ALADDIN Director Recalls How Incredible it Was Working with Robin Williams and How He Changed Feature Animation
The director of Disney’s classic animated film Aladdin, Ron Clements, recently opened up about what it was like working with legendary comedian Robin Williams on the film. He explains how incredible it was and says that Williams’ Genie “was something extraordinary.”
While Clements and John Musker wrote the script for the film with Williams specifically in their minds, when the actor showed up to record, he was encouraged to improvise and that ended up being a complete joy for everyone who was there. Clements explained:
“On the first day of recording [Genie’s intro] we had script pages written in Robin’s improv style and storyboards illustrating some of the visual metamorphosing we were planning. He started out recording the script as written a few times, then took off in a multitude of directions. The original scene was meant to be about three minutes long. Each take, Robin would add and embellish, so by the 25th (and last) take, the scene had expanded to about 20 minutes long! Robin kept coming up with more and more ideas. And he was consistently hilarious. At one point, we had to remove the genie’s lead animator, Eric Goldberg, from the recording stage because his uncontrollable laughter was messing up takes. Going in, I was wary we wouldn’t be able to use a lot of the stuff Robin might come up with because it wouldn’t fit the requirements of the story. But he made most of it work, albeit in ways we never anticipated. His energy was incredible. By the end of that first four-hour session, Robin was dripping with sweat, completely drained. To this day, it’s one of the most incredible vocal sessions I’ve ever witnessed.”
What an amazing experience that must have been to be a part of. To witness Williams bringing the character of Genie to life would have been awesome! As you might imagine, the creative team ended up with an incredible amount of material to pull from him for the film. Their biggest problem was trying to figure out what to use from that! When explaining how they went about doing that, the director said:
“We came up with a system. Everything Robin recorded was transcribed. John, Eric and I played it all back and circled every line and variation Robin did that we particularly liked. We gave all this to our editor, H. Lee Peterson, and he cut together a first pass of the scene. We kept editing and editing until we got it down to the proper length. Hopefully we picked the best stuff, but there was a tremendous amount of strong material that didn’t make it.
“That’s how we did every sequence. Robin ended up recording about six to eight four-hour sessions. It was a marvel to watch him do his thing. It’s a very fond memory of watching a true comic genius at work.”
Clements went on to say that Williams changed animated feature films and how they were perceived:
“His brilliant comedy brought an adult appeal to animation that was new at the time. He was also one of the biggest stars ever to be featured in an animated film at that time. To be clear, we didn’t want Robin because he was a big star. We wanted him because he was right for the part. We wanted him because we thought his talents could bring something new and innovative to Disney animated features that could be exciting and entertaining. And he sure did!”
In my opinion, Robin Williams delivered the best animated Disney performance of all time. No one has ever come close to what he did with Genie. You can see some previously shared outtakes of Williams recording his lines below.
Source: Variety