Aladdin: The Return of Jafar (1994)

 

Aladdin: The Return of Jafar marked the first of many direct to video movies for the Disney studio. 

In this movie, the villainous Jafar, now a genie, concocts a plan to get revenge on Aladdin and his friends.  

As well as being a sequel to Aladdin (1992), this is also essentially a feature length pilot for the Aladdin TV series, which premiered the same year. The directors (Toby Shelton, Tad Stones, Alan Zaslove) and writers even worked on that TV series. With its lower budget animation and villain of the week story, the movie itself feels more like an extended episode of a TV series than a proper sequel to a Disney classic. However, it feels like a pretty good extended TV episode. The best part of this movie is Iago's character arc. This movie takes a comedic sidekick and makes him into a much more interesting character. He at first attaches himself to Aladdin for selfish reasons but ends up actually caring for them. This is done completely convincingly, and you actually end up caring for him in an unexpected way. Also, even if the storyline is very villain of the week, Jafar as a genie is an incredibly big threat to our heroes. There are even some good suspense scenes here as we wonder just how our heroes are going to make it out alive. While obviously on a smaller budget and scale the final action scene is quite exciting.

 This movie does have its flaws though. Unlike the great and memorable Alan Menkin songs from the first film, the songs here are completely forgettable and bland. If you try to remember any of these songs a couple days after watching the film, you will forget them. On the other hand, you can go years without watching the original Aladdin and still find the songs randomly getting stuck in your head. The humor here is also significantly weaker than that of the first movie. Part of this is naturally not having Robin Willaims as the genie. Dan Castellenta (best known as the voice of Homer Simpson) does a fine job providing the voice but without the improvisation of Willaims, the character simply isn't as funny. The basic slapstick gags involving the other characters also fail to get the laughs they should. Part of Jafar's evil plan is to use an incompetent thief, who gets a hold of his lamp, to help him get revenge on Aladdin (who they both hate). Unfortunately, this character can get rather annoying at times, and his incompetence is never as funny as the writers seem to think. 

This is not a great movie by any stretch, but it is an enjoyable enough watch for Disney fans.