This isn’t the first time that Disney has been criticised in relation to Aladdin. The well-loved soundtrack for the 1992 animation - A Whole New World notably won Disney an Academy Award, along with another Oscar for the entire score - is actually an edited version of the one that was heard in cinemas. The original lyric in the first verse of the song Arabian Nights described Arabia as “Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face”.

“Aladdin is not an entertaining Arabian Nights fantasy as film critics would have us believe,” wrote Jack Shaheen in 1992, then a professor of mass communications at Southern Illinois University, “but rather a painful reminder to 3 million Americans of Arab heritage, as well as 300 million Arabs and others, that the abhorrent Arab stereotype is as ubiquitous as Aladdin’s lamp.”

The film was criticised for perpetuating Orientalist stereotypes of the Middle East and Asia. The American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee saw light-skinned, Anglicised features in the heroes Aladdin and Jasmine that contrasted sharply with the swarthy, greedy street merchants who had Arabic accents and grotesque facial features.

Shaheen warned that these images would perpetuate negative stereotypes that “literally sustain adverse portraits across generations.” He argued: “There is a commanding link between make-believe aberrations and the real world,” and warned of the negative portrayal of Agrabah, the film’s fictionalised city that he called “Hollywood’s fabricated Ayrabland.” It appears that for some, this warning wasn’t unfounded: in 2015 it was revealed that 30% of Republican voters in the US would vote in support of bombing Agrabah.

After Shaheen protested against the film alongside the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Disney agreed to alter the lyrics in Arabian Nights for Aladdin's video release in 1993, and defended it, as it was a rare film to feature an Arab hero and heroine.