Truly great except for ONE thing ...

Rating: 9/10 (1 July 1999)

The depth of talent at Disney is frightening. It's interesting the character animation here with that in "The Prince of Egypt" - no contest at all. Every character in "Mulan" is well, brilliantly, perfectly animated, and many great animators at Disney didn't even touch the project. A writer here who said that the animation "lacks detail" merely betrays his (her?) ignorance. One must distinguish between character design and animation: the former is what a still drawing of a character displays, the latter is the art of moving a character around. The animation was full of detail. I felt that every one of the 24-per-second frames conveyed something of value. The character design, on the other hand, *was* deliberately simplified, but I don't see how anyone could deny that this approach was both beautiful and fitting; and since everything (backgrounds and effects animation) had the same stylistic simplicity, the characters were more solidly in place than they usually are in animation.
(The effects animation was creative and also streets ahead of "The Prince of Egypt". As was the use of computers. Watch the Great Wall scene closely: you might be able to *deduce* that computers were involved, but you certainly won't feel that they were. Computer imagery has been misused with ghastly results in everything from "Aladdin" to "The Phantom Menace". Finally someone has it right.)
I won't comment on the story - I'm still moved by it, but then I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. I'll get to my one complaint. It's not the music. Yes, the music was ultra-1980s with the odd pentatonic scale; but that's not intrinsically worse than being ultra-1990s with the odd pentatonic scale, and it has the advantage that we know immediately the worst about how dated it will sound (less dated than you'd expect). No: my problem is Eddie Murphy. He is painfully unfunny and his introduction made me sigh wearily. He doesn't belong here. I don't have anything against comic relief, but Disney should have trusted their animators to provide it. When Mushu is funny, it's the animators' doing - and on those occasions the humour is not at odds with the story.
That one criticism pains me to make. Swallowing "Mulan" whole, Eddie Murphy and all, it's still a fine movie and a reason for optimism about the future of hand-drawn animation.