Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
The new ‘Mulan’ is sombre and intense – and spectacular
DISNEY has engaged in reframing the studio’s animated classics as live-action features, a strategy that attracts nostalgic fans of the original cartoons and a new baby audience ripe for enchantment.
Some of the second helpings have become classics – the 2015 adaptation of provided a lush, beautifully acted example of how to make a graceful leap from format to format (and generation to generation). Last year’s on the other hand, felt strained and superfluous.
the live-action remake of the popular 1998 animated musical, lands somewhere in the middle. Produced with lavish attention to detail, the film’s costumes, landscapes and period-specific design elements burst with colour and extravagant scope.
Yifei Liu is perfectly cast as the title character, a girl living in Han Dynasty China who disguises herself as a boy to fight northern invaders, throwing herself into the film’s martial arts sequences, trick riding and gravity-defying action with serene confidence and athleticism.
Taking one page from the balletic violence of director John Woo and actor Jet Li, and one page from the historical epics of Zhang Yimou and Bernardo Bertolucci, is impressive, taking its heroine from the busting village of her birth across a rugged countryside, to battlefields and imperial redoubts that director Niki Caro films with sweeping, swooping intensity. But, even at its most spectacular, that doesn’t mean
is always fun to watch. Although there is humour, a crucial character has been dropped, along with the catchy songs: Mushu, the little dragon voiced by Eddie Murphy. Mushu is replaced by more supernatural characters: a Phoenix that flies into Mulan’s vision when she needs strength and inspiration, and a shape-shifting witch named Xianning, played by Li Gong with grim ferocity.
The parable of female empowerment has survived, as have the boys who Mulan befriends when she enlists; Yoson An plays Mulan’s best friend and would-be love interest with convincing surprise when Mulan reveals her identity.
For the most part, though, the new is a more sober affair than its predecessor, filled with shadow warriors, dark magic and mysticism. This is a movie dedicated to the proposition that women can and should be just as bellicose as men.
Sombre and serious-minded, it is a movie that has grown up alongside its original audience, which is presumably old enough to crave something heavier in its entertainment diet.
Girls might be better off sticking with the cartoon; but the opulent, ambitious production and Liu’s focused, intrepid performance, gives them something to grow into. |
Mulan,
Mulan
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Mulan
Aladdin,
Mulan