Historically Accurate Aladdin

Being the history geek that I am, I guess it is kind of surprising that I haven't really done a "historically accurate" animation series before, but after seeing that awesome Buzzfeed Disney Princess video, and of course all the amazing art on here, I was inspired to make my own.  I guess it is better late than never!

As I've said before elsewhere, from an artistic standpoint, I'm not at all bothered by the animated designs of the characters in Disney and Dreamworks films. They weren't documentaries after all so in most cases they didn't need to be accurate, and in animation in particular, it is more important to convey character and style in the designs.  I am not trying to "fix" anything because I don't think there is anything to fix!  That being said, it can still be fun to learn how your favorite characters might have looked if they had existed in real life.    

For my series, I am trying to be as accurate as I possibly can.  I'm taking the country of origin, the social class, the culture, and the specific decade into mind (instead of just a general sweep of multiple decades), and also adapting the colors and styles to fit what was available and worn everyday.  I will try to keep the characters recognizable where I can, but I want to make my pictures realistic and so some elements of the original designs might be altered in the process.

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Yep, here it is time for another revision!  Hey, I said I was going to be super accurate, and that means making some changes when you learn something new!  For my original drawings of the Aladdin characters, I based their fashion on the clothing worn in the Ottoman empire, since it was ruled by a Sultan like Agrabah is in the film and there were some Ottoman references in the movie's design.  However, this week I was doing some reading and learned that there were ALSO sultans within the Abbasid caliphate, the widespread Arab empire of the middle ages.  By the 8th century there were many "autonomous provinces" in the Arab world that were only nominally controlled by the caliph.  If Agrabah had been a real region in the Arabian Peninsula, it could have still been ruled by the Sultan like in the movie, but more as a mini-kingdom within the overall empire (kind of like the Ghaznavid Sultanate).  I think an Abbasid sultanate would be an even better fit than an Ottoman one, especially since it involved Arabs and not Turks - so here we are!  I marked this version of Aladdin as set in the "Arabian Peninsula" since Agrabah is a fictional Arabian country, apparently a combination of the Indian city of "Agra" and the Arabic city of "Baghdad."  But most of my references were illuminations from medieval Baghdad since Disney's movie was heavily based on the earlier film "The Thief of Bagdad" (and I just also read that that was where the movie was supposed to be set until the Gulf War started).  As for the period, I set it in the 13th century near the end of the Abbasid caliphate.  Since Genie mentioned Scheherezade, I definitely wanted to set it after the 10th century which was the earliest mention of that character.   But I settled on the 13th century based on the line from "Prince Ali" where he was mentioned as fighting "galloping hordes," probably a reference to the Mongol hordes that were invading the Arab world around that time.  At this period in time, though, clothing stayed pretty much the same for several hundred years.

Aladdin’s street rat clothing in the film most resembles 18^th-19^th century Ottoman military uniforms, but that is not a very close match for medieval Arab clothing at all.  Although the Abbasid caliphate stretched from Africa to Asia, the people who identified as "Arabs" had a fairly standardized fashion across the various regions, mostly consisting of a tunic, salwar trousers, and some kind of shoes and headcovering.  Interestingly, because of trade and cultural influence, it was not all that different from European clothing at the time.  Many men wore long tunics that were about calf or ankle-length, but working men were shown wearing shorter tunics sometimes without pants but more often with a looser, baggier version of the salwar.    I didn't see any examples of purple clothing on these lower class men, only on more regal figures, although many of the laborers were wearing tunics of other colors.   Since I know that indigo was a widely used dye in this region, I decided to give Aladdin a dull indigo tunic to resemble his original vest, tied with a narrow belt which was apparently more typical than a sash, at least among average men.   As for Aladdin's personal appearance it seems that the Arabs, unlike the Turks, had no problems with longer hair, as many men are depicted with visible hair, usually around chin length. 

An interesting decoration which seems to be specific to medieval Arab fashion is the tiraz band, a piece of embroidery on the arms of a tunic that originally symbolized special favor from the caliph, but which later came to be a commonplace decoration.  In fact, it was so commonplace that I couldn't find a picture of a man without it!  Oftentimes they were large and elaborate, inscribed with blessings or statements of good luck, but I made Aladdin's tiraz bands very modest, based on this extant tunic and what appears to be thin tiraz bands on this peasant woman's sleeves: www.warfare.altervista.org/Per…

Another very important part of the Arab costume is the turban, which derives from the religious teachings of the Quran.  An Arab boy like Aladdin would DEFINITELY be required to cover his head, but just a cap was seen as the lowest of the low, so it appears that even the poor tried their best to imitate a turban, as in this depiction of a beggar, which also happens to be the closest match I could find for Aladdin's fez-type cap in the movie.  Interestingly, there is a similar illustration in this depiction of Moorish Arabs from Spain, so possibly the fashion was standard enough to reach other parts of the Arab world as well.

In the drawings for this series I like to include objects where I can since material culture is as interesting as the fashion!  At first I thought of drawing Aladdin with a scimitar, a Middle Eastern sword like the ones used in the movie, but really, how can you draw Aladdin without his lamp?  The elaborate lamp like the one in the movie was appropriate for later time periods, but since Genie had been trapped in the Cave of Wonders for a long time, I felt it made more sense to draw an older type of lamp.   I drew a bronze one based on an example from 200 AD, it was one of the earliest I could find that still resembled Genie's lamp.  It isn't 10,000 years old but it's about 1000 years old by Aladdin's time.   By the way, these lamps are never as big as the kinds shown in movies, they were very small and could pretty much fit in the palm of your hand.  That really would be "itty bitty living space!"

I will revise Jafar and Jasmine as well in the next few days, so keep looking for their Historically Accurate 2.0 editions!

You can check out the original Ottoman version in my stash here