The Disney 100th Anniversary short, Once Upon A Studio, featured The Genie from the original Aladdin that used Robin Williams’ voice.
Disney is ready to celebrate its whole new world it has built over the last 100 years! An entire century of Disney magic has graced the world. What a statement. The new Once Upon A Studio short film just aired live yesterday on ABC, with a sprinkle of throwback magic. The biggest highlight of the short was that the Genie was voiced again by the late Robin Williams. And no, Aladdin’s Genie was not done through the use of AI.
Williams may have passed away in 2014, but he has left so much great, unused work that Disney was able to artistically use now for this special short. They went back into the archives to find these old voice lines from the original film and asked Williams’ estate permission to use them. “We tried to take them on the journey with us to say, ‘We’ve got this very special short that we’re doing. Robin as the genie means so much to so many people, and we would really love to involve him,’ ” said producer Bradford Simonsen in an interview with Variety.
Williams was such a driving force in making Aladdin a huge success back in 1992, and what better way to showcase his biggest achievement within the Disneyverse? While Will Smith may have taken the reins on the Genie character in the latest live-action Aladdin, Williams had that unique charm and whimsy to the character. Simonsen also explained how they began the process of integrating Williams’ voice into the short. “So, [director] Dan [Abraham] listened to the outtakes from the original recording, and he found those little bites that we could use.”
Once Upon A Studio uses a combination of live-action footage, hand-drawn animation, and CGI animation to recreate 543 classic Disney characters. Some of the most notable characters included Mickey Mouse, Elsa and Anna from Frozen, Winnie the Pooh and Friends, and Moana. The trailer showed Mickey leading the characters from the shadows when the Disney studio closed for the night. He and his many animated friends check that the coast is clear which leads to a wonderful bit of a 100-year-long nostalgia party.
The short film saw these iconic characters step out of their individual worlds and into a unified one—to spotlight Disney’s long-running history of magic-making. Simonsen expanded on the overall process of bringing this project together: “We used our animation research library where we pulled out model sheets for the animators to work from. We had Eric Goldberg, who has the studio history, and we did tests to make sure it was all working together in the scenes.”
Once Upon A Studio debuted on ABC on October 15 and is available on Disney+ now (as of October 16).
