3 / 10
Official trailer
Mulan (2020) is the live-action remake of the 1998 Walt Disney Animation Studios musical. Niki Caro directed. Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Lauren Hynek, and Elizabeth Martin wrote. Liu Yifei plays Hua Mulan, the young woman who disguises herself as a man to take her father’s place in the imperial army. Yifei Liu, Donnie Yen, Jet Li, Gong Li, Jason Scott Lee, and Tzi Ma round out the cast. The 1998 animated film’s songs, Mushu the dragon, and Li Shang were all removed for the live-action version.
The plot follows the imperial conscription, Mulan’s training, the war against the Rourans, and her revelation as a woman.
Disney couldn’t even give me a decent war movie here.
This is a lifeless remake with the heart cut out, a pretty postcard that has no idea why it exists. They stripped away everything that made the 1998 version a joy, and what’s left irritated me from start to finish. The 3 is for Mandy Walker’s photography and very little else.
The film made approximately seventy million dollars in limited international theatrical release on a two hundred million dollar budget during the pandemic. Disney released the film on Disney+ with a thirty-dollar premium access fee in most markets. The commercial performance was widely considered a failure. The film was the subject of two separate political controversies that combined to make it Disney’s most-debated 2020 release. It’s widely cited as the point at which Disney’s relationship with the Chinese market began to receive sustained Western scrutiny.
What Made It a Woke Disaster
Two political controversies broke during the film’s release. The first was Liu Yifei’s public statement during the 2019 Hong Kong protests.
Liu posted on Weibo supporting the Hong Kong police and their suppression of protesters. The post translated as “I support the Hong Kong police. You can all attack me now. What a shame for Hong Kong.” The statement made the film’s lead actress an explicit supporter of the Chinese government’s response to the pro-democracy movement. American audiences who had followed the Hong Kong situation noticed.
The second was the credits. The film thanked multiple Chinese government agencies for production support. The credits thanked the publicity department of the Chinese Communist Party in Xinjiang and the public security bureau in Turpan, the city in Xinjiang where the film shot certain sequences. The same agencies were responsible for administering the Uyghur internment camps that Western governments had been documenting for two years. Disney had filmed in the region and credited the agencies running the camps as production partners. The film thanked the people running the camps.
That credit is where my patience with this production ran out. Somebody at Disney approved a thank-you to the officials running those camps on a film sold as a story of strength, and I find that more damning than anything on the screen.
The film’s progressive framing centered on it being a feminist retelling of the Mulan story with an all-Asian cast. The framing collapsed under the political weight of the production decisions.
Western audiences were asked to celebrate a film whose star supported authoritarian crackdowns and whose production credited the publicity arm of an active ethnic-cleansing operation. The “progress” the film represented was unable to survive contact with the actual political record of its making.
For Writers
Marketing positions can’t survive contradictory facts about the production that generated them. Mulan was sold as a feminist progressive film while its star endorsed authoritarian crackdowns and its production thanked agencies running ethnic-cleansing camps. The audience read the contradiction. The lesson is that ideological branding requires consistency between the work and the conditions of its making. A film can’t claim political virtue while its star opposes the politics the virtue claim depends on. The audience sees both.
The Creative Surrender
The film removed the elements that had made the 1998 animated original a Disney classic. It cut Mushu, the dragon sidekick voiced by Eddie Murphy, because Chinese audiences had reportedly found the character offensive to traditional dragon symbolism. The songs went too, and the film plays as a serious wuxia drama instead of as a musical. The producers removed Li Shang, the original’s romantic interest, because they were concerned about the implications of Mulan having a romantic relationship with her commanding officer.
The removed elements are also the elements the 1998 audience came to the property to revisit. The film stripped the source material of its Disney identity to make a more sober Chinese-market-friendly historical drama. The result was a film that didn’t appeal to the audiences who had wanted a Mulan remake. The 1998 fans wanted Mushu and the songs. The Chinese market audience for serious wuxia historical drama had access to better wuxia historical drama. The film fell between two markets without serving either.
Mushu and the songs got cut, and as a movie lover too I call that a blunder. Those were the reasons anybody wanted a Mulan remake in the first place, and Disney threw them out and kept the brand name. What’s left is a handsome shell that could have been called anything.
For Writers
A property’s identity is in its creative choices. Strip them out and you have a different property with the same title. Mulan 2020 removed Mushu, the songs, and Li Shang. The remaining film had no reason to be called Mulan. The lesson is that beloved properties are beloved for specific reasons. Identify those reasons. The audience comes to the remake to revisit those reasons. Remove the reasons and you have a generic film with a trademark attached. Generic films don’t generate the audience attachment that beloved properties did.
The Chi Reframing
The film’s most-criticized invention is the chi mechanic. This Mulan is born with extraordinary chi, the life force that gives certain people supernatural ability, and her father has hidden it because chi-women are persecuted. Her training arc becomes a matter of accepting an innate magical gift. She doesn’t earn her ability, because she already has it. I think this is the worst decision in the film, and it made me angrier than anything else in it, because it guts the point of the story.
The change reframes the 1998 film’s central argument.
The original Mulan succeeds because she works harder than the male recruits and develops the skills they have. Her training montage, set to “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” is the franchise’s most-quoted sequence because it showed this earned capability. The 2020 version replaces effort with destiny. Mulan succeeds because she was born special. The change empties the story of its actual lesson and substitutes a much weaker one.
For Writers
Replacing earned capability with innate destiny weakens a protagonist’s arc. The 1998 Mulan worked because she had to learn. The 2020 Mulan was special from birth. The lesson is that protagonist arcs depend on growth. A character who already has what they need has no arc. They have a discovery. Discoveries are weaker than transformations. If your protagonist is born great, you’ve removed the growth that makes audiences invest in them.
Craft Note
The cinematography by Mandy Walker is the film’s most consistent craft achievement. Walker shoots the Chinese landscape with the deliberate widescreen composition of a serious wuxia film. The exterior sequences in the Tujue ambush and the mountain training pass are beautiful. The cinematography also reveals what the script doesn’t provide. Walker is shooting a more committed film than the script has written. The visual ambition exceeds the dramatic ambition.
When the cinematography is the strongest element, the audience has been watching a film whose other components didn’t match the craft of its image-making.
Should you skip Mulan?
It’s a 3, and that’s generous. Mandy Walker’s cinematography wins every one of those points, and I’d happily look at her mountain passes with the sound off.
The rest is a two-hundred-million-dollar lesson in draining the life out of a beloved story while embarrassing the studio politically on the way out the door. Skip it and put on the 1998 animated version, which still has the songs, the dragon and the soul this one threw away.
