The live-action Mulan is much more animated than the origiinal

I confess that I am not a fan of Disney’s current trend of live action remakes of animated hits. Very few of them bring anything new to the party and some of them – Beauty and the Beast (2017) leaps to mind – tarnish the memory of the original. Having said all that I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed Mulan as a vast improvement on the original.

The 1998 version was, literally, two-dimensional. A pale anaemic-looking film with a thin story and a heroine it was hard to feel strongly about. It felt more like a film whose origins were in the marketing department.

Niki Caro’s current version is a revelation. It’s an energetic, enthusiastic, vibrant film with a great performance at its heart. It is also one of the best looking films – even on a small screen – I have seen in a long time. It is a movie designed to make the spirits soar which is exactly what we need right now.

It is a proper, action-packed, family entertainment and would have been a much better bet to get audiences back to the cinema than the ponderous Tenet. This is a film that people would go and see more than once for sheer enjoyment and not to try to figure out what happened.

The story hasn’t really changed from the animated version, it’s just told better. The titular Mulan (Yifei Liu) is a free spirited young woman with a strong chi, or life force. She performs at almost super heroic levels of grace and athleticism, but her family warn her that ‘chi is for warriors, not for women’.

Denied her future, fate takes a hand when the Emperor (Jet Li) commands every household to send one male soldier to form a conscript army to combat the invading hordes of Bori Khan (Jason Scott Lee). He has his own chi warrior Xianniang (Li Gong) but her skills are condemned as witchcraft. As in the original Mulan steals her father’s sword and armour and journeys to join the army and meet her destiny.

This is the film’s major weakness. Mulan seems to convince everyone of her gender switch by simply not bathing frequently. Granted it’s a traditional male attribute but it takes more than a little mud on the cheeks and some killer b.o. to be convincing.

That apart Mulan the movie has two great strengths. The first is Niki Caro’s direction; the film is constantly driven forward by relentless dynamism. The action sequences are spectacular and, again, just the sort of thing audiences are craving. The second strength is the performance of Yifei Liu who anchors the film with an utterly convincing turn as a young woman who wants to be true to herself and dedicated to her family.

The casting overall is very clever with great names of Asian cinema such as Li Gong, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Rosalind Chao, and Tzi Ma providing a thoroughly authentic feel for the story.

The real star of the film for me however is cinematographer Mandy Walker. In the past with films such as Australia (2008) and Hidden Figures (2016) she has been able to shoot glorious vistas and human stories. Here she gets the chance to do both in the same story with vibrant, sumptuous cinematography and a colour palette that pops into the imagination.

Mulan is a superb looking story, very well told. Of course, it would be nice to see it on a big screen but there is an element of snobbery in this I think. A lot of our film viewing is done on smaller screens now and, for me, Mulan doesn’t lose much in narrative or visual terms and it is to Disney’s credit that they were agile enough to make the film available as widely as possible.