Mulan

JUNE 22, 1998: Newcity Chicago

Directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft.

As a little girl, I might not have had much patience for Disney's latest batch of good intentions, the animated legend of a girl named Mulan - a Chinese Joan of Arc - who bobs her hair and dons military garb to defend her homeland against hordes of marauding Huns. But kids nowadays are a lot more hip, with female basketball stars being such super role models, so perhaps they'll be as enthralled as I was by this Claire Danes-ish heroine, who in the patently didactic first scene fails at being a marriageable cherry blossom.

 But even if Snow White's come a long way, baby, the fact remains: it's tough to jazz up an Asian land war, especially one waged against nightmare-inducing green-gray-faced hulks. The tunes are weak, less rollicking than just plain rock 'n' roll, and don't measure up to Disney show stoppers like "Under the Sea." A couple laughs come courtesy of the world's absolutely cutest little black-eyed cricket and a sassy, pint-sized dragon whose Eddie Murphy-ish antics I initially found offensive until I recognized the voice of Murphy himself.

But if "Mulan" flounders a bit on the children's front, it thoroughly won me over as an adult. Appealing slightly more to the head than to the heart, Mulan's inspiration owes less to Brothers Grimm than to Shakespearean gender-fucks and the modern fetish for little ass-kicking Japanimated fighter-girls. Particularly daring is the way our cross-dressing heroine wins the admiration of her hunky captain as a man, and there's always the delicious threat of discovery.

 The film's biggest triumph of animation isn't the silkscreen-inspired decors of salmon and turquoise, the poetry of the Asian-styled backdrops, or even the breathless vision of the computerized hordes rolling like locusts over a snowy mountainside. It's the way Mulan's silky black curtain of hair swoops and swings with the genuine heaviness of real Asian hair. Whether she's doing a little "Pillow Book"-ish writing on the body or slipping away from a skinny-dip gone sour, Mulan's precisely the kind of cartoon-girl that will leave grown-up boys sighing. (Ellen Fox)