Girls will be boys

Romance takes a back seat to action in Mulan

by Jeffrey Gantz

MULAN. Directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft. Music by Matthew Wilder. Lyrics by David Zippel. Score by Jerry Goldsmith. With the voices of Ming-Na Wen & Lea Salonga (Mulan), B.D. Wong & Donny Osmond (Li Shang), Eddie Murphy (Mushu), Freda Foh Shen (Fa Li), Soon-Tek Oh (Fa Zhou), June Foray (Grandmother Fa), George Takei (First Ancestor), Harvey Fierstein (Yao), Jerry S. Tondo (Chien-Po), Gedde Watanabe & Matthew Wilder (Ling), Miguel Ferrer (Shan-Yu), James Shigeta (General Li), and Pat Morita (Emperor). A Walt Disney Pictures release. At the Harbour Mall, Holiday, Lincoln Mall, Showcase Route 6 and North Attleboro, Warwick Mall, Westerly, and Woonsocket cinemas.

Having proved it can do American history (Pocahontas), the 19th-century novel (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), and Greek myth (Hercules) over the past three years, Disney Pictures is spreading its net toward the East -- and, not incidentally, hoping to snare the Asian film and merchandising market. Based on a Chinese legend as told by children's-book author Robert San Souci, this year's big Disney animation, Mulan, is about a young girl who, to preserve the family honor, replaces her ailing father in the Emperor's army and saves China from the invading Huns. Mulan herself (drawn to resemble The Joy Luck Club's Ming-Na Wen, her speaking voice) is a winner, and the story is designed to appeal to both boys (lots of action) and girls (a woman in the middle of all that action, plus a little romance): few summer movies will surpass it. But what's become an annual animation ritual is beginning to show signs of franchise filmmaking, of taking after the fast-food outlets where Mulan toys will inevitably appear soon.

Part of the problem is that Mulan reads like a children's story instead of the more adult fare of Pocahontas or The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Hercules. As the only child of Fa Zhou and Fa Li, Mulan is headed to the Matchmaker in the hope that she'll make a fine marriage and bring honor to her family, but she's a bit of a tomboy (like so many Disney heroines), and when the crib notes she's brushed on her wrist get all over the Matchmaker, she's sent home in disgrace. Meanwhile, invading Huns are pouring over the Great Wall of China, and bad goes to worse when an emissary from the Emperor arrives at Mulan's village to conscript an able-bodied man from every village: Zhou is no longer able-bodied, but if he doesn't go, the family will lose face. So Mulan cuts her hair, grabs his commission, and rides out to take his place, aided by a feckless jive-talking red dragon (he's sent, sort of, by her Ancestors) named Mushu (Eddie Murphy) and a good-luck cricket named Cri-Kee. (No, that's not Chinese for "cricket.") There's a humorous section where she survives boot camp by using brains as well as brawn, but the story quickly turns grim as the wicked Shan-Yu (Miguel Ferrar) and his Huns destroy a village and kill General Li (James Shigeta), the father of Mulan's hunky commanding officer, Li Shang (B.D. Wong). The rest of Mulan is standard good-triumphs-over-evil fare soured by some implausible plot developments (Li Shang wouldn't really abandon her and then take the credit) sweetened with a sugar dusting of romance.

Disney used Hercules to spoof Western civilization, our obsession with celebrity and commercialization (and the studio didn't exempt itself); it was a smart, hip, insider's film. With Mulan the studio is standing outside both the culture and the audience it's aiming at; everything is more tentative, more generic. The thin-textured narrative gives no sense of what time period we're in (the T'ang period of poets Li Po and Wang Wei would have been a nice inspiration). The costumes (particularly the kimono and obi Mulan wears to the Matchmaker) and hairdos look Japanese. And the characters seem variations -- often less interesting -- on their predecessors. Give Mulan Native American features and you have Pocahontas; Shang is a blander John Smith. Mushu is an African-American take on Aladdin's Genie, The Lion King's Timon, and Hercules's Philoctetes; the one-dimensional Shan-Yu descends from Pocahontas's Governor Ratcliffe, The Lion King's Scar, and Hercules's Hades. The Ancestors are (literally) pale shadows of Hercules's Olympian gods; and this film's computer-animation tour de force, the Huns' charge, doesn't compare to The Lion King's wildebeest stampede or Hercules's Hydra. Even Khan, Mulan's noble black steed, looks recycled: he's the same Uccello-inspired equine we saw in Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback (Achilles), and Hercules (Pegasus). And then, with the conspicuous exception of The Lion King, the new wave of Disney animations, from Beauty on, have been love stories, movies grown-ups can enjoy along with the kids. Next to the technicolor sophistication of what Beauty offered, or Pocahontas or even Hercules, Mulan's romance with Shang is more like an ink sketch.

The best thing about Mulan is Mulan herself: the "Gotta be me/Gotta find out who I am" formula may be rote, but she has her own style, as when, on her way to the Matchmaker, she finds the move that unlocks a café game of Go (this is one smart fortune cookie). There's some inspired Disney lunacy: the "Chinese Gothic" pair of Ancestors; the dragon rockets; Mushu going through an entire tube of toothpaste after biting a butt to save Mulan; a cameo appearance by a giant panda (who should have had a bigger part); Cri-Kee jumping into a pan of ink and then hopping about on a sheet of paper (to a typewriter soundtrack) and producing perfectly brushed Chinese characters; Mulan using the firebreathing Mushu to launch a rocket; Mushu toasting Peking ravioli over a fire; the celebrating Ancestors ordering eggrolls. There are also moments of moving tenderness: Mulan sitting with her father (mothers, as usual in Disney, get short shrift) under a canopy of cherry blossoms; Shang sitting alone under the moon, wondering whether he'll ever be a leader; Khan drooping his horse blanket around a shivering Mulan after she's been abandoned in the mountains; Mulan hugging a surprised Emperor (a very huggable Pat Morita). The red, Bosch-like shots of the destroyed village are horrific and unforgettable; so is the scene where Shang thrusts his sword into the snow and places his late father's helmet on top, and Mulan leans a child's doll against the sword.

The movie is given shape by its mirror metaphor: Mulan seeing herself in pools of water, burnished helmets, gleaming swords, wondering who she is. (It's the reflection of a snowy peak in a sword that shows her how to defeat the Huns in the mountains.) One such mirror moment defines the film, when she sings, "When will my reflection show/Who I truly am?" Who you are is what you do, she discovers. Yet at the end she presents her father with the dragon medallion and the sword of Shan-Yu that the Emperor has given her not as a mark of her achievement but as "gifts to honor the Fa family." Her reward shows up immediately, in the bashful Shang, who after a nudge from the Emperor ("You don't meet a girl like that every dynasty") comes to his senses and follows her home. Mulan's is a wonderful story, but Mulan and Shang's would have been even better.

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True to its heart?

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