I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this, but I REALLY liked the Aladdin animated series Disney did.  However there was one thing that always bothered me, and that was Mirage.  Don’t get me wrong, I like her character and personality, the fact she’s a catgirl, the fact she’s voiced by Frasier Crane’s ex-wife Lilith, and the fact her design seems to be inspired by Egyptian Goddesses such as Bast.  What bothers me is her design tend to fluctuate quite a bit during the course of the series.  To the point to where I even noticed it as a kid.

Granted Aladdin had the same issue most of the Disney Afternoon and Warner 90s series had at the time.  That issue was being weekday shows, they were required to hire multiple animation studios to assist in production in order to turn out the large number of episodes for a season.  The side effect being animation styles would vary from studio to studio and to an extent so did the character designs.  But the latter is usually pretty minor, Mirage however seemed to change a lot with her appearances and I just found it odd, and figured I take a second to compare them.

Picture 1: This comes from her first appearance.  Mirage’s first appearance looks to me like what you’d get if you took a Tailspin character and tried to draw them in The Aladdin style.  I’m not saying that because she’s a furry, but because she shares a lot of the look and design stlyes present in the Tailspin characters, just a bit more stylized and simple to go with the Aladdin style.

Picture 2: This design seemed the most common, and this time she looks like a full blown Tailspin character to me.  Furry cheeks, bigger eyes and ears.  As much as I liked the character, this design always made me feel like she was in the wrong show.  Like she should be giving Baloo some shit instead of Aladdin.

Picture 3: Sadly this design only got used once, and it makes me sad because I REALLY liked her design here. She’s given bigger eyes, more feline ears, and a more angular face. This makes her look a lot more like an actual Aladdin character (even if some of the details are admittedly more animal based)  The slimmer some what more slimmer angular face goes with the Aladdin style ethics rather than the broad Tailspin-ish head. Also she feels more like a woman with a cathead and less like a anthro cat in this style.  Wish they kept with this one.

Picture 4: This picture came from the same episode as picture 3.  I’ll admit, I just posted it because she looked cute in that pose.  That episode “The Lost Ones” did a lot of cute posing with her that other episodes didn’t.  People should’ve took notes.

Picture 5: Here’s Mirage from the last episode she appeared in and as you can she, she’s back to her Picture 2 designed, but the Tailspin qualities feel ampted up a bit.  She still has the broad face, more furry cheek details, and her cat like mouth is far more pronounced. The only thing that keeps her from totally looking like a Tailspin character in this design is he’s got very defined cat eyes.  She sorta’ had these in the first two designs, but they weren’t very defined, and sometimes just felt like slightly elongated typical cartoon dot pupils rather than cat pupils.  Here she’s got full on cat pupils, and I admittedly like that detail.  It’s something that makes her look catlike and not in a furry way.  A nice little detail.

So there’s my random rambling on the Mirage character in Aladdin.  Not sure if you guys agree, disagree, care, but I would like to hear your opinions.  I’d also like to know if you’d want to hear me ramble about cartoons more often, since it is an issue I do like to talk about.  Anywho, seeya.