Mulan (12A.)
Directed by Niki Caro.
Starring Yifei Liu, Donnie Yen, Jet Li, Tzi Ma, Gong Li, Jason Scott Lee and Yoson An. Available to stream on Disney +. 115 mins
The thing about Disney's Mulan is that it's not Disney's Mulan. Previously their run of live-action remakes of classic animations have offered quite close approximations of the originals. In the U rated 1998 animation, a young girl dresses up a boy to join the Chinese Imperial army. This live-action version strips away the songs, Eddie Murphy's Dragon characters and all the fun, replacing them with a humourless, wuxia, martial arts action film suitable for 12s and over. Not quite sure what the thinking is there, but I suppose any responsible 21st parents feels a responsibility to introduce their children to the arrow catching, sword-swinging delights of martial arts movies as early as possible.
As child-friendly martial art action movies go, I guess it has its merits. It's colourful and spectacular. The fights and action sequences are well-staged. None of them are exciting but I that might be down to Mulan (Yifei Liu) being so effortlessly superior, like Rey in the Star Wars trilogy, that there isn't much tension. Yifie Liu is quite engaging as the heroine but, like everything else in this movie, she's so damn earnest it's difficult to care. The best of the wuxia martial arts film, the Crouching Tigers and Flying Daggers, have an overblown sense of melodrama that is both send up and heartfelt. Their absurdity invite audiences in. Here, everything is so weighted down with messages about the importance of family, of honour and duty that noting flies and it's all a bit of joyless chore. Disney may have wanted to honour Chinese culture, but the film has the effect of presenting China as a dreary, regimented land full of uptight people who never dare smile.
Mulan was the first big blockbuster to be withdrawn in March and the posters for it stayed up for months, along with those for Emma and The Invisible Man. I remember crossing Leicester Square on a Thursday night on my way to see a different film (which would be my last screening for five months) as its European premiere was taking place. Back then Disney seemed to be pretty upbeat about it. Now they are restricting it to their Disney+ streaming service, which you will have to get a subscription to first and then pay £19.99 to rent it. (Steep, but arguably a bargain if the alternative was taking the whole family to a central London screen.) Because of its theme parks and long impatient line of 100 million dollar plus projects backed up for release, Disney has apparently been hit harder by COVID than the other studios. So I guess it makes sense pushing its release onto one of the branches of the business that has actually benefitted from lockdown.
Sometime over the two decades, the pronunciation of the title character seems to have become closer to muhlarrn, as in the Italian city Brits go to for fashion week, rather than moolan, as in Rouge and an excess of red may be at the heart of Disney's decision to move it. All the major studios have kowtowed to the Chinese government to some degree to try and get access to the world's most lucrative market but probably none more than Disney. Much of the cast are American-based and the director is a New Zealander but it will still be seen as a China-friendly project and 2020 is the worst possible time to be releasing it. The decision to pull the cinema release was made just as Trump and Pompeo were ratcheting up their anti-5G Tik Tok rhetoric.
It doesn't help that the very fine Hong Kong-born/ American raised actor Tzi Ma (The Farewell), who plays Mulan's father, is a dead ringer for Chinese premier Xi Jinping. If only they'd been doing a live-action Winnie The Pooh.
Directed by Niki Caro.
Starring Yifei Liu, Donnie Yen, Jet Li, Tzi Ma, Gong Li, Jason Scott Lee and Yoson An. Available to stream on Disney +. 115 mins
The thing about Disney's Mulan is that it's not Disney's Mulan. Previously their run of live-action remakes of classic animations have offered quite close approximations of the originals. In the U rated 1998 animation, a young girl dresses up a boy to join the Chinese Imperial army. This live-action version strips away the songs, Eddie Murphy's Dragon characters and all the fun, replacing them with a humourless, wuxia, martial arts action film suitable for 12s and over. Not quite sure what the thinking is there, but I suppose any responsible 21st parents feels a responsibility to introduce their children to the arrow catching, sword-swinging delights of martial arts movies as early as possible.
As child-friendly martial art action movies go, I guess it has its merits. It's colourful and spectacular. The fights and action sequences are well-staged. None of them are exciting but I that might be down to Mulan (Yifei Liu) being so effortlessly superior, like Rey in the Star Wars trilogy, that there isn't much tension. Yifie Liu is quite engaging as the heroine but, like everything else in this movie, she's so damn earnest it's difficult to care. The best of the wuxia martial arts film, the Crouching Tigers and Flying Daggers, have an overblown sense of melodrama that is both send up and heartfelt. Their absurdity invite audiences in. Here, everything is so weighted down with messages about the importance of family, of honour and duty that noting flies and it's all a bit of joyless chore. Disney may have wanted to honour Chinese culture, but the film has the effect of presenting China as a dreary, regimented land full of uptight people who never dare smile.
Mulan was the first big blockbuster to be withdrawn in March and the posters for it stayed up for months, along with those for Emma and The Invisible Man. I remember crossing Leicester Square on a Thursday night on my way to see a different film (which would be my last screening for five months) as its European premiere was taking place. Back then Disney seemed to be pretty upbeat about it. Now they are restricting it to their Disney+ streaming service, which you will have to get a subscription to first and then pay £19.99 to rent it. (Steep, but arguably a bargain if the alternative was taking the whole family to a central London screen.) Because of its theme parks and long impatient line of 100 million dollar plus projects backed up for release, Disney has apparently been hit harder by COVID than the other studios. So I guess it makes sense pushing its release onto one of the branches of the business that has actually benefitted from lockdown.
Sometime over the two decades, the pronunciation of the title character seems to have become closer to muhlarrn, as in the Italian city Brits go to for fashion week, rather than moolan, as in Rouge and an excess of red may be at the heart of Disney's decision to move it. All the major studios have kowtowed to the Chinese government to some degree to try and get access to the world's most lucrative market but probably none more than Disney. Much of the cast are American-based and the director is a New Zealander but it will still be seen as a China-friendly project and 2020 is the worst possible time to be releasing it. The decision to pull the cinema release was made just as Trump and Pompeo were ratcheting up their anti-5G Tik Tok rhetoric.
It doesn't help that the very fine Hong Kong-born/ American raised actor Tzi Ma (The Farewell), who plays Mulan's father, is a dead ringer for Chinese premier Xi Jinping. If only they'd been doing a live-action Winnie The Pooh.
