Mulan / Mulan II

Looks better, but some bonuses dropped from the old DVD
While Mulan looks better on Blu-ray, we are sacrificing some bonus material that was on the old DVD:

All galleries are lost in the leap from DVD to Blu-ray. There were ten Character Design galleries holding several hundred images, three Visual Development galleries amassing around 100 images, a 13-image Backgrounds & Layouts gallery, and a Publicity Art gallery holding 32 images. The interactive edutaining feature "DisneyPedia: Mulan's World", comprised of ten shorts on the film's elements and culture, is another notable casualty. Also gone: the no longer applicable introduction about being able to toggle angles for the production stages demonstration. Included on Mulan's first DVD (a non-anamorphic Limited Issue disc repackaged as a Gold Classic Collection edition) but subsequently dropped and still not resurfacing is its original theatrical trailer. That's a bummer both for fans of Randy Edelman's Dragonheart score and for those who appreciated the use of some rough...

Five stars for the original, three stars for the sequel
Mulan (1998)

Disney Blu-ray & DVD (March 12, 2013)
Directed by Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook
The Voices of Ming Na Wen, B. D. Wong, Eddie Murphy, George Takei, June Foray, Miguel Ferrer,
Harvey Fierstein, Jerry Tondo, Gedde Watanabe
Music by Matthew Wilder
Lyrics by David Zippel
Music Score by Jerry Goldsmith

Mulan is significant in that it was the first feature produced almost completely by Walt Disney Animation Florida, a top-flight studio that doubled as a Theme Park attraction. Guests could wander along picture windows and watch animators at work on real shorts and features. It was a wonderful thing to see while it lasted.

Mulan was also my daughter's first movie. Even though she was just a baby then, she has seen it many times since and it is one of her all-time favorites. This is a great dad and daughter movie, in any case.

The strength of Mulan is that its a story that makes a strong...

Who she is inside
Based upon traditional Chinese folklore (try this take on it for a solid introduction by a noted reteller Fa Mulan: The Story of a Woman Warrior), these two movies tell the story of Fa Mulan (Ming-Na Wen), a young girl living in China in the 3rd Century BC. In the first of the two movies we learn that, as the only child of a considerable landowner, Fa Zhou (Soon-Tek Oh), who was lamed in war some years earlier, Mulan has, somewhat of necessity, grown up something of a tomboy, dressing in trousers, working in the fields, and riding her horse Khan astride; but she's found over the years that she enjoys this kind of life--the prospect of "meeting our Matchmaker (Miriam Margolyes)" terrifies her, and the process of getting "primped and polished" so that "boys will gladly go to war for [her]" seems rather stupid. But in her culture, women are at best second-class citizens, and "a girl can bring her family/Great...

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