A Californian saggy red lantern

Rating: 5/10 (27 July 2018)

My sweetheart is a big Disney fan. So over the handful of years we've been together I've found my self watching a good deal of animation i would otherwise have ignored. Moana, Coco and Ratatouille left me with an unexpected sense of joy. Stylish stories with a quiet moral woven into the back ground.
Mulan, though set in China, feels like a cheap Chinese restaurant in California. If you are making a film set in a foreign culture? You should do your leg work and get the feel right. Simply putting the family name first on a character and making some assumptions about honour does not cut it for Chinese. This movie felt like a good B grade western with a thin Chinese theme pasted over the top.
Then there's the message. The movie is obviously trying to put a woman up as a heroine. A "lady triumphs and wins the respect of the men" happy ending story. But really the only message here, is that if you're a woman and want to be judged as an equal, you need to be as good as three men to even stand a chance.
Add to this some expected cheesy Disney moments and Eddie Murphy being a little over the top and I was left with a passable but hollow feeling.