In my opinion Aladdin was one of the best features my generation of animators came up with. The photo brings back a lot of fun memories. From left to right:
Dave Pruiksma (Sultan), Glen Keane (Aladdin), Duncan Marjoribanks (Abu), Eric Goldberg (Genie), Will Finn (Iago), Randy Cartwright (Carpet) and myself.
Mark Henn (Jasmine) and Aaron Blaise (Rajah) were working at the Orlando studio at the time.
Just a few memories that come to mind:
Eric was the first animator on the movie, his incredible test animation of the Genie set the film’s animation style and standard. Quite intimidating!
The movie’s backgrounds impressed me so much, I sent a note -signed by all of the supervising animators- to the background artists. It said that we think their work is on the level of “Peter Pan”.
All animators were walking around with a smile on their faces, we loved our assignments.
Jonathan Freeman’s nuanced voice recordings were a tremendous inspiration for Jafar.
We all loved the integration of CG (Tiger Head) with our drawn characters.
We also thought the songs and score were amazing.
We also thought the songs and score were amazing.
Frank and Ollie thought the films’s pacing was too hectic. Marc Davis questioned the contemporary references. Don’t know what Kimball thought of Aladdin.
After Aladdin the animation crew split into two units. One did Lion King, the other did Pocahontas.
It felt like our animation unit could move mountains.
