Mulan 1998 Review

 

Disney fans the company is at least a day away from releasing it's latest in the ever growing and never stopping line of live action remakes.As such I thought that before I took a look at the remake i'd go back in time and take a look at the original and so that way when the remake does something different I can be just as angry as the rest of you and when the movie does something the exact same I can be just as angry as the rest of you and so here is my review of the 1998 version of "Mulan" enjoy the review everyone.

The plot of the movie is after her father is summoned to fight in a war Mulan takes his place and so must help stop a Hun invasion. I honestly do like the plot of the movie since it does a good job of telling the story as well as making the plot generally engaging which I feel is something that is true for a lot of the Disney Renaissance films and it's something that I hope stays true with the remake on top of that the story is also simple and easy to follow since it's basically a story about a girl who would do anything for her father.

Starring in the film is Ming-Na Wen as Fa Mulan , Eddie Murphy as Mushu and BD Wong as Captain Li Shang. Also starring in the film is Miguel Ferrer as Shan Yu , the late June Foray as Grandmother Fa , Harvey Fierstein as Yao , Gedde Watanabe as Ling , Jerry Tondo as Chien-Po , James Hong as Chi-Fu , Soon-Tek Oh as Fa Zhou , Pat Morita as The Emperor of China , George Takei as First Ancestor , Miriam Margolyes as The Matchmaker , Freda Foh Shen as Fa Li , James Shigeta as General Li and Frank Welker as Cri-Kee and Khan.

In terms of what I thought about the acting in the film is honestly really freaking good with all of the actors not just the likes of Frank Welker and June Foray turning in solid performances. I honestly do feel the the live action actors will have a tough time winning over fans just based of the fact that all of the actors in this film are so good and the performances are so engraved in the minds of many people that's how good these actors are in my opinion.

The animation for the film was handled by Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida with this film being one of the few films they solely worked on. The animation in this film I felt to be pretty good and while it was up to the high standard that Disney had at the time it to me didn't look as good as other Disney feature animated films that came out around the same time which is a shame because the animation in this film does look really good.

I don't think this needs to be said but im going to say it anyways this film is largely inspired by the Chinese poem The Ballad of Mulan. I cannot say how true to the poem this film is or how true to the legend of Mulan this film is but I can say that it's great that Disney took a chance on something that would only be known inside of China or other Asian countries and I do believe that the remake is going to be alot more faithful to both the poem and the legend.

Believe it or not there's one character in the film that the animators hated and that's the character of Cri-kee. I can see why they didn't like the character since he has no personality and adds nothing to the overall plot of the movie but at the same time he is still enjoyable to watch even tho like Mushu he was created just for this movie and I have a feeling that they didn't like working on the character because of the fact he adds a comic relief element to the story which just isn't needed when you have a character like Mushu also filling in that role.

The villains in this film are for me one of the films weaker elements purely because we get to find out nothing about them. Which in turn makes them less interesting and less threatening because we don't get to find out what there end goals are and so they just come across as being evil because the plot demands it and this is something that the remake could actually improve upon but only time will tell if they do or not.

Now i'm not going to talk about how the character of Mulan is handled in this film purely because i'm going to do it when I talk about the remake. However I can say that this film does a good job of empowering the character if Mulan which is something that alot of modern films fail to do because here she's fighting in this war to protect her father and that is something we see her deal with all throughout the film and because she actually has a personality and character traits she actually comes across as an interesting and well written character.

This is a kind of romance film and I say kind of because the romance really doesn't play a huge part of the film but it's still present. I actually kind of liked the romance in this film because it anchored back to Mulan pretending to be a man and so it made the character more determined then what she already was but at the same time the romance angle could have been removed since it adds nothing to the overall story.

The songs for the film were written by I think two people with the first being David Zippel who did write songs for the for the film and other i'm not quite sure about being Matthew Wilder. For me at least while the songs are indeed pretty catchy there not as good as songs that Disney have done in the past which is a shame because there are some really good songs in this film with "Reflection" and "I'll Make a Man Out of You" being some of the better songs in the film.

Overall this is honestly a good film and I can see why it has it's fans however that doesn't make it a perfect film. Since I did have some issue with the film alot of which i'm actually not going to cover in this review because if the remake goes exactly how I think it's going to go i'm just going to bring them up then since i'd just be repeating my self as such this film gets a 7 out of 10 from me and you can expect my review of the remake up in at least day or two depending and when I get to actually see the film.

All the images that I used in this film were gathered from the official Disney fandom wiki page and nowhere else. Since I didn't go anywhere else for the images used in this review I have no choice but to recommend the official Disney fandom wiki page for images from either this film , it's sequel or basically anything to do with Disney or the Disney version of Mulan since your going to find alot of images all of which will be very high definition.