Mulan: No cartoon dragons, no musical numbers, just an ancient, action-packed Chinese spectacle

By Thom Ernst

Rating: A-minus 

Mulan is a rich, colourful film that is surprisingly cinematic and far less a remake than you might expect. Those anticipating a recreation of the 1998 original risk being disappointed by the lack of musical numbers and spirited animation.

But those put off by the carbon copy renderings of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King might be in for a pleasant surprise. Mulan is distinct enough from its predecessor that it hardly seems like a remake at all. 

Yifei Liu makes for a wonderfully ferocious Mulan.

Mulan is more than just an exercise in faithfully converting animated source material into live-action. Director Niki Caro rejects an instinct to play safe by adding characters who were not in the original (notably a shape-shifting witch played by Rosalind Chao) and dropping beloved characters who were in the original (notably Eddie Murphy’s comic-baiting Musha). 

Caro opts to trade in the familiar for breathtaking spectacle, glorious combat sequences, and studied moments of stillness that would not be entirely out of place in the works of Kar-Wai Wong (In the Mood For Love)—that is if Kar-Wai Wong had any interest in making family-friendly Disney films.  

But Caro is not such a rebel as to completely dismiss the basis of her source material; Mulan is still a tale about a girl upending a patriarchy by defying cultural expectations and challenging the staid wisdom of her elders. It’s a story that falls within the vast extremes between Yentl and any of the countless films featuring Joan of Arc. 

Caro has told this tale before in her 2002 film Whale Rider, about an eleven-year old Maori girl who stands firm in her belief that she is the rightful heir to be the next tribal chief, a role understood to be male. 

There is unquestionably a shift of references and experience from Maori to Chinese; Caro is from New Zealand and not Chinese. Then again, neither is she Maori. But she is a woman and arguably, despite cultural specifics, Mulan is a story pertinent to the experiences of young girls and women regardless of background. 

Originally, Disney had hoped for Ang Lee to direct, before awarding Caro with the role. Indeed, Caro’s film often feels like a homage to Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. No doubt, Lee would have done an impressive job, but it seems essential to have Mulan’s story, at the very least, be told by a woman. 

Mulan does tend to hinge on the theatrics, and Caro is not ashamed to play out every melodramatic note to full affect. It’s an affectation heightened by performances from Yifei Liu who makes for a wonderful Mulan, even if she does make for an unlikely male impersonator, and from more veteran performers like Donnie Yen, Jet Li and Jason Scott Lee. 

But even the movie’s stagiest moments seem perfectly suited to the overall spectacle that Caro creates; stunning vistas of sand dunes, majestic snow-capped mountains cities popping with colour and scenes of jaw-dropping choreographed battles. After all, Mulan follows the narrative of legend, and so excess seems hardly out of place. But this is a film intended for a movie screen, destined for a home screen. If the actions and emotions seem, at times, unduly grand, it could be due to the unfortunate confines of a small screen.  

Mulan may, I suspect, have the largest body count of any Disney family film to date. (I’m happy to be corrected if that’s not the case). But it’s bloodless violence. Still, the sight of arrows piercing armour and soldiers toppled from great heights might be unsettling for younger viewers still hoping for chatty crickets and fast-talking dragons who sound like Eddie Murphy. 

But in a year that offers few surprises, Mulan is an unexpected treat.

Mulan is directed by Niki Caro and stars Yifei Liu, Rosalind Chao, Donnie Yen, Jason Scott Lee and Jet Li.  Mulan is available on a pay-per-view basis on Disney-Plus.