Mulan: Special Edition: 2-Disc Set: Taking a break from the normal, I decided to go ahead and watch Mulan. While Disney has not really made a great animated film since Beauty & the Beast, I will concede that this one was no as bad as their more recent films. While the art style was nice, resembling classic Chinese paintings yet still looking "Disney-ish," the story was decidedly modern and Westernized and so it felt a little awkward at times. It also follows the Disney tradition of straying entirely from the source material whenever possible. Of course, the original poem wasn't really much in the way of detail, it certainly wasn't the horrible history revision and politically correct nightmare of Pocahontas.

Of course being the strange man that I am, I watched this film in the Mandarin dub only and have never seen the original English version. It's kind of cool to hear Jackie Chan and Coco Lee play the characters of the film quite well. As far as the music goes, I actually preferred the Mandarin versions of "I'll Make a Man Out of You" and "Reflection" to their English counterparts.

This leads me to the extras. One extra on the DVD is a music video with Jackie Chan doing the Mandarin version of "I'll Make a Man Out of You." To American audiences unfamiliar with his music career it must seem really odd for this stuntman to sing in a rather corny music video but Jackie can pull it off. It's too bad they didn't add anything Coco Lee's version of Reflection if anything was ever made, of course.

For the record, I will not be watching the made for DVD sequel as I find such sequels are unnecessary and most likely suck, especially when they come from Disney.

On a side note, I found the VHS tape of Under the Umbrella Tree episodes and thus I plan to watch a few of them in the coming days. This is great but I fear my backlog, which is now at 180, will stagnate for a while and barely reduce in size.

Labels: Cartoons, Disney