Disney's Got a Brand-New Baghdad

While all these conceptual puzzles were getting solved, Disney's animation staff was applying as much dazzle to each shot as state-of-the-art technology could provide. The movie's stunning color palette, worked out by production designer Richard Vander Wende, depended heavily on Disney's CAPS (Computer Assisted Postproduction System) technology, first used on The Rescuers Down Under. Instead of physically painting each character pose with pen and brush onto plastic cels that are then laid against a background, CAPS allows the ''ink and paint'' staffers (they've kept their old name) to rerender characters in dozens of sample hues by painting digitally with a computer-station mouse.

Another bit of elegance made possible by CAPS is a blurring effect in which different layers of background art come in and out of focus as characters move to or away from them, the way the human eye or a movie- camera lens would see them. Disney's high-tech CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) branch tackled other especially intricate shots. Complex renderings, such as the magic carpet's pattern and the wall of lava that nearly boils Aladdin, were drawn in ''key poses'' by artists, then expanded with a computer's calculations.

Aladdin is a bold step for Disney, but where the studio will turn from here is unclear. There is one odd project on the way for November 1993, a Tim Burton-designed puppet-animated feature called Nightmare Before Christmas (in which a skeleton kidnaps Santa Claus). But most of the com-pany's future cartoon output sounds more conventional. Summer of '94 will bring The Lion King, which Katzenberg calls ''Bambi in Africa,'' set to music by Elton John and Tim Rice. A rejiggered edition of 1940's Fantasia, with some new segments, is due by 1997, along with a cartoon Swan Lake.

Animator Randy Cartwright, who gave Aladdin's magic carpet its eager-to-please pantomime personality, has hopes that Pocahontas, set for Thanksgiving '94, will aim for a more grown-up audience. ''It's a Romeo and Juliet story, and offers a lot more range and depth than we've done before,'' he says, promising an unhappy ending in which Pocahontas and John Smith part. ''It's exciting, because I'd like to see animation get into more sophisticated stories. Not just good guy, bad guy, defeat the bad guy, movie's over.'' If Aladdin becomes big enough, Cartwright just may get his wish.

— (Additional reporting by Lisa Karlin)