MovieMonday: Mulan

This is another Disney live-action remake (the 15th, by my count) of one of its animated features.  The original, a girl-power story, was released in 1998 and is discussed later in this piece.

The story comes from traditional Chinese poems about Hua Mulan, a brave young woman who disguises herself as a man and serves with distinction as a soldier in the emperor's army for 12 years and whose sex is revealed to her fellow soldiers only after she returns home.  The story has been revived many times since it was written around 500 AD.

In this case, Mulan is the daughter of a former soldier who admires her strength and agility.  

"Your chi is strong," he tells her.  (Chi translates into "essential life force" for westerners who haven't been paying attention the last few decades.)

There is the usual blah blah blah from the mother, who tells her husband, "You forget -- Mulan is a daughter, not a son.  A daughter brings honor by marrying well." 

When Rouran nomads invade from out west, the Chinese emperor calls for the conscription of one man from every family to defend the (yet-unnamed) Silk Road.  When the recruiter arrives at the Hua home with a summons, Mulan's father agrees immediately even though his health is poor.

"I am blessed with two daughters. I will fight," he declares with pride.

 The night before her father has been ordered to report, Mulan takes the conscription scroll and lights out on the family horse to enlist, presenting herself as a young man.  

At training camp,  Mulan hides her femaleness and proves herself.  The commander, who remembers her father, says, "I know your secret.  You need to cultivate your gift."

Then it's off to battle after battle.  The Rouran leaders are Böri Khan (Jason Scott Lee), plus a possibly magical female leader, Xian Lang, (famed Chinese actress Li Gong).  Mulan deals with both, effectively, while her comrades, including the serious Chinese soldier who admires her, defeat the rest of the enemy team.  

All ends well.  The film is beautifully shot (appropriately, given its $200 million budget), and the characters of Mulan and the people who care about her are portrayed movingly.

But the justification for a war with nomadic tribes who perceive their land to have been seized is taken as a given, rather as in another recent film whose viewpoint is less benign.  

As someone unfamiliar with the geography or history of the Asian steppe,  I have no way of evaluating the matter.  Interestingly, China's current leaders preferred that this newer film, unlike the one discussed below, involve enemy invaders from a different century.  The Chinese government, of course, controls film distribution in the country.

Mulan 1998

This Mulan functions as a late-century Disney princess movie in which Mulan is a more active version of Snow White.  

Mulan goes off to war and is surrounded in training by silly recruits who act as humorous relief and who are improved by their association with her.   (Similarly, Snow White fled her castle and settled in with the seven dwarfs, gray-haired goofballs who were won over by her kindness and sincerity.)

Also in the Disney theme, Mulan 1998 is assisted by a comical dragon named Mushu, who is voiced by Eddie Murphy and who camps it up with American idioms and is very funny but who is absent here and perhaps not just because Mulan 2020 is not a film aimed to make children laugh.  (The Han Chinese are not thought to be welcoming toward persons of different ethnicities.)   

In addition, this movie has a musical score and popular songs that are referenced, infrequently and orchestrally, in  Mulan 2020.

Note

Mulan 2020 is a more sincere and more serious movie than other Disney live-action remakes of cartoon stories. 

It has been designed to appeal to Chinese audiences, who have been deprived of the opportunity to see typical R-rated American releases like Deadpool, the poor folks.   

The single kiss between Mulan and her presumed infantry admirer has been excised. 

Her military commitment to be "loyal, brave and true" has been given an added requirement:  devotion to family.

Both movie and earlier cartoon portray soldiers devoted to their country, but the film does a bit more valorizing of the emperor and his devotion to "my people."  China's dynastic history stretches back thousands of years and ended only in the very early 20th century.  It is likely that its most recent strong man, Xi Jinping, sees himself as something like the emperor in the movie, protecting his people from threats in Tibet, Xinjiang and Kazakhstan, among others.  

                 A few days ago, the Los Angeles Times reported that six million Mongols who live in greater China are resisting the government's efforts to make them speak Mandarin.   From the story:  “'All ethnic groups must embrace tightly like the seeds of a pomegranate,'” read a slogan from Chinese President Xi Jinping printed in Mandarin on the wall." 

Another interesting point is that the Mulan star, who was born in China and raised in the United States,  has signaled support for the police in Hong Kong -- the police who have been suppressing agitators who want democracy and want China to abide by the "one country, two systems" 50-year deal that it signed in 1997.  

This may be the actress' opinion (an unusual one in the US except among players and executives of the  National Basketball Association), but it has been noticed and has inspired movements to boycott the film in Thailand, South Korea and other Asian countries.  

On reflection, I wish I had not paid $29.99 to see Mulan 2020 on Disney +.   If Disney wants to kowtow to China, that's Disney's business.  But I do not.

Notes:  

An opinion piece in this morning's Washington Post notes that the credits for Mulan 2020 thank several Chinese agencies in Xinjiang province, including a Turpan public security bureau, for their help in the making of the film.  Xinjiang is home to China's notorious "retraining" facilities for an estimated million Muslim Uighurs.   Why Disney would choose to shoot much of its movie in that province, given international sentiments of the last few years, is a bit of a question.  Another question is why China would want to draw attention to the place.

MovieMonday: The Great Mouse Detective

This still-enjoyable movie from Disney was among the first to use CGI, or computer-generated imagery.

Disney began doing cartoons the hard way with Snow White, which featured laborious hand-drawn cel-by-cel movements and a multiple image camera that moved characters and backgrounds at different speeds as a story progressed.  Later cartoon productions were clunkier and produced with much less attention to detail, which showed.  By the middle of the last century, the character-driven Warner Brothers cartoons were valued, but those and Disney classics are the only ones remembered today.

Besides good animation, this comic film is a loyal, mouse-driven derivation of the Sherlock Holmes stories and books written by Arthur Conan Doyle and published between 1892 and 1927.

Its story begins in London when a toymaker is kidnapped after giving his daughter a handmade gift.  The daughter, Olivia, seeks help from a gentleman, Dr. David Q. Dawson (Watson.) She needs help  to find Basil of Baker Street (named after Basil Rathbone who played Sherlock in a the mid-20th century film series, no doubt,) to find her father.

Dawson is a kindly fellow, and together the two find Basil's mousehole under the Baker Street apartment where a gentleman upstairs (Sherlock?) plays a violin in silhouette in a window in the evening moonlight.

Basil's landlady, Mrs. Judson (Hudson in the books) welcomes Olivia in a motherly way, and Basil agrees to help find Olivia's father, who has been kidnapped by an agent of the dastardly Ratigan (Professor Moriarty.)

From there, the adventures and conflicts build and build, climaxing finally in battles over and inside London's most famous timepiece.

This film is fun to watch for children and adults.  It also is true enough to the character of Sherlock (who always has been what we would now call "on the spectrum" but whose hard shell is cracked by the distress of innocent victims) and Watson to prepare children for later literary or film versions of Conan Doyle stories.

Besides being more visually arresting, the film is anchored more in history than popular culture of the current day.  Almost 35 years after its release, Mouse Detective retains interest because it refers to old stories that don't rely on tropes like Lego/DC superheroes, Pokemon characters and twerking animals.  (Twerking was a 1980s dance phenomenon that was said to have ended in 2013, but you wouldn't know it if you watched more recent children's animation.)

If you share time with a young person who has seen this movie, by the time the person is 10, for instance, you can enjoy the Rathbone movies that date to 1939, or the still-enjoyable British Granada television series that features Jeremy Brett as Sherlock.  A young person who has enjoyed Mouse Detective many times (as children do with favorite books or videos) will appreciate instantly Sherlock's deductive reasoning, his reliance on Watson for human interaction and his absolute and unswerving focus on solving mysteries.

In short, this cartoon is nearly 35 years old but still worth enjoying.


Notes

This movie was enhanced by the participation of two film legends.

The first was the late Henry Mancini, who scored the movie and is most famous for "Moon River" the song (with lyrics by Johnny Mercer) for the Breakfast at Tiffany's film (that I mean to see someday) and the "Pink Panther Theme" from the Peter Sellers movie series.
           If you have a moment, enjoy the first minute or so of this Mouse Detective scene, in which the three heroes search for clues in a factory of wind-up toys (a perfect setting for a Disney movie.) The musical accompaniment matches the action perfectly.  Mancini also contributed catchy music for Ratigan and his goon team.

The second is also-late Vincent Price, who voices the character of Ratigan, a rat, yes, who aims to replace the mouse monarch of England on the1897 occasion of the actual Queen Victoria's 50-year jubilee.
            Price died in the last century after a long film career as a master of evil.  You can almost hear him twirling his mustaches as he reads his lines with devilish glee

-----

Contemporary parents are getting mildly leery of this film because it includes a mouse chanteuse singing and stripping off (some) clothing in a performance at a sleazy riverfront bar, and because Dr. Dawson is made briefly silly after being served a mickey at the same locale.  So while film experts recommend the movie only for children over the age of six, some parents are upping the minimum recommended viewing age to eight.

             Difficult as it is to protect children now from all the coarsening content of our popular culture,  if parents focus their distress on a 1986 Disney cartoon in which honorable good guys help a frightened young heroine, the parents surely will have their hands full every time a child uses a computer tablet or walks outside the family home's front door. 

MovieMonday: The Lion King

There are two general reactions to this movie:

     -- It will make more than $1 billion and be a classic for many years.

     -- It is not as good as might be hoped.

The Lion King franchise was launched 25 years ago with a cartoon movie described as a G-rated "Hamlet" for the children's audience.  It was wildly popular.  (The Id may be the only person yet on earth who has not seen that film.)

A few years later, the material was transformed into a theatrical musical, which I enjoyed on a trip to London, and which still plays in New York and the West End.

Now the Lion King has been brought to life again in a hyper-realistic version that follows the success of a very good CGI-generated remake of The Jungle Book in 2016.

My reaction to this Lion King is that it is TOO MUCH.   The story is too big, its hyper-realism is too broad, its humor and songs are too trivial, and its characters are too human to be credible when stuffed into apparently realistic animal characters.

I'm not advising against seeing the thing.  Pretty much everyone who has seen the first cartoon will go, and if other people have different reactions, I'm eager to learn them.  Meanwhile, let me talk about some of my points.


Children and Stories

The 1994 Lion King cartoon was given a G rating.  Like most Disney films of its day, it was aimed at the pre-k through middle-school demo. 

As we know, the story is about young Simba, whose father, the Lion King, is killed by Simba's envious uncle.  Then Simba, convinced by the uncle that Simba is responsible for his father's death, leaves the pride and returns after he has grown up and has learned the truth and when he is ready to take his ancestral role as the new lion king.

That first bit -- the daddy dying -- is a tough one.  Small children are aware that people die someday, but they come to accept the fact of mortality only over years.  They are resistant to entertainments that involve death.

On the other hand, small children also see cartoons and understand that cartoons are stories that are not real.  Think of Tom and Jerry, the cat and mouse who battle each other (and sometimes with Spike the bulldog) but never suffer any injuries.

A child who sees the 1994 Lion King cartoon version of Simba's father's death understands the scene as having more in common with a Tom and Jerry cartoon and less in common with the child's existential fear of dying or losing a parent.  My guess is that this distance allowed children to accept the 1994 story without trauma.

In this new version (labeled PG and not recommended for children under age eight,) the animals look like real animals, talk like humans and have family relationships that read, emotionally, like human relationships.  (If you think about it, virtually all animal characters in cartoon films have less human-like emotional lives or problems.)

A couple small children in the theater when I saw this new movie were so sad they cried when Simba's father was killed.  My guess is their parents had loved the first show as children and figured this new version would be just as appealing to their own kids.  To their credit, the children dried their tears and stuck it out for the rest of the show.


Species Appropriation?  

The CGI characters in this movie are beautifully rendered and believably realistic.  You could quibble with the how well the animators have dubbed their speaking and singing, but that would be silly.  The technical accomplishment is remarkable.

In addition, this movie gives us the broad savanna, a dark cavern full of animal skeletons and isolated forest scenes with ponds and rivers.  It shows the flights of groups of native birds across wide skies and a stampede of wildebeests.  This further reinforces, certainly in children's minds, that the show itself is real.

But the story is not real.  Its "Circle of Life" song and theme imply that the Lion King is accepted and honored as the ruler and protector of all animals in the Pride Lands.  (Yes, the daddy king explains to Simba that lions eat animals and then when lions die, their carcasses feed the grass that is eaten by the herbivorous other animals and so it all works out.)

But, still, lions are carnivores.  If a tower (cq) of English-speaking giraffes, ala this narrative, were invited to the presentation of a Lion King's baby and heir, as in the opening of this film, the giraffes would send a polite note regretting that they had a previous engagement and could not join the ceremony with hordes of other tasty (to real-life lions) celebrants.  Said shorter, some ideas are more credible in a cartoon format than a realistic CGI one.

Additionally and because the story requires it, packs of hyenas are drafted as nasty, omnivorous predators, the natural enemies of all the really nice animals.  (Apparently some hyena-loving biologists remonstrated about this characterization when the cartoon movie came out, but their objections went nowhere and so the idea survives in the service of the story.)

Anyway, there is no shortage of beautiful cinematography of the wilds of Africa or of its wildlife.

Why not let children learn about the real Africa and the habits of its real animals instead of seeding the continent and its wildlife with European-based mythic human narratives?


Story Derivation

Since I mentioned that Lion King is patterned on "Hamlet," I'll add a few thoughts.

-- Yes, Simba/Hamlet's father was murdered by his uncle, Scar/Claudius, who assumed the throne, and, yes, after some dallying, the prince returned to avenge his father's death.  But the endings are different, appropriately given the age of the desired audience.

-- In both plays, the late king counsels the prince -- from the sky in Africa, in a ghostly apparition in Denmark -- to live up to the role assigned him at birth.  (There is also an assurance of everlasting life, a religious idea, in the Lion King.  The Hamlet story offers no such hope.)

-- When Simba flees after his father's death, he takes up with an aimless team -- a warthog named Pumbaa and a meerkat named Timon -- "Timon of Athens," get it? They are pleasant companions who believe life is meaningless.  Some so-called scholars say the two are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, goofballs who are killed off-stage in the Hamlet narrative, which makes no sense.

-- Simba's sojourn more calls to mind two of Shakespeare's history plays:  "Henry IV, Part 1" and Henry IV, Part 2."  In those, Prince Hal's friendship with Falstaff is more like Simba's bromance with Pumbaa and Timon.

-- The end of Lion King less resembles the Hamlet story than "Henry V," the subsequent and triumphal play in which Hal assumes his role as king and leads England to victory in the Battle of Agincourt.

-- Finally, the look of Scar (see right,) the murderer/usurper in this 2019 Lion King iteration, summons immediately to mind a line from "Julius Caesar," another betrayal narrative -- "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look."

Reviews from the 1994 cartoon movie suggest that the original Lion King plot drew on a Japanese anime story and/or a Scandinavian myth.  The themes of such stories have traditional resonance.  The only question I have is how long the idea of ancestral-derived and -enforced primacy will survive in narratives over time. 


About That Play

Below is a too-quick run-through of "The Lion King" play as it opened in London after the turn of the millenium.  Among its charms were animals played by people in costumes or manipulating intricate puppets and a strong singer who opened the show with the Zulu chant — “Nants ingonyama bagithi baba! -- and then provided a musical narration to signal scene and location changes. The show also had an almost entirely black cast with the bad guy (Scar the murderer/usurper) played by an Anglo actor with a plummy Oxbridge accent.  Why not, given the story was set in Africa?



We attended that show with a second grader who sat straight up in his seat, rapt, from the moment it started until the curtain came down.  The semi-abstract nature of the animal cast was perfectly understandable and appealing to the younger person, who still recalls it with affection, unlike the more traditional Gilbert and Sullivan production he was forced to attend the next evening. 

It has been said, often and truly, that poorly done theater is awful, much less compelling than film.  But great theater is vastly superior.


Note:

Keep your eyes open to see whether Disney's renowned marketing team promotes this film as relentlessly as it did another big movie in 2016.

Star Wars: The Sales Force Awakens

I finally saw Disney's new Star Wars movie.  It is fun in many ways, but it seems to have been designed primarily to promote the franchise.

The new young leads include a strong young woman (a la Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games) and the first black character we have seen in that far-far-away galaxy.  There is a cute new droid, and furry Chewbacca returns to reprise his role in the first trilogy.

The plot has many action scenes, but not all of them make sense when you think about them afterward.

And of course the movie ends with two big story questions designed to bring the audience back for the next of the five more planned Star Wars films.

Honestly, if the Disney marketing department had been asked to turn out the script, it could not have done a better job.


Star Wars Products

Naturally, big new Star Wars features (rather like the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando) are being readied at Disneyland and Disney World.

And of course there are the usual Star Wars products -- shirts, hats, bobble-heads, posters, lunch boxes and Lego sets.

But these are only the beginning.  Here are some Star Wars-themed products that I have noticed recently.

Star Wars Crocs

Star Wars toothbrushes

Star Wars aprons

Star Wars lipsticks

Star Wars bedroom sets ($231 for the twin size)

Star Wars soccer balls -- and Star Wars basketballs too

Star Wars pencils

Star Wars Pez dispensers

Star Wars at the Grocery Store

Star Wars Grapes (and Star Wars oranges and Star Wars apples)

Star Wars Coffee-Mate

Star Wars water

Star Wars yogurt

Star Wars Cheez-its

Star Wars cereals

Star Wars macaroni and cheese

Too Much?

At the risk of sounding like a grinch, I wonder about the ubiquity of these promotions, most of which are pitched at children.

Kids naturally will want to play with toy light sabers and to dress up as Star Wars characters next Halloween.  I understand that people want to participate in the newest thing.

But children are less sophisticated consumers than adults.   It makes me uneasy when children are market targets for so many unrelated products that happen to have Star Wars labels slapped on them.

I imagine that more than a few families are drawing some lines here.