of the story is told with the translation of codes between the different mediums, highlighting different goals each producer of text had.

 

The original had a playful, imaginative spirit showcased in the 3D animation through quick, dramatic, and bold camera movement, while the musical has a significantly slowed down camera speed to mirror the shifted goal from towards an emotional connection to the audience, while lastly the live-action imagery, has a more muted colour palette of blues and greys to signify the transition of the producer’s goal towards creating a grounded and realistic world with the goal of heightened audience immersion into the world, as discussed by Linden and Linden, media and storytelling is a system of signifiers of colour, audio and other codes that shape the audience’s perception of a text. This is a large element of what we wanted the animation to show.

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Another large inspiration for our work was ideas expressed by Hellekson and Busse in their exploration of fan creativity and performance where they argue that fan works are not just imitations of the source but an active, performative reinterpretation of the original text, where our animation transforms a static still of a whole new world into a new dynamic, layered video that takes on new meaning of being Aladdin being a continuously adapting piece of media and story.

 

Drawing upon Arriagada and Cruz’s 2014 academic analysis of fan interaction with existing media, our animation positions us as active interpreters of media. Arriagada and Cruz illustrates how fans in the digital age reinterpret and circulate texts to forge collective cultural identities, similarly our animation employs digital techniques to transform Aladdin’s iconic imagery into a remixed narrative for fans. This process of digital mediation creates a participatory space for reinterpretation, allowing audiences to engage with and contribute to the evolving uses of the Aladdin story.

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To conclude, our animation serves as a tool to reconstruct different meanings embedded into the text by producers by inviting viewers to watch the transitional form between the various texts, prompting audiences to encourage a participatory engagement with the text, with us attempting to create an open-ended dialogue where the past, present, and future of storytelling converge in a cohesive way.

 

Bibliography

Arriagada, A., & Cruz, V. (2014). Music fans as mediators in the age of digital reproduction. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures. Routledge.

Hellekson, K., & Busse, K. (Eds.). (2014). [4 Introduction]. In The fan fiction studies reader (pp. 193–197). University of Iowa Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt20p58d6.17

Linden, H., & Linden, S. (2017). Fans and fan cultures. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50129-5