Disney’s telling of the Chinese legend is leaner and more serious than the studio’s habit, with a snowfield battle worth the evening. The songs are ordinary and Eddie Murphy’s dragon is a tax on it, but the daughter and her father are moving.
Disney took a Chinese ballad about a daughter who goes to war in her father’s place and, for once, did not soften it much. Mulan has an enemy who kills people, an army that trains and marches, and a heroine whose trouble is not a prince but a promise. Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook direct it at 88 minutes and it feels shorter. It is one of the studio’s better films of that decade, with two reservations.
The first thing to notice is how much has been left off the screen. Hans Bacher’s production design borrows from ink painting: a few strokes for a hillside, a wash of colour for the sky, and long stretches of nothing where another Disney film would have put detail. The Fa village is warm ochre and pink blossom; the army camp is dust and grey canvas; the mountain pass is white to the edges of the frame. The characters are drawn in simple angular lines, and the Huns, when they come, have yellow eyes and almost no other colour in them. It is the plainest the studio had looked in years, and the plainness suits the story.
It pays off most in the pass. The Huns appear on a ridge as a black line across the snow and the line keeps widening. Michael Kelly cuts between the handful of recruits below and the horde above, and holds on the wide shots long enough for us to count. Jerry Goldsmith’s score drives it with drums and low brass and no tune to hum, which is the right choice. We sat forward for the whole sequence and did not notice we had done it. What Mulan does with the last cannon is the best idea in the film, and we will not describe it.
The voices are well chosen. Ming-Na Wen plays Mulan plain and slightly dry, without a simper, so that when she does something brave it sounds like a decision. Soon-Tek Oh gives Fa Zhou a soft, patient voice, and the scene where father and daughter sit under the blossom and he tells her the late flower is the finest moved us more than we expected from a Disney parent. It is the film’s quietest minute and its best written. Miguel Ferrer barely raises his voice as Shan-Yu, which is why the moment where he asks two captured scouts how many men it takes to deliver a message is properly frightening. BD Wong’s Shang sounds like a young officer trying to sound older. Miriam Margolyes has three minutes as the Matchmaker and makes them count, and James Hong fusses nicely as Chi Fu.
Now the reservations. The first is Mushu. Eddie Murphy talks fast and some of it is funny, and every time the film goes quiet he arrives to fill the silence. He is there because the studio did not trust a girl, a father and a war to hold a child’s attention for an hour and a half, and the film is interrupted by that lack of nerve about every ten minutes. The better comedy belongs to Harvey Fierstein’s Yao and the two recruits beside him, whose marching song about the girl waiting at home is cut off mid-line, and the silence that follows is the sharpest edit in the picture.
The second is the songs. Reflection is a mirror ballad of the standard shape, competently sung and gone by the next scene. I’ll Make a Man Out of You is the one people remember, because it does a month of training in three minutes and has a joke in every verse. The rest are filler, and Goldsmith’s score underneath them is better than they are.
The China is a Disney China: hairstyles from one century, armour from another, a cricket for luck and a lizard for laughs. Anyone who knows the ballad will wince at least twice. But the ballad is about a daughter and a father, and the film knows that and keeps coming back to it, which after the shouting of Hercules the year before is a relief.
It carries a U certificate and earns it in the old sense: children will take the charge in their stride and the adults will be the ones flinching at Shan-Yu. Watch it with a child if you have one to hand. If you have not, watch it anyway, and pour a drink when the lizard starts.
