Lived It

Main: Is Aladdin actually Chinese?

Episode Summary

Premiere Pick ‘Wish Dragon’...and how it all links back to the same Chinese fable that Aladdin was based on. Plus Jackie Chan, immigration trends in Hollywood, and our favourite animations, all in this episode with Alexei Toliopoulos and Gen Fricker.

Episode Notes

Episode Transcription

Michael Sun:

What even is Shangri-La? Because I-

Alexei Toliopoulos:

It's a made-up place. They made it up for this book and movie called Lost Horizon.

Michael Sun:

The only Shangri-La I know is the hotel chain.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Hello, I'm Alexei Toliopoulos.

Gen Fricker:

I'm Gen Fricker.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Welcome to The Big Film Buffet.

Gen Fricker:

This right here is a podcast for pop culture fans and people looking for what to watch recommendations.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Today, we're serving up a main course where we will recommend you a Netflix film for you to watch this weekend.

Gen Fricker:

And of all the films you should cast your gaze upon this weekend, we reckon you should spend time with Wish Dragon.

Long:

I am a wish dragon, who will grant three wishes to the owner of this teapot.

Din:

How do you fit in this teapot?

Long:

Well, it-

Din:

It's so small. Look at your little arms. Your face is so soft. Can you breathe fire?

Alexei Toliopoulos:

So we're talking about Wish Dragon. Gen, what is Wish Dragon all about?

Gen Fricker:

It is a fun family movie, an animated movie about a young guy called Din, who is trying to balance being a student, having a job, growing up and not trying to disappoint his family. And how like stressful that is on his life, throw into this, he finds a magical teapot. Inside the teapot, a dragon called Long who can grant him three wishes that changed his life. Also, he wants to reconnect with his childhood sweetheart. So, I don't know. Put it together, fam.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

I'm putting it together, fam, and what I'm discovering is this feels very familiar to a fairytale movie that I love very dearly and probably everyone else loves very dearly. The fairytale that is Aladdin, and that's... Something I really liked about this movie is I like how contemporary it feels. I liked that this feels like a very modern and urban set fairytale that I don't think we see very often in the realm of animation. I feel like when we get a fairytale animation, it is kind of set in like a made-up fantasy world that feels very period set or mediaeval or something like that. And to see like a modern type fairytale, I felt-

Gen Fricker:

Yes, set in modern Shanghai.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

It felt very fresh and more relatable if you will in a way.

Long:

And you, sir, are my master. So, go ahead, wish away.

Din:

Okay, you got me. Where are the hidden cameras? Great joke, guys.

Long:

A joke?

Din:

Is this like a hologram or something?

Long:

I assure you not.

Gen Fricker:

What I really like about this movie is it feels very real, very lived in as much as like an animation can. So then it makes all the magical elements much more stark.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah, absolutely.

Gen Fricker:

Much more magical.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Much more magical, and I think that this is a movie that I would really love to recommend to families with maybe kids that are a little bit younger than the demographic we're talking to with The Mitchells vs. The Machines.

Gen Fricker:

Sure, yeah.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Which I think was a bit more tween centric, a little bit more grown-up kids type vibe. I think this will be really good for younger kids with their parents but there's so much in there that I think all the kids will still enjoy watching it too with the family.

Gen Fricker:

For sure. It's definitely got that perfect balance of when you're watching a movie for kids but there's jokes for everyone in it.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah.

Gen Fricker:

Jokes for adults too.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

And I did find this movie quite funny. I genuinely thought it was very funny. The animation style is pretty hip and pretty fluid if you will say. There's some great character animations. And if you'd like Wish Dragon, I'd recommend another movie to check out that is on Netflix, it's called Over the Moon. We talked about on the podcast last year. I really enjoy that movie. I think it's got some very sweet fantasy elements to it and just beautiful, beautiful dream-like animation.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. I was thinking this kind of reminds me of, especially the food in this movie, reminds me of Studio Ghibli films, which we've talked a lot about on the podcast before. But if you're kind of looking for an age appropriate parallel film like Ponyo I think would be the go. If you're kind of wanting to set up, like you base it in the cousins or something, you want to set up like a whole bunch of films-

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Absolutely.

Gen Fricker:

... this would be part of it. But what you were saying about how funny this film is, the casting is perfect. So many funny people in this gosh-darn movie, John Cho playing Long, the wish dragon.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah.

Gen Fricker:

He's so good. His characterization is so good. You might know him from the iconic film, Harold & Kumar, their series of films.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Go to White Castle.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Escape Guantanamo Bay, 3D Christmas. We know them all.

Gen Fricker:

Also in there, Constance Wu, who you might know from Crazy Rich Asians, from Fresh Off the Boat, from Hustlers.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

I love Hustlers.

Gen Fricker:

We all love Hustlers. Jimmy O. Yang who is in Space Force which is on Netflix at the moment.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah, and a great comic as well.

Gen Fricker:

Yup. Ronny Chieng, of course.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Another great comedian.

Gen Fricker:

Another great comedian, also in Crazy Rich Asians. The characterizations are so good which just adds that element of entertainment. It is that cut-through, so then your younger family members can enjoy it and you can too.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Exactly. One thing that you just made me think of, Gen, when you were recommending Ponyo, which I think is a great one too, is because Ponyo retells the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale of the Little Mermaids and it kind of brings it into a modern setting as well, much like this movie does with Aladdin. And I think that its relationship with Aladdin is very interesting because we know it mainly as the classic Disney animated film and then some movies on the '30s and '40s and stuff, which are like The Thief of Baghdad. So we kind of know it as a film centred around exoticism of the Middle East.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

And it has its history in that we find... In the west, Aladdin kind of first comes about in this collection of stories like fables and kind of like the predecessors of like magic realism in this book called One Thousand and One Nights also known as Arabian Nights. And so this book and collection of stories has existed for maybe nearly a thousand years. These stories mainly from the Middle East like fantasies from there. And once this was translated into French, they incorporated more stories that felt to that audience rather exotic. So they were pulling stories more from other countries, other lands, and some of them came from China, including the story that we now know as Aladdin. So this is more, I guess, a representation of where that story originally comes from.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah, right. Yeah. I had no idea but that makes so much sense. It's like tracing it all the way back to the roots of the story.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Absolutely.

Gen Fricker:

And then making it into a modern Chinese context.

Long:

What are you doing now?

Din:

Well, if you're not going to let me ride you, we got to catch the bus.

Long:

The bus. Is that some kind of animal?

Din:

Wait, how long have you been in that teapot?

Long:

I don't know. Is it still the Qing dynasty?

Alexei Toliopoulos:

I don't know too much more about it though beyond the connection to One Thousand and One Nights.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. So it might be time to bring in the most knowledgeable person we know.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

He's the editor of the Netflix News or that Netflix Pause. And if you haven't already subscribed, you simply must. And he's also our producer here, Michael Sun, welcome.

Gen Fricker:

What up? So tell us about the origins of Aladdin.

Michael Sun:

You are very right, Gen. The first version of the Aladdin tale features Aladdin as a poor youth, living on the streets of China, not at all this like foreigner abroad, not this kind of Middle Eastern tale that we've been used to, but initially, definitely, this Chinese boy who was struggling to make an income and had to come up with magical ways to do it. So the actual way that he kind of ended up in One Thousand and One Nights, that kind of mythology and law, is actually because this French translator added on the tale of Aladdin that he had heard to his translation of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

[foreign language 00:08:05].

Michael Sun:

As Emily in Paris would say, right?

Gen Fricker:

Ooh la la. So literally because the decision of one French person, this story gets transplanted from China to the Middle East.

Michael Sun:

Very much so. And I also think, this is just me completely brain worming now, but I feel like the reason it's then being represented as such in American media, specifically in the Aladdin movie version, I think it's because of these almost like cultural attitude towards who gets to be considered as a foreigner or exoticization. And I think especially if we look at, I don't know, migration trends.

Gen Fricker:

And you know we love to.

Michael Sun:

And we love to look at stats. This is a stats podcast, baby.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

We love trends and we love things like that, so.

Michael Sun:

By the '80s and '90s, when this story of Aladdin was becoming more popularised in mainstream media, there was definitely quite a large Asian-American population already whereas I think the idea of Americans viewing who was the actual other. I think they very much latched onto the idea of Middle East as the other.

Gen Fricker:

Right.

Michael Sun:

Or it's like they latched onto the idea of the Middle East as some like scary, foreign entity which is why the narrative of Aladdin being Middle Eastern and then engaging in these like mythical practises just seemed more natural, that's just my theory.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

That makes sense to me as well like that tracks because I think that idea of exoticism in American film, in Hollywood pictures kind of changes from where it is. In like classic Hollywood era, where it's like orientalism meets exoticism becoming one thing to create a magical mystical place and then changes to kind of become something a little bit more specific in its place.

Michael Sun:

I mean, that's so true. And I think if you look at kind of early cinema, you do see this idea of East Asian people being viewed as the other and exoticized. And that was the first real migration trend into places like England and the US. We see movies like Piccadilly, for example, classic 1929 movie where you get like Anna May Wong playing this intruder into this very white scene. But I think by the time that you've reached the late 20th century, it had already, as I said, this idea of the other had changed.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). There's a movie just remind me of, I think it's 1930s and possible lost for a while called the Lost Horizon, which is all set in this mystical, oriental land of Shangri-La. I think that's kind of like the lasting power of that film in that fake place in the Himalayas has really kept on, and to what the idea of like exoticism in film is.

Michael Sun:

What even is Shangri-La? Because I-

Alexei Toliopoulos:

It's a made-up place. They made it up for this book and movie called Lost Horizon.

Michael Sun:

The only Shangri-La I know is the hotel chain.

Gen Fricker:

I mean, you've mentioned how that idea of the other has changed now, and especially as we kind of move away from that really Americanized version of cinema, how do you think the idea of the other will change now?

Michael Sun:

I think it's very interesting because on one hand you do see this giant rise of foreign cinema which has always been there. But I think it's finally starting to become accepted in the US as much more mainstream like with Bong Joon-ho and then with just a whole bunch of foreign cinema entering the American market and you see that in TV as well, especially. But I do feel as if Hollywood still hasn't gotten rid of this idea where they'll always need to be some kind of intruder, whether that's perhaps not a foreign race now, because that's obviously quite unacceptable but it's almost like how we say in Sci-Fi, the other is like an alien.

Gen Fricker:

Totally, yeah. Yeah.

Michael Sun:

The other is like the invading species in like Dune, for example.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah.

Michael Sun:

The other is like the octopus aliens in Arrival.

Gen Fricker:

So it's almost like take it back to the early 20th century. It was all these kinds of ideas of unexplored lands. And now it's like the world has become more globalised and information and stories are more kind of accessible from places that we haven't really been hearing from traditionally. It's now like, not like unexplored lands but like unexplored galaxies.

Michael Sun:

Well, as Star Trek famously says, "Space, the final frontier."

Gen Fricker:

Yes.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

So, Michael, what you're saying is, famously, Aladdin is Chinese.

Michael Sun:

This is famously Chinese, QED, case closed. I rest my case. Period.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

The thing that I really love the most about this movie is it has very unique, detailed, and exciting character animation. They're all different shapes and sizes, these characters, and they move in such different ways. Like there's a very short squat henchman, then there's more characters that are kind of your traditional action romance leads of an animated film, and then there's kind of villainous henchman, sometimes the big, bad character who has these very, very long legs.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

And can you describe kind of how that character moves around?

Gen Fricker:

He kind of reminds me, and maybe this is too spooky reference, but of Slender Man.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

It's a Slender Man thing about them, that's for sure.

Gen Fricker:

He's just like very long-

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Languid, kind of.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah, and a bit floaty or something.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

It's almost like he's got either too many bones in his legs or none at all.

Gen Fricker:

Exactly.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Kind of like those inflatable flailing men that you see like at used car places.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah, totally. Even the way that the wish dragon moves because it has arms. It doesn't have legs. It's just kind of more of like a snake kind of-

Alexei Toliopoulos:

A serpenty kind of-

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. But the way it kind of moves through the air and kind of grabs around things and interacts with the other physical characters, yeah, it just sort of all worked so well.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Yeah. I think it works specifically very well in this fight choreography that we've seen this movie. This movie at points in time becomes like a proper martial arts film and got me thinking like... Because Jackie Chan is a producer on this film and I think he is obviously known as one of the all-time great martial arts legends, especially when it comes to cinema. What I think it kind of learns in the tradition of Jackie's martial arts films is that he often will have some sort of obstacle that will handicap one of the fighters in their scenes whether it be something like in the Rush Hour films where he's like kind of trapped by something or he's got handcuffs on or he's got like something trapped around his head, so he can't like move properly. And there's like one scene in particular... Gen, I know you liked when it feels so much like that kind of obstacle Jackie Chan stuck in something like martial arts type style.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. So he's fighting these two goons and he gets his foot stuck in a door but then he's using one other foot and his two arms and everything's just kind of... I mean, only you could do it in like animation truly. It was so elegant. All of these five sequences are so elegant and they never feel overly violent as such. It's more choreographed.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Choreographed in that kind of comedic way that Jackie Chan brought to cinema-

Gen Fricker:

Exactly.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

... where it's inspired by like silent comedies, like your Buster Keaton's or your Charlie Chaplin's, and it's great to see that'd be brought back to like a very child-friendly way with this film.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't feel like a fight sequence more than like what you said, pure physical comedy. And he also voices the wish dragon, Long, in the Mandarin dub of the film.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

I was surprised by how much I really liked this movie and it continued to grow on me all the way throughout.

Gen Fricker:

Why were you surprised for how much you liked this movie?

Alexei Toliopoulos:

I think because my expectations for animation are set so high especially after our experience with The Mitchells vs. The Machines a few weeks ago. Seeing like the pictures of this movie, I thought that it would never live up to that kind of thing but there was enough difference in there and it was doing enough things that you don't see every day in animation while still feeling like sweetly and calmly familiar that I really did enjoy Wish Dragon.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. There's some really cute visual gags in there too, which I feel like on a repeat viewing, you'll pick up again. I'm kind of the same. I thought it'd be quite a simple film.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

A bit more kitty than I-

Gen Fricker:

Totally.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

... is what I thought it would be.

Gen Fricker:

Yeah. But it really surprised me. And again, the characterization from all of the lead actors is incredible. The animation, all of it, it's such a rich viewing experience and it's definitely one that you can watch a few times and get something new out of every time.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

If you're like listening to The Big Film Buffet, please give us five stars on your podcast app of choice. And don't forget to subscribe and follow wherever you listen to those pods.

Gen Fricker:

This episode was hosted by Alexei Toliopoulos and me, Gen Fricker.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

Produced by Michael Sun and Anu Hasbold.

Gen Fricker:

Edited by Geoffrey O'Connor.

Alexei Toliopoulos:

And executive produced by Tony Broderick and Melanie Mahony.