The world lost an artist of beautifully controlled chaos yesterday as Robin Williams, one of the greatest stand-up comedians of his era and one of the more underrated film performers of the past 30 years, passed away. (Yes, it’s possible for someone so outsized and gleefully over-the-top to be underrated.) From Popeye to Mork and Mindy to Good Will Hunting to Insomnia to Dead Poets Society, Williams had one of the more diverse bodies of work in cinema for someone so well-known. Of course, to anyone with a love for animation as well as to any child of the 1990s, Williams may be best known for his work in family films like Hook, Mrs. Doubtfire, and, of course, Aladdin.
If you grew up during the Disney Renaissance, it’s perhaps impossible to avoid associating Williams with his work in the 1992 film as the Genie, the big and lovable catalyst to our hero’s ascent to becoming an honest-to-goodness prince. Though it may be something of a backhanded compliment to the film as a whole, Williams is so lively and funny (even 22 years after its release) as the Genie that the film around him, all the way up to the so-called diamond in the rough, suffers by comparison. It’s no secret, of course, that Williams had a contentious relationship with the Walt Disney Company throughout the 1990s; he agreed to appear in Aladdin, but only if his name wouldn’t be mentioned in the marketing campaign. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Williams’ involvement was too good to resist in the ads; because Disney went back on the deal, he didn’t appear in The Return of Jafar, the first Disney direct-to-DVD sequel. (He would appear in Aladdin and the King of Thieves two years later, primarily because Jeffrey Katzenberg, who’d made the original deal with Williams, no longer worked at Disney.)
It’s also worth noting that, even though he didn’t want to become a big part of the Aladdin marketing machine, Williams was something of a Patient Zero for celebrity voice work in modern animation. He may not have been the first well-known actor or comedian in a Disney animated film (Bob Newhart and Buddy Hackett in The Rescuers and The Little Mermaid, respectively, come to mind), but Williams was the first true movie star to step into the recording booth. And unlike many stars who appear in animated films now, those who are cast primarily due to their fame instead of being right for a part, Williams was both an excellent fit for animation and an impossible one. His voice was unmistakably familiar and, thus, challenging to pin down. How could any group of animators translate his whirling-dervish, giddy mania into something visually coherent?
What Eric Goldberg and the rest of the Disney animators did to bring Robin Williams’ voice to vibrant, vivid life is nothing short of a masterwork. We love the Genie for his fast wit and intelligence, but Williams’ voice did only so much work to make the Genie move, sing, and dance. And what work! No part of Williams’ work as the Genie has aged poorly; though he is very much a character out of time, by dropping references to Jack Nicholson and Rodney Dangerfield, the Genie is one of Disney’s best and most lovable creations. There may be no better representation of Robin Williams’ depth of talent than with the vertiginous highs and painful lows that the Genie feels throughout. He was a force of nature, and the animated encapsulation of that energy is one of Disney’s greatest achievements. Williams proved later in his career that he was equally as capable of embracing the darker side of his persona (though it’s not beloved, his work in Death to Smoochy is worth revisiting if only to see him as nasty as ever), but his work in Aladdin remains one of his finest moments as an actor.
Park aficionados, of course, know that Robin Williams’ connection to Disney doesn’t end with the Genie. In one of its earlier iterations, the Animation building at Disney’s Hollywood Studios (then Disney-MGM Studios) featured a film starring none other than Williams and Walter Cronkite, going through the animation process for thousands of park guests each day. And Williams was also the voice of the Timekeeper, a long-since-discarded character from a Circle-Vision 360 attraction at Tomorrowland. But more than anything else, Robin Williams was best associated with the family film from the early 1990s onward. They’re not Disney films, but it’s difficult for any Millennial to think of Williams without thinking of Hook or Mrs. Doubtfire or even Jumanji. He had a unique quality, an ability to reach out from the silver screen and make you feel like he was your father, your friend, your best self, and so on. For anyone who grew up from the 1970s through the 1990s and beyond, losing Robin Williams isn’t the same as just noticing that a well-known celebrity has passed away before the time. Losing Robin Williams is akin to losing a part of yourself, a part of your childhood that you thought would never leave. It’s terrible, heartbreaking news, as we all try to figure out how to fill the hole he’s left behind.