It da Man. Sort of.

Rating: 10/10 (18 March 2020)

When I was like 6 years old I think I bought the VHS with birthday money and I watched it over and over.
This is a movie I don't think I'll ever stop rewatching. As good as it is that feminism is getting more and more popular, we unfortunately have too many writers who think they can score brownie points by waving the black and purple flag without anything to say about a struggles of women. Ocean's 8, Brave and that god awful Dracula Adaptation in 2019 just pandered to the audience by telling them what they wanted to hear at the expense of well developed characters and good story telling.
Mulan is therefor perhaps even more relevant now than ever as what a good empowered female movie should actually look like, and this is over a decade before #metoo.
A lot of this is to do with Mulan herself. She is a good character because she is neither a helpless damsel in distress like Snow White nor the opposite problem of a character that has no personality beyond being practically perfect in every except in having no real personality, like Hermione Granger.
She is clearly smart and resourceful from her dog powered chicken feeding device (It's a lot more simple than I make it sound) but when she enlists in the army she is as much out of her depth as anyone but she has the capacity to rise to the challenge in a believable way and they don't spend too much time on it. Mulan is the perfect fusion of relatable underdog and credible hero. While in a lot of comparable movies, the human protagonist is almost one of the blandest with the anthropomorphic help carrying the show, but she has perhaps the most personality of any pre-Tangled "Princess".
We have not only an internal conflict of a person not knowing where they belong but also a material one in Mulan trying to spare her father military service and the too strands coalesce so elegantly in this story of overcoming the self, of friendships emerging between initially hostile parties and of also of the futility of war in a mature and subtle way ("A girl worth fighting--" cue reality check). One really gets a vivid sensation of the destruction of armed conflict in a way one typically doesn't see in the "family" movie.
It ticks all the other boxes you expect it too and more: the music, not just the songs but the intense score, the immersive sense of local color juxtaposed to the austerity of battle, the comedy, the pathos, the impeccable structuring of the story and intense images (Mulan must have worn the most easily removied make-up ever but I don't care), that all come together in a feature that is more of a treat each time.
My only real qualm is an unsavoury spitting attempt but that's a small thing.
This is what a feminist family movie looks like.