Disneyology

Mulan (1998)

By 1998 Disney had just tried getting very serious and literate with The Hunchback of Notre Dame and super goofy and farcical with Hercules and neither approach really did much for them. Their next movie, Mulan, was an attempt (perhaps one last attempt) to get back to the Goldilocks zone between the two extremes and get back the mojo of their success earlier in the decade. The movie had that sort of epic sweep that had characterized those earlier films and like a lot of the Disney movies of the 90s it was interested in transplanting the tropes of a Disney movie into a different culture’s mythology. Having already done movies in France (twice), the Middle East, Africa (sort of), North America, and Greece it only seemed natural that Disney would go to Asia next and specifically they set their sights on China. In 1998 China was not the vital market that it is today but I’m pretty sure the Disney executives wanted to build bridges there just the same and they had had some success selling The Lion King there. To do that they came upon the legend of a female warrior named Hua Mulan, a sort of Joan of Arc figure who passed herself off as a man in order fight in a war in her aging father’s place. It’s a story that would both move the Disney aesthetic into Asia while also subverting the traditional Diseny princess figure in the most radical way yet by making a female protagonist into a full on fighter.

Mulan is in many ways an attempt to do a Disney take on two genres that would be fairly familiar to adult audiences: the gender bending comedy and the “ragtag platoon bonds before going to war” movie. So it’s like Tootsie meets Stripes but on an epic scale and for kids. Kind of an odd direction to go but I’d say they actually pull it off fairly well. Comedies about men and women pretending to be one another for contrived reasons obviously go back to Shakespeare’s time probably has precedent a lot earlier than that too. It is interesting however that in cinema we tend to get a whole lot of men pretending to be women and not a whole lot of women pretending to be men. I’m sure that college dissertations have been written about why this is but it’s probably just a simple matter of men in dresses being a much stranger sight to most audiences than women in pants. The gags here about Mulan trying to fit in with “the guys” aren’t terribly novel but they are mostly cute. The basic concept is kind of ludicrous of course and Mulan does not make a terribly convincing man during these scenes (in part I think because Disney still wants to make sure she’s “hot” despite the disguise) but the fact that this is animation helps. The film also does a pretty decent job of establishing the comradery between the soldier during the training sequences and by the time they’re actually marching on the enemy you do believe their cohesion.

Of course what’s notable about these scenes is that the humor in them seems awfully grounded and human jokes rather than the goofy pop culture referencing slapstick that took over Hercules and infested other Disney movies like Aladdin. To provide the stupider comedy that kids apparently demand Mulan was of course given a talking sidekick in the form of Eddie Murphy’s Mushu the dragon, a character I certainly expected to hate but who frankly could have been a lot worse. He’s a little out of place and the movie would have been better off without him, but he doesn’t totally break the fourth wall as much as the Genie from Aladdin or the Gargoyles in Hunchback and he actually does serve something of a purpose to the plot as Mulan’s masculinity advisor of sorts. On the musical front this movie presented some changes from the norm as Alan Menken finally stepped away to do other things and their go-to lyricist in this period Stephen Schwartz had defected to the newly formed Dreamworks to make songs for The Prince of Egypt. As such they brought Jerry Goldsmith in to do the score and the songs were done by a dude named Matthew Wilder (best known for the pop hit “Break My Stride”) and David Zippel. The new blood seems to have worked for the movie because musically it’s almost certainly Disney’s best work since The Lion King and that “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” song is really something special.

So the movie has a lot of good things going for it, so why isn’t it better remembered? Third act problems. Much of the movie’s running time has everyone getting ready to go to war but once they finally go on their adventure it seemingly ends something like fifteen minutes later in a fairly cheap fashion. At this point Mulan’s secret is revealed, everyone over-reacts, then they get over it something like five minutes later when the (rather boring) villain comes back shortly and launches an urban attack that is not terribly epic compared to what came before. Then there’s this strange coda where Mulan comes home, then Li comes chasing after her but at that point the movie just kind of ends. That isn’t handled very elegantly and there are a few other shaky moments here or there, but overall there’s not really too much to complain about here really, it’s a serviceable little movie though not an extraordinary one. The improvements here did not however turn the movie into the comeback film Disney had likely hoped for. It made $120 million domestic, which was $20 million more than Hercules but still not really anything to write home about. It also didn’t end up making the killing in China that they had likely hoped, in part because Disney was on the Chinese Communist Party’s shit list because Touchstone pictures had put out the movie Kundun the year before and the Chinese government was not thrilled about it. You could tell at this point that Disney was not “planning for success” at this point and they reported gave the film half the marketing budget that Hercules had.
***1/2 out of Five

Oh, I almost forgot, my research into the movie led me to this video:

I think I'm most curious what he's going to think about Atlantis: The Lost Empire. It is, to me, most unlike their animated movies of the 90's/early 00's. It's basically a straight-up action movie, with no songs and a sweeping score. It's probably the most "summer blockbuster-esque popcorn movie" animated movie they've ever done.

Definitely curious about Atlantis. Its place in Disney history and its general ambition almost makes it look like the Black Cauldron of the 2000s

They're very different movies. People forget that before Shrek, DreamWorks was going directly after Disney. Prince of Egypt, Road to El Dorado, Stallion and Sinbad were Disney-esque movies. Atlantis and Treasure Planet were kinda trying to up the ante. Give DreamWorks a run for its money. What both studios didn't count on was Shrek becoming a cultural phenomenon and making those type of animated films irrelevant. Even now, movies like Tangled, Frozen and Moana aren't really the classic style. We're post Shrek. I think that's why Enchanted and live-action Beauty and the Beast have worked out so well. It's the closest we have to pure Disney or at least Renaissance era Disney.

Tarzan (1999)


If I asked the average person what the two highest grossing Disney Renaissance movies were they’d probably say The Lion King and Aladdin and they’d be right. What may be more surpising is that the third highest grossing Disney Renaissance movie wasn’t Beauty and the Beast or The Little Mermaid, it was their 1999 film Tarzan. Ticket inflation likely had a little bit to do with this but it is still noting that the movie made $170 million while all their other late 90s films had only managed to make between $100 million and $140 million. Granted that still isn’t anywhere near the heights of The Lion King but it does certainly feel like a bit of a comeback after a lot of decline. I was certainly shocked when I discovered this firstly because the movie does not seem to be terribly well remembered and also because even back in 1999 the movie didn’t actually seem to make all that much noise. It just kind of seemed like the annual Disney movie that would come and go and I don’t really remember the advertising campaign nearly as well as I do the campaigns of some of the other Disney movies of the era. Of course it’s also worth questioning if this movie should even be called part of the Disney Renaissance. “Disney Renaissance,” much like the real Renaissance, is kind of a vague term that was invented after the fact. It has a pretty clear beginning with The Little Mermaid in 1989 but it’s less clear when it ended. Mulan certainly seems to fit but this next film seems to be actively moving away from some of the conventions we associate with that era of Disney.

For one thing this is not a movie based on a fairy tale or legend or myth or even a famous work of literature; it’s an adaptation of a copyrighted 20th century pulp character and one with something of a long history of cinematic adaptation. The film also has a new animation style born of a technological innovation called Deep Canvas, which allows the filmmakers to use CGI to make backgrounds that look painted rather than digital. It’s kind of hard to explain exactly what it is about this look that seems distinct from the earlier films but the aesthetic change is noticeable. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this stylistic change a definitive change for the better as it does kind of rob the movie of that signature Disney style and in some ways makes it look more like a generic animated production, but it does look pretty cool. Disney had been increasingly incorporating CGI into their films with varying degrees of success since The Great Mouse Detective. Sometimes it looks good like certain shots in The Lion King, sometimes it looks god awful like the hydra fight in Hercules. Of course the irony is that this was a half-measure of sorts and that the wave of the future was going to be fully CGI animated films of the variety that Pixar was pioneering at this time, but Disney was heavily associated with 2D animation and were clearly trying to find a compromise style to run with. The jungle that Tarzan resides in certainly looks pretty good and the action scenes here have a lot more speed and heft than a lot of what we’ve seen before from the studio.

Another thing that differentiates this from the Disney movies of old is that it isn’t a musical. In an interview director Kevin Lima explained that he "just couldn't see this half-naked man sitting on a branch breaking out in song… it would be ridiculous." I agree, this adventure story did not need conventional musical numbers, however the alternative they came up with was probably worse. Instead of having characters burst into song they hired Phil Collins to record vaguely on theme songs that would play non-diegeticly at various points in the film. I’m not a fan of Phil Collins but that’s not really the point, I’m sure these songs would sound fine within the context of one of his albums but they seem pretty out of place here. Nothing about the music of Phil Collins screams “jungles of Africa” to me and I’m not sure what made them think it was a good idea to hire him outside of the fact that they’d had some luck working with Billy Joel and Elton John in the past and Phil Collins was next on their list of adult contemporary stars who are sort of past their prime but are still kind of famous and will appeal to the parent demographic. Then again he managed to steal and Oscar from Aimee Mann for his trouble, so what do I know?

Ultimately I think the bigger problem here is just that this Tarzan character is a bit too bland to carry a movie like this. Tony Goldwyn doesn’t really bring this character to life and his confusion with the other humans just isn’t as touching as the writers seem to think it is. Jane is a little better and walks a pretty good line between being a realistically Victorian woman without seeming like regressive doormat, but the villain is really lame. Clayton is basically just a combination of Percival McLeach from The Rescuers Down Under and Gaston from Beauty and the Beast and the fact that Jane and her father seemed to trust him as long as they did makes them both look like morons. Overall I think this proves to be a very thoroughly average movie more than anything. Disney was clearly trying to use this movie to make a slightly cooler and more boy friendly kind of Disney movie, a direction that would probably turn out to be disastrous in the long run but I can see why the producers would have seen the movie to be fairly promising even if it clearly wasn’t a homerun out the gate.

*** out of Five

Collecting Some Thoughts

Throughout this installment, I’ve referred to a lot of these movies as being “disappointments” but let’s be clear: Disney didn’t lose money on any of them. Yes, a lot of them underwhelmed at the domestic box office but a lot of them actually did quite well overseas and even beyond that I’m sure Disney made plenty of money where it mattered: merchandising. All of these movies had toy lines, likely sold a million VHSs and DVDs, and they all had marketing tie-ins with companies like McDonalds. In fact the lowest grossing of all these movies, Hercules, is reported to have had marketing tie-ins with no fewer than 85 different licenses. Still, Disney is a mega-corporation and after the massive success they had earlier in the decade you have to assume that someone in a suit somewhere must have been furious about how things had gone. So what went wrong? Well the movies got worse obviously, but they weren’t terrible and there are certainly worse kids’ movies out there, why weren’t they able to spin the likes of Mulan into gold? Part of it must have just been fatigue. When Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King came out they seemed like events but these later movies didn’t; releasing a movie every single year for a decade tends to have that effect. Still, I’m pretty sure that if things had been reversed and Pocahontas and Tarzan had come out first and the earlier renaissance classics had come out later it wouldn’t have necessarily meant that the former would have been received better. I feel like the bigger problem was just hubris. By the time they made The Lion King they simply felt that they could do this in their sleep and that the public would be endlessly willing to follow them wherever they went and the proved not to be the case. Meanwhile, competition was coming into place. Pixar emerged during this era and instantly began out-grossing their older sibling with pretty much every movie right up until Frozen and it wouldn’t be long before they also had to contend with Dreamworks and as we will soon see this combination of creative stagnation and increased competition will come to bring Disney to its true low point.

While we're on the topic of Tarzan, let's discuss that crazy theory that Tarzan is the younger brother of Anna and Elsa from Frozen. The theory claims that the shipwrecked couple and their infant child (baby Tarzan) from the opening of Tarzan are the same couple from Frozen (Anna and Elsa's parents) who are shown on a ship that goes down during a storm. Thoughts?

Well, the other theory is that they were sailing to the royal wedding of the couple from Tangled, which seems less out of the way than Africa. 

Neverending, consider this next time you want to accuse me of snobbery.

www.atlasobscura.com/articles/tolkien-cs-lewis-disney-snow-white-narnia-hobbit-dwarves

We gotta get Dracula to review Disney Afternoon.

Gumi Bears
DuckTales
Chip n Dale
TaleSpin
Darkwing Duck
Goof Troop
Bonkers
Gargoyles
Aladdin

At least a handful of episodes of each. This is as important as the Disney Renaissance if not more.

Pussy