9 / 10
Official trailer
Disney Goes to War
Mulan is the Disney film most willing to show what war costs. It has a burned village, a field of dead soldiers, an army of invaders and a heroine who fights with her wits and a sword. It’s also funny, musical and warm, and it balances those tones with more confidence than almost any animated film of its decade.
Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft directed it for a June 1998 release. It was largely made at Disney’s animation studio in Florida, the first feature developed mainly there, and it was a big critical and commercial success. I give it a 9. It’s a war story, a coming-of-age story and a comedy all at once, and it holds together very well.
What I love about Mulan is how it makes me laugh and then devastates me, sometimes inside the same five minutes. I think she’s the best Disney heroine of the decade, a girl who wins by thinking, and I admire a family film that trusts its audience with a burned village and a field of dead soldiers. The songs are terrific, Murphy is a riot, and the ending with her father moves me.
The Ballad
The story comes from the Ballad of Mulan, a Chinese folk poem that dates back roughly fifteen hundred years. In the poem, a young woman takes her elderly father’s place when the army calls for one man from every family, serves for years in disguise and returns home without ever being discovered. Her comrades are astonished to learn she was a woman all along.
Disney kept the core of the poem and built a new story around it, adding a family, a villain, a love interest and a comic dragon.
The result is looser with history than purists would like, and the setting is a Hollywood version of ancient China. The central idea, a daughter who risks everything to protect her father, remains intact and gives the film its emotional weight. Everything else is decoration around that simple, ancient story.
A Daughter Who Doesn’t Fit
Mulan, voiced by Ming-Na Wen, is clumsy, clever and completely unsuited to the role her family expects of her. The early scenes show her preparing to meet the matchmaker, painted, dressed and drilled in etiquette, and the meeting is a comic disaster. She pours tea on herself, sets the matchmaker on fire and is told she will never bring her family honor.
Her song Reflection, sung by Lea Salonga, is about the gap between the dutiful daughter she’s supposed to be and the person she really is. It’s a quiet, lovely number, staged in a temple garden among polished, reflecting stones, and it establishes the film’s central question: who is Mulan, when nobody is telling her who to be?
A pop version of the song, recorded by Christina Aguilera, was released as a single and launched her career. The film version is gentler, and it suits the character better. Salonga sings it as a private confession instead of a performance. That’s exactly what the moment needs.
The Haircut
When the imperial army calls for one man from every family, Mulan’s father, Fa Zhou, an old soldier who walks with a cane, insists on answering. Mulan argues with him at dinner and is silenced. That night, in the rain, she makes her decision, sitting alone beneath a stone dragon in the family garden while her parents argue inside.
The sequence that follows is nearly wordless. Mulan takes her father’s armor, cuts off her long hair with his sword, leaves her comb on his pillow and rides off into the storm. The music swells, the ancestors’ shrine glows, and the whole family wakes to find her gone. Her mother runs into the rain calling her name, and her father falls to his knees, knowing he can’t bring her back without exposing her. It’s among the most powerful scenes in any Disney film, and it contains no song and almost no dialogue.
What makes it work is that Mulan’s choice is an act of love. She’s sacrificing herself to save her father, and the film never lets us forget it. Every risk she takes afterward is measured against that first night, and against the father who doesn’t know where she’s gone.
The haircut sequence is the reason this film sits at a 9 for me. There’s no song and almost no speech, only a sword, a comb on a pillow and a mother running into the rain, and I think it’s braver filmmaking than most live-action dramas of its day managed. Whoever decided to keep Mulan silent here knew exactly what they were doing.
For Writers
The haircut scene has no song and almost no dialogue, and it’s the most powerful moment in the film. The choice speaks for itself.
When your character makes the decision that changes everything, words can dilute the moment. Action, silence and a few precise images often carry more weight.
Write your character’s turning-point decision using only what they do, in physical detail. Cut every line of dialogue and interior thought, and see how much stronger it reads. I’ve gone into this further in my piece on writing dialogue that works.
Mushu
Mulan’s ancestors send a guardian to protect her, and by accident they get Mushu, a tiny, fast-talking dragon demoted to gong-ringer who wants to win back his job by making Mulan a hero. Eddie Murphy voices him, and he’s hilarious: boastful, anxious, insulting and loyal, a pocket-sized hustler with a big mouth and a good heart.
Mushu could easily have been a distraction, a celebrity voice inserted to sell tickets. Instead, he gives the film a comic energy that balances its darker scenes, and his friendship with Mulan grows into something real. His sidekick, a lucky cricket named Cri-Kee who can’t speak and may not be lucky at all, adds another layer of silliness.
The one false note is that Mushu’s modern, streetwise humor occasionally jars with the setting. Most of the time, the contrast works, and Murphy’s performance is so energetic that it carries the joke. His rapid-fire delivery turns even throwaway lines into laughs, and he’s especially funny when Mushu’s schemes go wrong.
I’ll Make a Man Out of You
At the training camp, Mulan joins a troop of hopeless recruits under Captain Shang, voiced by BD Wong. The training montage is set to I’ll Make a Man Out of You, sung by Donny Osmond for Shang, and Disney has rarely produced a better song: rousing, funny and joyful, with a chorus nobody can resist singing along to.
The song follows the recruits from total incompetence to real strength over several weeks. Mulan fails every test at first, and the famous moment comes when she climbs a tall pole to retrieve an arrow, using two heavy weights as a counterbalance, succeeding where every man has failed. The visual idea is clever, and it makes clear that her strength is her intelligence.
I’d put that song at the top of Disney’s nineties catalog. Osmond sells every line, the lyrics are funny, and the pole climb pays the whole number off with a real idea about who Mulan is. I grin through the entire thing. Her friendship with three fellow recruits, Yao, Ling and Chien-Po, grows out of these scenes, and the trio become her loyal allies and the film’s comic chorus. They start as bullies who make her life miserable, and by the end they would follow her anywhere, even into the palace in borrowed dresses.
For Writers
Mulan climbs the pole by using the weights as a counterbalance. She succeeds by thinking differently, without becoming as strong as the men.
If your hero is weaker than the obstacle, give them a way to win that plays to their strengths. A clever solution is more satisfying than a sudden transformation.
The strongest version gives the protagonist one unique strength and at least one major obstacle only that strength can overcome, with everyone else failing at it first.
Shan Yu
The villain is Shan Yu, leader of the invading Hun army, voiced by Miguel Ferrer. He’s one of Disney’s most frightening villains because he’s so simple: a huge, brutal warlord with a falcon, a sword and no interest in anything except conquest. He doesn’t sing, joke or scheme. He simply kills, and his yellow eyes and silent falcon make every scene he’s in feel dangerous.
The film shows his cruelty without softening it.
When Mulan’s troop reaches a mountain village, they find it burned and the imperial army that was stationed there destroyed. A child’s doll lies in the snow. Nothing is said, and nothing needs to be. Shang finds his father’s helmet on the battlefield, and he leaves it planted in the snow as a marker. This is a sobering moment in a family film, and it gives the war real stakes.
I think the burned village is the bravest thing Disney did that decade. The doll in the snow says more about war than any speech could, and Shang planting his father’s helmet hurts because nobody explains it. Shan Yu frightens me more than the singing villains because he has nothing to say.
The Avalanche
The film’s great action sequence takes place in a snowy mountain pass, where Shan Yu’s entire army charges down on Mulan’s small troop. The soldiers fire their cannons at the advancing horsemen, and Mulan, seeing the snow-heavy mountainside above, takes the last cannon and fires it at the peak instead. For a moment, nobody understands what she’s done.
The resulting avalanche buries the Hun army in seconds, and Mulan saves Shang from being swept away. The sequence is spectacular, full of scale, speed and motion, with the hundreds of Hun riders animated using new crowd software. And once again, Mulan wins with her head, not her strength, seeing a solution nobody else has noticed.
Then she’s wounded, the doctor discovers she’s a woman, and everything falls apart.
Shang, bound by law to execute her, spares her life but abandons her in the snow. The turn is devastating, and the film lets it hurt. Mulan sits alone by a fire in the snow, admitting to Mushu that she may have done it all for herself, and it’s the film’s most searching moment of doubt.
For Writers
Shang discovers Mulan’s secret and abandons her in the snow after she saved his life. The triumph of the avalanche turns into her lowest moment.
Find your protagonist’s biggest win, and let the consequence that undoes it arrive almost immediately. Don’t give the reader time to relax.
Placing your character’s worst loss immediately after their greatest victory makes both hit harder. The fall feels steeper when the reader has just been celebrating.
The Palace
The finale takes place in the Imperial City, where Shan Yu, who survived the avalanche, attacks the Emperor during the victory celebrations. Mulan, now alone, tries to warn the army and is ignored because she’s a woman. She and her three friends, disguised as women this time, break into the palace and fight Shan Yu’s men.
The climax on the palace roof, with Mulan using a fan, a sword, a firework tower and Mushu to defeat Shan Yu, is thrilling and funny.
Then the Emperor, voiced by Pat Morita, bows to her, and the entire city bows with him. It’s a wonderful image, and it deserves every bit of its emotion. The whole empire has honored the girl who couldn’t impress a matchmaker.
In the final scene back home, Mulan offers her father the Emperor’s crest and the sword of Shan Yu.
Her father sets them aside, embraces her and tells her the greatest gift is having her as his daughter. Disney has made few endings this moving. The grandmother’s final joke and Shang’s awkward arrival for dinner send the audience out laughing.
The Live-Action Version
Disney remade Mulan as a live-action film in 2020, and the remake dropped the songs and Mushu, made Mulan a warrior with innate powers and aimed for a grander, more serious tone. It had impressive landscapes and fight scenes, and it received mixed reviews and was released largely on streaming during the pandemic.
Most viewers still prefer the 1998 animated film. Its songs, its humor and its sense that Mulan wins through cleverness, courage and love give it a warmth the remake never finds. The original remains the definitive version, and it’s the one families keep coming back to.
Count me among them. Dropping Mushu and the songs and handing Mulan innate powers throws away the thing I value most in the original, a heroine who wins because she’s smarter than everybody in the room.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Mulan’s every victory comes from her mind: the counterweights on the pole, the cannon aimed at the mountain, the fan and the firework tower on the palace roof. The film makes intelligence her weapon.
A hero who wins through cleverness gives readers something to admire and imitate, and it avoids the easy trap of a character who simply becomes more powerful.
List the obstacles your hero faces, and make sure at least three are overcome by insight. Let each one reveal how your character sees the world.
How well does Mulan (1998) hold up?
It’s a 9. Mulan is funny, frightening and moving in the right proportions, and it has a heroine I’d rank above almost anybody else in the Disney canon. Watch it for the haircut, the training montage, the avalanche and the final scene with her father. The only thing keeping it off a 10 for me is Mushu’s streetwise shtick, which jars with the setting often enough to notice.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Mulan, RogerEbert.com
- Mulan (1998 film), Wikipedia
- Mulan (1998), IMDb
