Mulan (2020)

 I want to complain about Mulan(2020). So, here I go!

This movie was deeply disappointing. I was excited when I heard it was being made--while I was moaning about the movie during our screening my wife kept reminding me how excited I'd been seeing the trailer in the theater.

It has a noble intention. It set out to be a Disney Live-Action Remake that wasn't a shot-for-shot remake of the originals (Like Lion King or Beauty and the Beast), and so they made pains to make the movie more culturally accurate to China, to shift the genre from sinified fantasy film into something resembling a proper Wuxia movie. But the movie, for me, still struggles under the yoke that dragged down its Live Action Remake predecessors: a desire to be Very Grown Up but with absolutely no grasp of what that actually means.

Let me air out my grievances first.

1. The movie is not a musical. 

Abandoning musical numbers is one of the ways these movies strive to be Very Grown Up, but I can't imagine someone who liked any of these Disney movies without finding at least one Disney song they enjoyed. Furthermore, the songs in Mulan aren't just good songs, they provide pacing and texture. They're not necessary themselves, but they provide a number of necessary functions that need to be met and planned for.

 The song Girl Worth Fighting For, for example, is a light-hearted number where Mulan's friends bond over women in an effort to keep their spirits up before marching into battle. It provides Ling, Yao, and Chien-Po an opportunity to become fleshed-out characters. It also provides a bridge between the inspirational Make a Man Out of You and moment when the soldiers encounter the devastation of Shan Yu and Shang learns that his father has died. The high of the song's comedy and its dreamy visual elements starkly contrast with that emotional low.

Mulan 2020 replaces this song with a scene of Mulan and her friends eating a meal together and literally speaking the words the words of the song, but rather than contributing to a flow of action (moving from training to combat) or being visually interesting (it's literally just five men in identical outfits speaking the words to the song), or providing any emotional polarity, it just sits there, part of a melange of that scene.

This is especially pronounced with Mulan's departure and the dramatic scene handled by the song Reflection in 1998. The movie feels like its rushing through her departure because the song that handled that exposition got cut, and the movie doesn't bother figuring out another way to build the energy that scene needed. So it doesn't. Mulan 2020 doesn't do away with Reflections (small snatches of the song play throughout the whole film).

2. It's Never Funny

Mushu the Dragon was cut from the 2020 film over concerns of cultural inaccuracy. Which... fine. The only thing more egregious than a talking animal sidekick is a CGI animal sidekick, and I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to put a wise-cracking CGI animal in film without giving James Marsden a role.

However, apparently laughter of any kind is culturally inaccurate, because they kept cutting comic roles until there were none left. Mushu was cut, but also Grandma, Cri-Kee, the dickish bureaucrat Chi Fu, and the ghosts of Mulan's Ancestors.

Now, a film doesn't need a cartoon cricket for comic relief, but I do believe that someone needs to be funny, because watching old Chinese people complain that their daughter is a disappointment isn't quite the carnival of thrills the movie thinks it is. I'm not asking for Krusty the Klown to be doing handstands in every scene, just for someone--anyone--express an emotion other than stoic stoicity.

I think they might not have realized what was happening, though, because supposedly Mulan was supposed to make up for the loss of Mushu by forging a closer bond with her allies: Chien-Po, Ling and Yao. That... that didn't happen. They might have thought that was happening, because Mulan has at least two conversations with men while at camp, and they laugh during it, but honestly those scenes have the same energy as a saloon in a Wuxia movie right before Jet Li alphabetizes everybody's skeletons. There's more esprit de corps in a pair of rotting corpses.

Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh, but I liked the pun.

3. They Broke Chekhov's Gun

In the 1998 film, the Matchmaker song Bring Honor to Us All says that women can bring honor by striking a good match, i.e. match with a good husband. But the film turns that line into an elaborate pun by making both of her victories involve cannons, struck with a good match. It's such a subtle line I didn't notice it until I was researching for this essay, but it's a good object for a problem I had with this film: the elements don't work together.

Take the training montage in Make a Man Out of You. In Mulan 1998, Shang shot an arrow to the top of a pole and challenged his trainees to retrieve it by climbing while carrying two weights. Throughout the song, different characters take a crack at it, inevitably failing as they're dragged down by the heavy weights. In the culminating moments of the song, Mulan binds the two weights together and uses them as a strap to help her climb the pole, succeeding as the sun rises behind her.

It's a great moment; a metaphor for how Mulan's unique perspective inspires her to turn obstacles into assets. The technique is even reused during the climax, with Mulan and her buddies (I really need a collective name for those Ling, Chien-Po and Yao... suggest one in the comments?) scaling the columns in the palace to ambush the evil Shan Yu. Showing a character learning something, and then using it later in the film is a really easy way to create a cool moment in a film. It creates the same tingle as a reference, but doesn't require your audience to be depressed millenials chasing a nostalgia buzz.

This scene is replaced with a water bucket carrying challenge. Which is not a problem unto itself--many a family member and college acquaintance rolled their eyes with my protracted complaints about Disney Remakes being shot-for-shot recitations of their 90s forebears. 

But Mulan doesn't beat the water bucket challenge with wit. She doesn't come up with a clever twist on the challenge's rules which allow her to succeed where everybody else failed. Instead, she's given permission to "unleash her chi," at which point she... just carries the water up the hill. She does precisely what was asked of her. She doesn't, say, carry everybody's water. And later in the movie, of course there's no reference to her carrying water.

The movie is just a string of things happening.

4. Cowards! You're all damn cowards!

I forgot how much Mulan talks in the original movie. According to this article, Why Mulan Needs Mushu, Mulan is the chattiest Disney princess. She's embarrassed and vulnerable, she makes mistakes and gets confused. She's not a super powered super lady with a ton of midichlorians. She's a person in challenging circumstances who rises to meet them. She depends on the people around her, and they like and respect her, and everybody shows that. With emotions. The cartoon character is more human than the real life character.