The titular heroine and male protagonist are attractive and yet humanly drawn. Esmeralda, the street dancer, is unmistakably a positive character, but is still sexualized, while Romani culture and people are liberated and sensual, providing white viewers with a mechanism for satisfying their own desires. Hunchback shows a lot of improvement, its Gypsies shown as the victims of unfair discrimination. Middle Eastern legal practices are exaggerated and stereotyped as unjust, perhaps in an attempt to make audiences see the West (and America/Israel) as a real-life protagonist and the Muslim world as a Jafar-like enemy. The two main characters (Aladdin- "Al"- and Jasmine- "Jazz") are blatantly Americanized and have European features, while the villain, Jafar, has a bulbous nose and deep set eyes. In Aladdin, Arabs are violent, backward, and physically ugly. It affords the Orient an either/or ultimatum: become a caricature so that your culture can be safely sold and consumed by the West, or reject your heritage and adopt modern American consumer capitalist culture instead. However, the Disney corporation's tendency to either stereotype or erase the culture of these characters is problematic. Disney's animated films Aladdin, Mulan, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame each portray Oriental characters in a different way, some more progressively than others.
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