Disney's Aladdin takes on a whole different aspect when postcolonial ideas are applied to it; I'm still contradicting myself in my head as to whether its orientalism is insidious or ingenuously clever kid-entertainment. One tangentially interesting little tidbit I noticed was near the end when Jafar says "So long!" in the middle of a song to Aladdin. At first I thought he said "Salaam!" (peace!) which doesn't make any sense, then I realized what he actually said. What made it interesting to me was that I remembered recently reading that the phrase "so long" came to English from Malay (I think, or at least from that lingual-region), wherein "salang" as a variant of "salaam" arrived there by way of Islam. I don't suppose the Disney writers thought of that as a really oblique ironic angle, but hey, what with the supposed hidden sexual references I suppose one never knows. And did they spell the title of the movie the way they did to avoid making it look like "Allah-din"?

Targete Art - lots of nice paintings