Walt Disney’s Mulan remake perfunctorily recycles the worst aspects of the 1998 animated version and roundly fails to convincingly execute the few deviations that it does attempt. Indeed, because director Niki Caro never finds any persuasive reason for the film to exist, it’s hard to view this Mulan as anything other than a requisite live-action makeover. Which is to say, the film allows Disney to continue hocking some culturally targeted merchandise to the largest market economy on the planet, and to tie that product to something more recent than the animated film that’s sitting in their vault.
Like most Disney films that have gone through this particular animation-to-live-action “legacy” treatment, Mulan tamps down the more flamboyant and, frankly, fun qualities of the original. For one, you will only recognize the songs from the 1998 film from instrumentals and melodies playing in the background, scoring a handful of dramatic moments.
Of course, it’s not unreasonable to attempt a more sober version of the Hua Mulan legend, or to bring some creativity to a narrative whose textual origins date back to the 11th or 12th century, in the form of a scant 31-line poem. Mulan’s story is even more ripe for a serious take than most Disney franchises, considering that much of it is made up of violent, wartime battles between the Emperor of China’s imperial army and nomadic invaders from the north (today’s Mongolia). Unfortunately, this Mulan feels no more realistic in its presentation than the animated version did. Or rather, due to the film more or less dutifully copying the original’s narrative, painstakingly recreating its scenes, this take on the material feels even more cartoonish and unreal—a live-action film modeled on a literal cartoon.
One of the more egregious examples of this comes early on, when Mulan (Liu Yifei) is taken to a matchmaker (Cheng Pei-pei, wasted in a role that all but drowns her in makeup and ostentatious costuming). The scene plays out as it does in original, sans the lovely grace note at the end of Mulan stealing away to sing “Reflection” when her blind date blows up. The fealty to the 1998 film extends even to the way the scene is aestheticized, which in this case means reproducing Mulan’s geisha-like white makeup from the original, despite it long being acknowledged to be both inappropriate to this time period and cultural context.
Fudging the smaller details would be more excusable if this weren’t representative of a broadly flippant attitude toward not just historical accuracy, but basic believability. The silliness of this Mulan reveals itself in tandem with its virtue-signaling ambitions. The most noticeable change that Caro brings to the table comes about two-thirds into the film, when Mulan makes the decision to reveal her gender identity to the other soldiers and, after a very brief expulsion by her Commander (Donnie Yen), isn’t only welcomed back to fight—as a woman—but is asked to lead the soldiers in battle. This all plays as pandering and phony, and it also has the added effect of leveling one of the animated Mulan’s more interesting (and progressive) relationship dynamics. With the increased agency that’s granted to this Mulan also comes the removal of her love interest from the original film, Captain Li Shang, whose flirtations with the male-presenting Mulan amplified that film’s queer narrative.
This Mulan is of a piece with recent popcorn entertainments to come out of China, like Wu Jing’s Wolf Warrior 2 and Dante Lam’s Operation Red Sea, for the way it embeds in its hero narrative a heavy emphasis on the importance of Chinese nationalism. The Mulan of this film has the same motivations as the character from the animated film—bring honor to her family name and be true to herself—but by the end, the message that’s espoused most effusively lies in speechified lines like “The girl who’s come to save the dynasty” and “Save the kingdom and its people.” The 1998 Mulan, too, climaxes with the rescue of the Emperor, and the defeat of the “foreign” Huns. But since this Mulan is also an abnormally strong, qi-wielding, high-jumping superhero, relating her triumph to China’s own comes off more forceful.
The film, then, caters to both its target audiences with some baseline effectiveness: Its performative feminism is in keeping with the trend in the West to gesture at themes of inclusivity rather than thoughtfully and committedly explore them, and the Mulan legend itself is repurposed, for a contemporary Chinese audience, as fodder for nationalist messaging. But all of that comes at the expense of most of the things that make other Mulan adaptations actually engaging on the level of character and story. And as much money as Disney has thrown at the production, it still looks like it was always bound for streaming services—with thoroughly unconvincing CGI work, disorientating editing that chops up the action, and a mostly wooden and disengaged performance from Liu as the eponymous character.
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