A Beloved Disney Character Was Designed After Tom Cruise

The concept of reference points in animation is common if you're in the know, but might surprise folks who don't have much experience with or knowledge of the history of the medium. Even the greatest and most talented illustrators have to start somewhere when creating a character, and it's no different for the craftspeople working for Walt Disney Animation Studios. In the early eras of Disney animation, reference points were often live actors or animals. In the cases of "Bambi" and "Dumbo," for example, if you check out the 1941 film "The Reluctant Dragon" (a movie that was itself bizarrely censored for one particular animated detail), you can see animators literally watching how deer and elephants move so they can accurately capture those minute details in designing the titular characters. 

As the world approached the 21st century, however, Disney animators started to look not just to real people, but to specifically famous real people when designing some of their cinematic characters. Indeed, one such instance you might not have known about before was when Disney's animators were inspired by none other than the man on an impossible mission himself, Tom Cruise, while settling on a look for the title character in their 1992 animated adaptation of "Aladdin." Still, while Cruise was one of the most famous people in the world by that point in time (and still is today), it should be noted that if Disney's animators had gotten their way, he wouldn't have been a thought in anyone's head.

To unwrap all this, we need to bring in a little context and backstory. As was the case for much of the heralded Disney Renaissance era, we need to start with the late songwriter Howard Ashman. Ashman and his composing partner Alan Menken were brought on board at the studio in the mid-1980s to help bring a new version of "The Little Mermaid" to life. No doubt, that film's iconic and wonderful songs had a huge part in its success, but it should also be noted that Ashman and Menken were co-credited with writing the film's overall script as well, not just the music. So, naturally, because "The Little Mermaid" was an undeniable hit at the box office and with critics (even netting Disney a couple of Oscars along the way), Ashman and Menken were brought back for future films, starting with Disney's 1991 masterpiece "Beauty and the Beast." But because of the long runway between when animated titles are approved and actually completed, coupled with Ashman's tragic passing from AIDS in March 1991 (months before "Beauty and the Beast" was released in theaters), Disney had already begun development on the duo's next title: "Aladdin." Although we all know and love "Beauty and the Beast," it may surprise some folks to learn that Ashman was only working on that film so that he could put his passion into "Aladdin." 

For a number of reasons, the version of "Aladdin" that we're all familiar with is far from the one Ashman had envisioned before his passing. Key characters and songs from his take didn't survive the final cut; perhaps the most famous example is Aladdin's mother, who was enough of a presence to lead to a song that got a second life in the Broadway musical, "Proud of Your Boy." It wasn't just that the arc of the film changed, as did the tone; the very design of Aladdin himself shifted, too. For animators like Glen Keane, as detailed in a Los Angeles Times profile back in the fall of 1992, it wasn't Cruise who served as the initial design inspiration for Aladdin, but another young big-name A-lister of the era: Michael J. Fox. Keane also noted that his Aladdin was "short in stature but with a big ego and lots of dreams." However, then-exec Jeffrey Katzenberg was dismayed with how the production was coming along and demanded changes of all sorts, including making Aladdin more relatable and slightly more mature by using "Top Gun" as a visual cue for the redesign. (We can argue about how 1992-era Cruise and Fox were probably not drastically different as performers, of course.)

At the time, Keane noted that when he watched Cruise fulfill his need for speed, he saw "a confidence, a look in the eyebrows, that gives him intensity and at the same time a smile that has kind of an impish look" that would help fill Aladdin out into the proper proportions. It's worth wondering how much of the end result feels like Cruise versus Fox, of course, both because the impish intensity in the film seems vastly more embodied by Robin William's livewire Genie than by the title hero. (Also, the Aladdin we see sometimes feels as much like a Marty McFly-esque teenager as compared to a slightly older but no less immature and juvenile fighter pilot.) What does feel irrefutably true is that, when you watch this "Aladdin," he feels a lot more modern than the setting in which his story takes place, allowing for audiences to perhaps more easily relate to his struggles as an orphaned "street rat" in Agrabah.

The amount of changes that an animated film can go through are often mammoth, and almost always in ways that we don't realize until well after the film is released. Disney is no strange to such creative struggles, as executives like Katzenberg can often barrel in and make a long list of demands that wind up completely overhauling a film from top to bottom. In an ideal world, the audience doesn't even realize the bumpy road to completion when they watch the film. These days, if you like, you can get a peek behind the curtain; consider the recent "Into the Unknown," a multi-part Disney docuseries about the making of "Frozen II," which makes it a lot clearer how that film's muddled arc came to be. For "Aladdin," though, its own creative success far surpasses the reality that it could have once looked a lot different, in no small part because the hero didn't seem confident and mature enough. Disney's animators had, if you will, an impossible mission to undertake when they were forced to redesign "Aladdin," and they were thankfully up to the challenge.