Mulan (Walt Disney Pictures, Jason T. Reed Productions, Good Fear Content, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s movie turned out to be a quite good action-adventure film: Mulan, Walt Disney Studios’ 2020 remake of a 1998 animated film based on an historical legend of ancient China in which the Empire is menaced by an invading army called the Rouran, whose commander, Böri Khan (Jason Scott Lee), is assisted by a witch, Xianning (the great Gong Li). He mounts a concerted attack on the garrisons protecting the Silk Road in northern China. To stop him, the Emperor (Jet Li, who’s now a bit too old for martial arts himself but coached the younger cast members) orders a draft in which each family in the affected region of China must submit a male to join the army. Mulan’s family, the Hua, has no young man – it’s just her parents and Mulan and her younger sister – so dad, who was a hero in the previous Chinese war against the Rouran, offers to fight even though he limps and is otherwise too decrepit to be useful on the battlefield. Mulan steals his sword and armor and disguises herself as a man to join the battle, though she’s “outed” about halfway through this 115-minute movie when a young man in her regiment catches her bathing in a nearby stream since she’s refused to shower with the guys and the other recruits are complaining about “his” smell.

Once she’s caught, she’s expelled from the regiment, but the witch Xianning tries to recruit her for the other side and essentially says that strong women like them should stick together. Mulan refuses but learns from Xianning that the attacks on the garrisons are merely diversions; Tung’s real plan is to invade the Imperial City (this would be what we know now as Beijing, though that name is not used in the film), capture the Emperor, kill him and take over the entire country. The second half of the film features the pitched battle for control of the Imperial City, in which Mulan (Yifei Liu) manages to persuade her former commander, Tung (Donnie Yen), that he should send a small commando force in ahead of his main army to warn the Emperor what’s going on and get him to mobilize the Imperial troops. Mulan does so well leading this force and fighting in the battle that the Emperor offers her the job of commanding his personal guard, but she refuses and goes home to her family – though she reconsiders when the Emperor sends a delegation to plead with her (and if she didn’t stay in the army, how could Disney make a Mulan II?).

The film has been blasted for taking a traditional Chinese legend that survives in an anonymous book that has been revered by generations of Chinese readers and turning it into a Walt Disney spectacular – which to my mind is valid but beside the point. Disney has been doing this sort of thing since Walt Disney was alive and still relatively young – the company is notorious for having ransacked the world’s storehouse of classic children’s literature, from Grimm’s fairy tales through Pinocchio, Bambi and Mary Poppins, for stories they can put into their formula – and viewing it “fresh,” with no particular knowledge of the story beyond its basic premise and no cultural attachments to get in the way, I thoroughly enjoyed Mulan. Indeed, after slogging through all three overlong, ponderous episodes of The Hobbit (also a story about an unlikely hero on a quest), Mulan was a breath of fresh air not only figuratively but almost literally, Director Niki Caro (a woman, appropriately enough for a story featuring a feminist heroine) and her four-person writing committee – Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Lauren Hynek and Elizabeth Martin – get the exposition over with in less than 10 minutes, establishing early on who the good guys are, who the bad guys are and that Mulan is a tomboy with a mean sword arm (she practices with a bamboo stake) who can’t stand the normal fate of a young Chinese woman of the time, which was to be set up by a professional matchmaker, married off to a man she’d never met before and essentially made into her property. (At least her traditionalist family didn’t try to have her feet bound.)

Mulan is full of marvelous and charming scenes, even though the dramatic points they make are pretty obvious – like the one in which Mulan’s mother puts her in charge of the tea ceremony with which her family entertains the matchmaker (she ends up breaking the tea set after first showing off her super-powers by catching the tea things in mid-air – there are lines about why she’s never shown off her abilities before, which made me joke, “It’s dangerous for a young woman in a Disney film to reveal her previously unknown powers! Haven’t you guys ever seen Frozen?” There’s also a nice scene in which one of Mulan’s fellow soldiers is pretty obviously cruising her even though at that point she’s still in disguise as a he – which reminded me of similar scenes of a straight guy cruising a woman in FTM drag between Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Queen Christina (1933) and Katharine Hepburn and Brian Aherne in Sylvia Scarlett (1936). (Mulan is a good enough movie to remind me of classic films I revere.) Instead of the sheer weight and infuriating complexity of J. R. R. Tolkien’s world we get clear-cut character conflicts and a plot that moves effectively and makes sense, and instead of the dank world of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien movies we get bright sunlight and the sorts of vivid colors that used to be used in color films when they were still a novelty but have fallen by the wayside now that they’ve become standard. Mandy Walker’s cinematography (another woman in a job usually done by a man! Indeed, because the American Society of Cinematographers is so notoriously “closed” and protective a union, it’s been even harder for women cinematographers to break through than it’s been for women directors) and Grant Major’s production designs are stunning and beautiful, and Niki Caro (who, ironically, is from Peter Jackson’s stomping grounds, New Zealand) manages to make the most of them and create a truly beautiful film.

I’m sure there are powerful undertones in this story as traditionally told that got lost in the Disneyfication process, but so what? On its own terms the live-action Mulan is excellent entertainment and virtually a textbook example of how a quest narrative featuring a young character should be done – and it has the major advantage over Jackson’s slogs through Tolkien that it’s only 115 minutes long, enough running time to get its story told cleanly and efficiently without dragging us through ponderous digressions. I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece, but Mulan is a film of real quality – and it’s made both Charles and I curious to see the animated version, which (according to the imdb.com “Trivia” page on the 2020 Mulan) differs from it in that Mulan cuts her hair off to disguise herself as a male (this time around the filmmakers decided against that on the ground that a lot of Chinese males in the time period wore their hair long) and it’s full of songs, some of which were used in this film as part of Harry Gregson Williams’ musical score (which itself is better than those of most modern films in this genre, inspirational without being ponderous), though the only noticeable songs in this version were the big rock power ballads (including one called “Loyal, Brave, True” – not a great song but sung spectacularly by Christina Aguilera – and where has she been? Throughout her career her powerful voice has been saddled with weak material) that inevitably got trotted out to be heard under the closing credits. The musical style is anachronistic but, as I said to Charles after the film, no more so than Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s 20th century take on 19th century German Romanticism in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), a film set in the 13th century!