The thing is: Mulan wasn't a story about following one's heart, and trying to spin that out as the "lesson" of that film, so that Mulan can act as the voice of liberated wisdom, is psychotic. It is not remotely thrilling to find out who wins, because the deck is so unmistakably and thoroughly stacked, and boy, is it ever a pile of bullshit: not least because the princesses are presented with the choice between their arranged marriage and the common soldiers, but emphatically not with the choice of not marrying anybody. In regrettably straightforward fashion, the three schlubs and the three princesses all fall in love, and soon Mulan and Shang's relationship is being torn by their differing views on love: she believes in following one's heart, and he believes in following one's duty. Shang and Mulan are to be the leaders of this mission, and Shang selects the previous film's comic relief soldiers Yao (Harvey Fierstein) Ling (Gedde Watanabe) and Chien-Po (Jerry Tondo) as all the guard he needs for this highly sensitive diplomatic mission. And so Mulan II sets itself to exploding the pernicious tradition of arranged marriages, by setting up a situation where the Emperor of China (Pat Morita), in order to make a tactically vital treaty, has sent his three daughters, Mei (Lucy Liu), Ting Ting (Sandra Oh), and Su (Lauren Tom), to be married to the princes of the Qui Gong kingdom. But the filmmakers of Mulan II are still at some level aware that their protagonist Disney's token overtly feminist princess, despite being, in cold fact, not actually a princess (and the plot very quickly corrects for the princess-less Mulan universe), and so it would behoove the sequel to have some kind of self-conscious gender-progressive theme. It's fair, if a bit dreary, that the sequel is basically forced to play the "girls get married" card right off the bat. That was baked-in to the ending of the last movie, admittedly. So the sequel opens, of course, with Mulan's long-awaited engagement to Shang, who has known that she is a woman for about a month.
#CARTOON MULAN FULL MOVIE 2 MOVIE#
It is a movie emphatically not about the girl getting married and behaving like a doormat. Wong), though this is happily shunted well off-screen, and the movie is able to end as it has been for its entire run: without caving in to Disney's customary gender norms. It's obvious from the last scene of Mulan that the writers of that movie wanted the title character (Ming-Na Wen), having saved China after posing as a man to take her aged father's place in the army, to pair off with newly-promoted General Li Shang (B.D. Still and all, the visuals are perhaps the least-obnoxious part of a movie that begins, inevitably, by crapping all over the very delicately expressed themes of the original. This is hardly shocking, but particularly disappointing, given that Mulan was such a vivid-looking picture, one of the most distinctive Disney films of its era, with a very particularly mentality toward character design and color palette that are carried over into the sequel only when they have to be.
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Even spotting that, Mulan II is full of enough frankly ugly character designs and horrifyingly broad expressions on the pre-established characters that even from a purely static level of draftsmanship, it should be obvious that something is wrong here. It is, for the most part, well- drawn, which is not the same thing as animation at all, of course, though many people do not bother making the distinction between the quality of the individual still images and the smoothness and acting involved in transitioning between them. The former is an issue of taste, of course I am, though, quite stunned that anybody could look at any given scene of this thing and think to themselves, "yeah, I feel good about the art of 2-D animation when I look at this picture". This is not, as it turns out, a consensus opinion: Mulan II is largely regarded as a mostly un-miserable sequel, with fairly strong animation. What makes this particular movie stand out, then, is how much it betrays itself: while most of these movies at least manage to hang together as self-contained objects, Mulan II is so feeble-minded and irritating even as a stand-alone narrative that before too long, I'd pretty much forgotten to keep comparing it to the original 1998 Mulan - the last film from Disney's 1990s renaissance to end up stuck with a DTV sequels, as it happens - as the experience of watching this movie was perfectly enervating all by itself, without having to hunt for reasons to hate the damn thing. So it is no surprise that Mulan II does this. Many of the sequels produced by DisneyToon Studios - many, many, many, many of them - betray the emotions and themes of their precursor movies from the actual Disney canon.