M Merriet

Visually stunning, but emotionally stunted. They rushed through the vitally important development of Mulan’s character in the beginning. They took away all the awkwardness and very human flaws that made her so lovable in the 1998 film. I feel like they dedicated too much time to staging grandiose battles and melodramatic confrontations..... the writing could have used a second pass of editing. The very first scene in which we learn the bird woman’s history, it is given to us in the most cringeworthy info dump in Disney history: “I found you wandering the desert. All you want is to be accepted. I can give you that.” Yeah, dude, she knows that. If you need to audience to know that, let it come out through organic storytelling. It’s just amazing to me that something with a production value of such an enormous scale could have such a careless lack of script editing. Spoiler ahead That being said, I totally cried when bird witch gave her life. I’m a softie like that. I cried again when Mulan’s dad said she was worth so much more than a sword to him. Though in the back of my mind, I could see the cartoon dad hugging her and putting the gifts from the emperor aside. I also started laughing as I remembered the grandma in the cartoon when she sees the hunky captain show up to thank Mulan. “Sign me up for the next war.” Hahaha. Really, we should just watch the old Mulan and pretend this one never happened.