Mulan

Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook made this away from Disney’s main California lot: it was animated mostly by the smaller Florida unit, the first of three features finished there. The scale shows in the shape. Eighty eight minutes leave room for a song-driven training stretch, a single avalanche that ends the war at the midpoint, and a palace chase afterwards. For the Hun charge the crew wrote their own crowd program, Attila, built on groundwork laid by the wildebeest stampede in The Lion King. The soldiers are not three-dimensional models but hand-drawn figures mapped onto cards, a trick that holds only while the camera stays within a limited angle. Watch what the film never does: no soldier arrives in close-up, and the army stays a distant mass. Mulan is carried by two performers. Ming-Na Wen speaks the part and Lea Salonga sings it. Salonga was first hired for both, but the directors were not convinced by the lowered voice she used for Ping, so the role was split, and the change of timbre is audible the moment “Reflection” begins. For a viewer fine with a version where the dragon and the cricket are Disney inventions absent from the old ballad. Not for anyone wanting the military stretch played straight, since Mushu undercuts nearly every dangerous moment with a joke.