Mulan is a surprise triumph from Disney, succeeding in ways we do not expect Disney to succeed in and displaying its greatest strengths in its least Disneyesque moments. Mulan is a good film, one of the better animated films of 1998, and points the way towards a different style of film making one hopes Disney will pursue.
The most important break with the past is with Mulan herself, a truly assertive female lead. Disney had been leading up to a character like this for most of the 1980s and 1990s; Belle was a bookworm, Ariel was puckish, Jasmine was able to "Just Say No" to her father's attempts to play matchmaker. These were a far cry from the passive versions of Snow White and Cinderella that starred in Disney's best-known features. Mulan leaves all these characters behind. She loves her family enough to disobey them (a complex dilemma that makes perfect sense in the film). Furthermore, after failing at traditionally feminine roles, Mulan finds her success disguised as a man - and is a better soldier than her dimwitted male companions! Perhaps it's best to think of Mulan as an animated answer to Joan of Arc at times.
The story is as strong as Mulan herself. Indeed, it is difficult to recall a recent Disney movie with such an emphasis on crafted story and character motivation. After all, Aladdin and Hercules were primarily gag-oriented comedies, and Pochahontas and Hunchback were attempts to tell well-known stories with a light operatic flair. This is not a film that youngsters will easily digest, due to the serious nature of the film. Mulan seems to be geared toward the older child, and is a good example of a non-condescending family film.' If more family films were like this one, perhaps the term would not be held in disrepute. Rather than rehash the old rags-to-riches-happy-ending "little princess" theme, Mulan is about the cyclical nature of journeys and adventures. Saying more would give the rest of the story away, but Mulan could have been subtitled "There and Back Again."
The graphics are very impressive. Mulan doesn't look like any other Disney heroine, and the artists involved in the film clearly learned some lessons from the study of Asian art. There is a special economy of line in the character designs that is very attractive. The graphic successes of Mulan recall the neat translation of Medieval miniatures in Sleeping Beauty. While no one would mistake a cel from Mulan as an authentic Chinese wall hanging, the artwork is sufficiently informed from Chinese art to add a certain non-Disney flavor to the animation. Again, this is unique among most newer Disney films, most of which have characters which would fit into each others' worlds with only a minimum of difficulty. At a time when many animated film's character design is increasingly standardized, the uniqueness of Mulan is easy to appreciate. One can also appreciate the tastefulness and restraint of computer-assisted graphics, for only in a Disney film do these graphics blend in with traditional draftsmanship.
There are also some throwbacks to the traditional Disney formula, and whether or not the viewer wishes to categorize these throwbacks as flaws depends on the seriousness of the viewer and how much of the Disney formula you can tolerate. For all Eddie Murphy's talent as Mushu the Dragon, the character goes nowhere and contributes nothing to the plot save for scattered comic relief. Mushu is a typical Disney cute supporting character, nothing more or less. The musical numbers are nice (in fact they are some of the nicer songs in a recent Disney film), but are sometimes at odds with the overall tone of the movie. This was exploited nicely in one scene, where a song trails off as the singers view the dead on a battlefield. One might also note that Mulan (at least in the Disney version) is less a true Chinese girl than a Chinese-American girl, just as Pinocchio is not an Italian but an Italian-American and Aladdin is not Arabic but Arab-American.
Still, there are enough triumphs in Mulan for the film to be wholeheartedly recommended. This is a different type of Disney movie - a successful noncomical animated film aimed at older children and families. It holds up to repeated viewings well - in fact it is only upon repeated viewings that the computer-generated special effects are apparent. After the recent faltering of the late 1990s Disney features, Mulan*'s successes are all the sweeter.
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Other NonAnime Reviews Prince of Egypt Review* Gotham Girls Review* Sleeping Beauty Review * Jackie Chan Adventures Review Return of the Joker Review* |
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