oh man I forgot there was a tiger in Disney’s Aladdin, I thought the parrot and the carpet filled up the “nonhuman sidekick” slots

when I was in LA I heard an animator give a good answer to “why do all Disney characters have only one parent”, it was that putting a voiced character in a Disney movie required like 3 character designers and a wooden model-maker working for 3 months to hand over to a team of 3 journeyman keyframe artists and like 15 apprentice in-betweeners who only drew that character, and it was really a drain and if they could use only one character to represent “parents” to the protagonists that was more efficient

but I mean, they bothered to put that tiger in

I dunno, maybe it was a “get to” thing and at the 1990 staff meeting there were enough animators eager to spend a whole year drawing a big cat