# Mulan (1998)

### reviewed by
Cheng-Jih Chen

This seems to be the week I'm seeing a lot of movies. "Armageddon" on Sunday, I saw "Mulan" last night, I'm supposed to see one this evening, and I haven't thought about the weekend yet, though I know "Last Days of Disco" and "Henry Fool" are on some list somewhere.

Amusingly, I was sitting around this morning, waiting for the cable guy. Time Warner upgraded their system on the Upper West Side, and is selling something called "MetroChoice", which lets me break that mystical Channel 77 barrier. It goes up to 88 or 90 now, or something ridiculous. In this unexplored wilderness is the Independent Film Channel. The new cable box is spiffy, too, having weird digital stuff, like channel info (no more Channel 40) and a neat-o new remote control with more buttons and an instruction booklet, unlike the crappy old remote, with many buttons but no indication of what these buttons do except make a LED brighten up on the cable box. A definite improvement. Yes, I'm slowly approaching TV apocalypse.

So, down to business. "Mulan" is the latest Disney animated feature, continuing their exploration into the non-Western canon. In brief, the Huns are invading China, and the Emperor calls up troops to fight. Mulan's father is drafted, but, fearing for his safety, she dresses as a boy and takes his place. She's accompanied by a small dragon, played by a-long-way-from-"Raw" Eddie Murphy, a cricket and a horse. At training camp, after a rough start, she wins eventually the respect of the other conscripts and the Captain. They go off to war. She destroys the Hun army with a bit of ingenuity and cleverness, but her identity is discovered. So, she has to prove herself again.

This is a fun movie. Eddie Murphy is pretty good, lots of laughs. He's morphed into a family comedian over the years, and starring in a Disney movie is the culmination of that transformation. I've never been a big fan of songs from Disney movies, so I'm not the best judge for that: I thought they were fine. Frighteningly, Donny Osmond does some of the singing, so it's possible we'll see him at the Oscars. (Figures from the Seventies and early Eighties seem to be popping out of the woodwork recently. Ricky Schroder, for example. And there's that "CHiPs" reunion.)

There's actually some breathtaking computer animation, better than the dull, predictable stuff in "Godzilla" or "Armageddon": the Hun army cresting the ridge feels like an innumerable horde, the pan of the celebratory crowd around the Imperial Palace is elegant.

The story choice is also interesting for Disney. Here, we have a heroine that doesn't need rescuing: this ain't Sleeping Beauty. And, as Mr. Cranky (http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/mulan.html) notes, "Let's give Disney some credit here for not pasting two cannonballs on their forty-pound Chinese heroine." The film is a conscious move away from passive ideas of feminine beauty towards a notion of a girl who things and can stand on her feet, at least according to one of the songs. It succeeds reasonably: she beats the Huns (twice! Miler Time doesn't happen after the first time), saves the Emperor, and is awarded a counselor's position, which she declines in order to go home to see her dad. Along the way, the Captain becomes smitten, neatly solving the initial Man Problem for Mulan.

Being completely indoctrinated in the Western Canon, I'm thoroughly familiar with Hercules and Xena, but I've actually never heard of Mulan before. So, I invested effort into finding some synopsis of the original "Legend of Mulan". Infoseek gives me the following non-Disney-related URL: http://www.panap.com/mulan_index.html, an outfit called "Pan Asian Publications" selling a children's book. The synopsis plays a bit differently from the Disney movie:

The story of the female general, Mulan, was originally a folk song dating from the Northern Wei dynasty, A.D.386-534.

According to legend, there was a young woman named Mulan whose aged father was conscripted. Mulan, unwilling to see her father fighting in a war, disguised herself as a man and joined the army in his place.

For the next ten years she showed remarkable skill as a warrior and became a female general. Her true identity remained hidden from her comrades until the very end.

You can read the first five pages online. Actually, the divergence begins on Page 2. Her parents know she's going off to war. I suppose they encouraged it, giving her money to buy arms and armor at the local markets. No subterfuge there. (Vaguely surprising is why Disney didn't pick up the "buying stuff at markets" thing: "kids, buy Mulan's outfit, just like she did in the movie!" I suppose that there'd be a residual image of the Girl As Shopper if that thread were left in.)

In the original legend, at least by this synopsis, Mulan makes a career of being a general. In Disney's version, she's offered a career as a stay-at-palace advisor.

Actually, I shouldn't go on about this too much. Disney's version is carefully honed for our time and our values. It is not a 5th Century legend, whose values would probably seem alien to us. At the beginning of the movie, when they were talking about family honor, I was thinking of the Iliad, which I read earlier this year: Achilles version of the ideal hero's life -- come home victorious or come home dead -- isn't something that'll ring the bells for late 20th Century American audiences. A straight retelling of Mulan should have similar problems. Perhaps people will go out and read something of the original sources: after collecting the Quasi dolls, go off and pick up Victor Hugo. Maybe not, but it's a hope.

One quick note: it wasn't the Huns, properly, who invaded China. "The Huns" were the name given to North Asian nomads invading the Roman Empire around 500 or 600AD. The Great Wall and all that was a defense against the various Mongol tribes. I suppose Disney was afraid of living Mongols complaining that they're not bloodthirsty barbarians, and instead picked an extinct tribe to do the evil stuff.

-- "The court determined that Fox TV does not impede free and fair competition in the teen-angst soap-com genre, therefore Party of Five need not be broken into five 'Parties of One,' one being distributed to each of the other networks."

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