Aladdin and Jasmine are definitely married in the last scene of Aladdin.
Don't get me wrong. It's not that I can't see the appeal in giving them an entire wedding story, an entire movie's worth of Wedding rather than just a little snippet at the end of their film, like we see for Cinderella, Ariel, or Tiana. It would be so sweet to get to experience the day when my favourite Disney couple, and in my opinion the very best one (seamlessly blending onscreen relationship development with a classic Disney Love At First Sight) made their True Love official. We could share in the moment when they could finally be together after so many things sprang up to separate them, and celebrate that joyous day right along with them.
But if we do want to see them get married, and not just imagine what the wedding was like before they fly off on their end-of-movie honeymoon, we've also been asked to accept that the end of the movie was not Aladdin and Jasmine's honeymoon. We're asked to believe that Aladdin and Jasmine were content to wait before they finally sealed their union – not a couple of days, which could work since they'd already had an eventful enough day; not a couple of weeks, which might have made sense if they wanted to give the kingdom a chance to recover from Jafar's takeover; not even a few months, which is less likely but maybe Aladdin and Jasmine wanted time to plan their own wedding – but literally years. We're asked to accept that despite being on the verge of getting married all throughout their movie, they're now perfectly content to not even have a date set.
And why would they be?
Maybe waiting for years would make sense if we were dealing with an ordinary, real-world modern couple. I suspect that's why so many fans are willing to accept this idea, and don't seem to feel, as I do, that it completely destroys their romance. After all, Aladdin and Jasmine have barely known each other three days; is it really so bad if they take a few years to get to know each other before the wedding? Isn't that what any normal, modern-day couple would do?
But we're not dealing with a normal, modern-day couple. The world we're dealing with is much older, populated by royalty, and exists in both the structure of a movie and within a fairytale. Everything Aladdin and Jasmine went through in their movie was with the end goal of marriage. Aladdin went to the palace as Prince Ali with the sole intention of marrying Jasmine: “I have journeyed from afar to seek your daughter's hand,” he says, not to take her out on a few dates and see how it goes from there. When Jasmine tells her father she's decided to accept Prince Ali's marriage proposal, the Sultan declares: “You shall be married at once!” and Jasmine makes no objection. Far from it, she and Aladdin look positively blissful, and Jasmine is obviously beyond excited for her wedding to take place right now. At the end of the movie, when Jasmine and the Sultan know the truth about Aladdin (and that's the only thing that's happened that could possibly have changed their feelings about him), they both make it clear they still want him in their family as much as ever. Jasmine is heartbroken at the thought of not being with Aladdin anymore, and the Sultan has so little reservation about his daughter marrying a commoner that he changes the law of his own free will with no one else so much as suggesting the idea to him. Aladdin and Jasmine were engaged for the whole last quarter of the movie, they were on the verge of getting married before they were interrupted by Jafar's takeover. There's no way they're suddenly going to look at each other, once all that is over, and think, “Oh, wait, we haven't known each other long enough.” Even by real-life modern standards, I'd think it would look pretty bad if a couple who was right on the verge of getting married suddenly decided to cancel everything and just get to know each other better for a while!
So if Aladdin and Jasmine suddenly decide not to get married right away, to not even start planning the wedding right away, I can think of only three possible reasons:
Aladdin is not as romantic and committed as the movie shows him to be. He suddenly becomes that stereotypical, commitment-phobic man who wants to put off the actual responsibilities of marriage for as long as possible. He is fine stringing Jasmine along as long as he can possibly get away with it – and for whatever reason, neither she nor her father calls him out on this.
Jasmine is not as okay with her fiancé not really being a prince as the movie indicated. “Jasmine, I'm sorry I lied to you about being a prince.” “That's all right, of course I still love you. Your rank doesn't matter to me.” “Great, so do you want to still get married today?” “Umm... you know, let's hold off on that a little while....”
The Sultan is not as willing to let a commoner be part of the royal family as he seemed to be at the end of the movie. Far from Aladdin's having “certainly proven himself”, he's now on some sort of trial run. Maybe in a few years, if Aladdin has really shown he can be relied upon (which I don't know how he can if he's supposed to be living like a commoner for all these years), maybe you two can finally get married. Oh, and you'll have to live out in your hovel until the time comes, even though I have plenty of room to give you your own quarters, because I don't want your dirty feet in my palace. And of course I'll give you an allowance, just such a small one you'll barely be able to use it. That would actually give him a valid excuse to say Aladdin wasn't treating Jasmine to fine enough things, or acting like someone who could belong to a royal family – so if this is the explanation we're going with, it looks very much as if the Sultan is secretly looking for a reason to kick Aladdin out of his family.
Somehow I'm just not seeing it.
Whatever the reason, whichever character was supposed to have thought this was a good idea, if Aladdin can't marry Jasmine right away it feels less like they're truly allowed to be together and more like Aladdin is on probation. It lessens the impact of the movie's ending, where Aladdin and Jasmine sing about the “whole new life” they will now have together as they fly off side by side on the Carpet, symbolizing their union as one. They are dressed in the same colour, almost matching, and Aladdin has a brand-new prince outfit: the same purple, open-chested style, and fez hat as his street rat clothes had, but clearly a higher quality befitting of royalty. The message is clear: Aladdin is a prince again, but this time the prince is all him. Aladdin has finally made it to his Happily Ever After, the goal he was aiming for all throughout the movie. If Aladdin still isn't allowed to be a prince, how is this his Happily Ever After? How do we know for sure, without a doubt, that he will ever reach it? What was the point of his journey throughout the movie if that wasn't what led him to reach his dream?? Isn't the whole purpose of a sequel to show us what life looks like for our beloved favourite characters after Happily Ever After has been achieved??? When I watch, or read, or imagine up more stories about Aladdin, I want to know what life is like for him as the Prince of Agrabah. I don't need to see him being a street rat or building a relationship with the Princess. I've already seen that. It was all in the movie Aladdin.
I could come up with a lot more reasons why it wouldn't make sense, from the point of view of someone within the story, for Aladdin and Jasmine to wait. They've already faced everything from a law that says they can never be together to an evil sorcerer who tried to murder them on multiple occasions to Aladdin's own insecurities. Wouldn't Aladdin and Jasmine want to get married right away before anything else springs up to tear them apart? And this is a royal family, Jasmine is the current ruler's only child, so won't Agrabah be in a vulnerable position until their bloodline continues? If Jasmine isn't going to be marrying a prince, Agrabah won't have any new, important allies in the making – and they're without a Trusted Advisor now! – so they might want to be very decisive about who the throne of Agrabah is going to pass on to, before anyone else tries to decide for them. If anything happens to the Sultan during these alleged years, Aladdin won't officially be the Prince yet, Jasmine I don't believe would be allowed to take the throne, and then even if she could she'd still be all alone and unprotected in the palace if anyone else wanted to force her hand in marriage and take the throne for himself. Or just kill her and end the bloodline right there. Okay, I'm not saying these dark scenarios I'm taking entirely too much pleasure in coming up with couldn't still happen if Aladdin was married to Jasmine. All I'm saying is they might think it was important to make their position a little more stable. Agrabah was already taken over once in this movie!
And I might add... okay, I know some people will be uncomfortable with my bringing up something so “adult” in connection with a Disney movie, but Aladdin and Jasmine don't know there are children watching their story so I'm just going to say it anyway. How long are we supposed to imagine Aladdin and Jasmine waited to have sex for the first time?? Because judging by the way they look at each other, I'm going to hazard a guess they wouldn't be too happy about having to wait for years. I admit, this might not necessarily be a problem, since the Arabian Nights are full of couples having sex before, or with no intention of, getting married. But considering Aladdin didn't head directly into Jasmine's bedroom after their first kiss, I'm guessing they weren't intending to do that (maybe it wouldn't be appropriate for a princess?), and then in every story I've seen since, they just don't... feel like they're being that intimate. How can Aladdin and Jasmine, after everything they've been through, ever be okay with an indefinite amount of time when they can't fully be together? When they can't fall asleep in each others' arms every night, when there's always the feeling of something still separating them (which is twice as strong when we suppose Aladdin is still living in his hovel)? If you are going to make it so they don't get married for years, I at least want to see some plotlines where Aladdin and Jasmine are constantly sneaking off for some spicy nights together and trying to keep that a secret.
I guess the movie really needed to do like the stage shows did (Aladdin: A Musical Spectacular and the Aladdin Broadway show), which both have Jasmine come out in a wedding veil at the end while everyone is dancing in celebration, and this very clearly happens the moment after Aladdin gets permission to marry Jasmine. (It's a cropped, two-piece wedding dress, yet; much more like our Jasmine's style than that awful, stifling number from the sequel that covers everything.) But I mean, who knew? I always thought the ending of the movie was clear enough. I think these stage shows offer even more proof that the ending of Aladdin was always meant to show us the happy couple newly married. (As does the packaging on the earliest Aladdin and Jasmine Mattel dolls, released I believe before either of the sequels were, which have little blurbs telling their story. The French side translates directly to, “Aladdin marries Jasmine and they live happily ever after”.) Really, it couldn't be clearer that the end of the movie was always meant to show us Aladdin and Jasmine happily married, and no matter what anyone else decided later, the original canon with its clear intent will always be there. And I don't see why anyone would want to change it. Personally, I would much rather assume somebody put in the wrong word every time Jasmine or Aladdin refer to each other as her “boyfriend/fiancé” or his “girlfriend/fiancée”, than that after everything they'd been through, Aladdin and Jasmine suddenly realized they didn't need each other that much after all.
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