The Progression of Disney’s Aladdin

Before taking Research Methods first semester of my senior year at Plymouth State, I had never watched the movie Aladdin before–the original animation or the remake. I wrote a 23 page paper with a research partner that analyzed both the 1992 animated Aladdin and the 2019 remake of Aladdin. My partner and I analyzed each movie to pick out the themes in the movie that connected to religion, gender stereotypes, and class. We compared the two movies and discussed where the movies were similar in aspects of gender, religion and class, and where they differed on those topics. After the paper was finished, my partner and I had to condense 23 pages of research and observations into a Power Point presentation that we presented to the rest of the class at the end of the semester.

This artifact is important to use in my portfolio because it is the best example of the learning outcome “the ability to read, write, listen, and present in various contexts and for various audiences”. For this assignment, my partner and I needed to do primary research on a topic of our choice that related to media. After conducting our research, we wrote a research paper with the findings of our research. had to create a Power Point presentation to give our class to show our findings for our research. For each part of this project, we needed to present our findings through this research to our professor in a paper and to the rest of the class through a Power Point presentation.

The primary research my partner and I completed for Aladdin (1992) and Aladdin (2019) exemplifies my ability to read and write because my partner and I needed to pull from other primary sources to base our findings off of and gather more information on the topics or race, religion and gender in a culture that neither of us were aware of. Along with that, our final paper needed to be presented in a research framework, while our Power Point presentation was developed to be a summary of our research and findings rather than a lengthy explanation of the information we gathered during our research. A large amount of effort between research, analyzing the movies, and interpreting our results was put into this paper on both my end of the work and my partner’s end.