She also doesn’t sing, a small mercy given the tuneless warbling in Disney’s 1998 animated film.
It has antiseptic violence, emotional uplift and the kind of protagonist that movie people like to call relatable: a brave, pretty young woman (the suitably appealing Yifei Liu), who loves her family, but doesn’t quite fit in (yet). It’s lightly funny and a little sad, filled with ravishing landscapes and juiced up with kinetic fights (if not enough of them). Set jointly in the Old World and in that newer mythic realm of happily-ever-after female empowerment, this live-action “ Mulan,” directed by Niki Caro, is pretty much what happens when a legend meets Disney’s global bottom-line. The bird is one of the few things that elude her during this otherwise less-than-buoyant epic, which tracks Mulan as she transforms from an unruly daughter into a masculinized warrior in the name of family, nation and those twinned imperial powers called China and Disney. When it takes flight, so does Mulan, by scampering over roofs and all but dancing in the air. She’s a tyke when she first appears, chasing a protesting chicken. įeet flying, Mulan enters her new movie with speed and wit. And it was like, as a director, being the conductor of a really brilliant orchestra. We brought in 80 Kazakh and Mongolian trick riders to be our Rouran army, because it was incredibly important to us that the people in our film were authentically the ethnicities that they needed to be for the storytelling. The sequence itself was created a couple of years before we shot it. Mandy Walker, the DP, and Liz Tan, our first AD. The key for me to creating and executing a sequence of this size and scale and complexity was really the collaboration of some really singular women. And we found our battleground in the Ahuriri Valley, which is in the middle of the South Island of New Zealand in a place called Central Otago. And so we spent many days location scouting really remote parts of New Zealand in a helicopter. The sequence was really hard to execute in one really critical and basic way, which is that the sequence required us to have a piece of land that had a number of working levels. And with all of our immense capabilities of the visual effects world, we could create something that was really quite fantastic. But I really felt that we could really honor the avalanche in live action. And the script did not include this sequence. When I joined this project, there was already a script. And her fighting is now so strong and so pure that she turns the battle around. And so she sheds her disguise and returns to battle as a young woman. Mulan understands that if she’s going to survive and thrive in battle, that she’ll need to do so as herself. She has had a confrontation with the witch, Xian Lang, played by Gong Li, who has seen through her disguise and reminded her that she will die pretending to be someone she’s not. Hi I’m Niki Caro, I’m the director of “Mulan.” Here we find Mulan, played by Liu Yife, returning to battle, this time no longer in disguise as a man. Transcript ‘Mulan’ | Anatomy of a Scene The director Niki Caro narrates a battle sequence from her film.