Review: Mulan
Directed by Barry Cook and James Bancroft
Voices of Ming Na Wen, Eddie Murphy, B.D. Wong, Pat Morita, June Foray
Approx 89 min
It had seemed to me that the folks at Disney had a rather interesting pattern developing in their feature animation department. Every other year produced a good film. Since 1989, Disney Animation has (with the exception of 1993) produced a full-length feature. The Little Mermaid was superior to the following year's Rescuers Down Under. Beauty and the Beast was far better than Aladdin. Lion King vs. Pocahontas and the solid Hunchback over the stylish but silly Hercules. Mulan, Disney's latest feature has broken the pattern.
Mulan is Hercules in so many ways. A scrawny young character musters up the courage, with the aid of a loud mouth dinky sidekick, to put evil-doers in their place. Add crossdressing to Hercules and make the unique Hades into a cookie-cutter boring villain and you have Mulan.
Mulan tells the story of a young Chinese woman (Mulan) who takes her father's place in the Chinese army so that she may save him from certain death. There are the usual gender change jokes and circumstances. Sadly, nothing creative is done with it. Strange that there were no snickers, though, from children in the audience when one character bared himself to his fellow soldiers and proclaimed that he was "the rock".
The central message in Mulan is a good one for children. Women can do what men can do and perhaps even better. But the Mulan character tends to do it the messy way. She gets the job done, but not without destroying everything in the area. So the message is muddled. She also goes from weakling to superior soldier in the space of one abrupt and annoying song. That one is also not a terribly clear message to children. What is it supposed to tell them, that success comes overnight if you just WANT it?
And then there are the sidekicks. You are familiar with them. In the past they have been clever as meerkats and raccoons, failures as yellow fish and monkeys. The folks at Disney created yet another loud and outlandish character whose sole asset is the person who provides the voice. Eddie Murphy is the mini-dragon Mushu who tricks the spirits and sets off to provide Mulan with support and help. With him he brings the slightly more clever cricket who provides almost as much humor withought speech as Murphy does with it. The only amusing moments in the film (and they are few and far between, at least for adults) do come with either the cricket or Mushu, but the dragon is merely a vehicle who fits well into the role of Disney sidekick. The writers and animators seem desperate to find another "Timon" and have as yet been unable to do so.
There are some moments of Disney magic to be found in Mulan. Primarily it is the battle scene in the snow, the formulaic middle plot point that is supposed to turn the story around. The digital effects do help in this instance and make for quite an awesome sight. There is also a clever little element added to clouds, smoke, water and snow, any thing that flows, really. The swirls, waves and puffs all have an asian accent, they twist and curve as they do in ancient Chinese paintings and it is quite a nice touch.
One would hope that the Character Animators at Disney have not forgotten how to create pretty characters. Everyone in Mulan looks like a Pocahontas extra. Square or pointy faces, sharply angled black hair, plain, black eyes. There is no depth to any of them, save for what the computer coloring can add. The production designers also went back and forth between Chinese and Japanese designs. Much of the picture had the rigid and simple beauty of Japanese culture invading the image, and not much of the intricate Chinese detail.
What I suggest to Disney (as if they would listen) is to take a year off. The pictures they are producing now are falling back into the creativity-draining trap that only attracts children. It was magical when they made Beauty and the Beast and allowed adults some enjoyment for the next few pictures, both in theme and in art. But now, they have failed two years in a row and seem destined to do it for a third if they continue to be an animation factory rather than artists. The world did not end in 1993 withought a summer Disney blockbuster. And that hiatus allowed them to create the highest grossing Disney film of all time, The Lion King. I'm sure that the money from that picture more than made up for missing a year. The quality of these films would approve all around if they let the pencils rest and came back with a masterpiece to kick off the millenium. Because only Disney can do it.
* * out of * * * * stars © Copyright 1998 Nick Amado Email me with comments namado@concentric.net
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