Mulan (1998)

US working title:
“China Doll”

Directed by: Tony Bancroft, Barry Cook

Written by: Rita Hsaio, Chris Sanders, Philip LaZebnik, Raymond Singer, Dean DeBlois

Starring: Ming-Na Wen/Lea Salonga, BD Wong/Donny Osmond, Eddie Murphy

Running Time: 1 hour, 27 minutes (Special Edition)

Rating: G

Pre-Conceived Notions: It’s a story about a warrior who just happens to be a Chinese woman—you know what? I can’t do this section of it. I had a really good paragraph going on, and I did something, and my computer swallowed it whole, right when I was writing the review for it, thus rendering any pre-conceived notion I may have had neither pre-conceived, nor a notion. Next time I’m going to immediately cut and paste things into Blogger as I write them. Google’s got my back way more than I do.

Why I Haven’t Seen This Film: I was 19 when it came out, and I think right around that time I was taking a really hard English class from a professor who actually wanted her students to read and understand the books she assigned, and a statistics class from a professor whose class consisted of him standing in front of the classroom with a worksheet, and calling on different people in the class to yell out the answers to the various problems without teaching us how to do them first. So, Mulan was the last thing on my mind at that point. Oh, and those classes? Were on the same day. So there’s that. 

1 hour, 27 minutes later…: So. That was a Disney war movie. Which impresses me. I guess I knew that at one point in time, but I had forgotten it along the way. Another impressive thing is the way they handled the romance between Mulan and Shang. They didn’t get all kissy-kissy at the end, they maintained a quasi-professional relationship. I would dare say that Disney might have opened themselves up for a sequel, with how open-ended that ending was. So, look for that in the future.

But with all of that impressive stuff in there, I was kind of left feeling flat. It was like Disney was going through the motions with the plot and not really pushing the envelope all that much. They had the chance to top or equal The Lion King, Aladdin, and Pocahontas, but they fell short. It felt rushed; there was no time for character development at all, and even less time for sussing out the plot. And I watched the extended Special Edition. But, hey. It’s a Disney movie. It’s hard to do what you do for a target demographic with short attention spans. 

Final Thoughts: 3 out of 5 slices of pizza. I was impressed with the many cultural things they got right, and with the different story approach. They just needed to tighten things up a little more.