Roy Disney looks pleased. Mulan (pronounced Moo-lawn by the filmmakers, although Irish audiences may be more likely to pronounce it like the surname of U2's drummer) is shaping up to be Disney's most successful animated movie since the heady days of The Lion King.
Not that films such as Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules stiffed, exactly - they all performed very respectably at the box office - but Mulan, based on a Chinese legend about a young woman who takes her father's place in the imperial army, is already looking like a better financial prospect. "It's a little early to make that judgment," says Disney. "But I happen to like it a lot. It's a very likeable movie." Where Hercules put the emphasis on comedy and music, the new film is much more of an adventure story, and those who don't particularly appreciate the sugar-coated ballads which always come with the package will be pleased at the relatively low song count (only five in all, composed by producer-writer Matthew Wilder). "It was the kind of story that even if you'd wanted to cram in several songs, you couldn't have done it," says Disney. "There's no reason to stop and sing." Hear, hear.
Mulan has been in production for five years, which is pretty long even for an animated film. In that time, the Disney Corporation has had its problems with the Chinese government, particularly over Kundun, Martin Scorsese's biopic of the Dalai Lama. Mulan is unlikely to raise any hackles in Beijing, though, and according to Roy Disney, the reception so far in China has been enthusiastic. "It opened very strongly in Hong Kong. The reviews are quite interesting because they talked a lot about ethnic mistakes that we had made, but I was encouraged there weren't a lot of people saying that Disney had butchered the story. But Mulan is the kind of story that's been told in so many different ways over the past 2,000 years that many different versions are possible."
Of course, Disney has been criticised many times in the past for insensitivity in adapting stories from other cultures for its purpose, so it's not surprising that the publicity for Mulan makes much of the fact that most of the character voices are performed by Chinese-Americans (the most notable exception being Eddie Murphy, in good form as the heroine's guardian dragon, Mushu). It's not something which you'd notice in the finished product. Where there is some sign of an Oriental influence is in the visual style of the film, which owes something to Chinese and Japanese traditions of comic book art. There are also some wonderful action sequences, which recall the choreography of Akira Kurosawa. "Yes, there's something of Kurosawa there," says co-director Barry Cook. "But most of our references are Western. We looked a lot at the films of David Lean, for the expansive scale and sense of composition. We also used a lot of negative space and extensive colour fields, which is closer in some ways to a Chinese style, and I'm not a big fan of colour, so we only used strong colours when it was necessary for the story. I'd say it's more stylised, more about design and shapes than about making things look realistic. And, of course, it's more of a two-dimensional, flat look."
Cook acknowledges that some viewers may have a problem with the new film's pared-down style. "We had one very well-known critic in America who hated the look of the film. He didn't understand what we were going for at all. He just thought there was none of the lavish detail he associated with Disney. Had we lost some of our budget or what was going on here? Well, this company sets the standard, and you'll see a lot of other companies looking for that `Disney style', but the fact is that we're constantly changing and developing that."
Roy Disney believes that whatever style is used is less important than the substance. "I don't think the audience cares after the first reel about the techniques involved," he says. "They just want good story and good characters."
With so many studios now producing animated movies, is Mulan an important weapon in the intensifying Hollywood cartoon war? "I don't know if I look on that as a war - more a series of skirmishes," laughs Disney. "It's not a war in that there's not going to be a clear winner. We're in the same business, trying to do the same thing and we'll each have our ups and downs, so we'll see how that goes."
This avuncular response has been the stock approach from Disney to attempts to encroach on its fiefdom in recent years, and recent attempts by rival studios to cash in on the animation boom with films such as Anastasia haven't met with much success, but this Christmas will see the biggest challenge yet to the Rule of the Mouse. Dreamworks, the production entity headed by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and former Disney mastermind Jeffrey Katzenberg is releasing its first classically animated feature, Prince of Egypt. Katzenberg has already trumped his former employers to some extent by getting Antz, Dreamworks' computer-animated insect comedy, into US cinemas a month ahead of Disney's very similarly-themed A Bug's Life, something which clearly rankles with Roy Disney. "A Bug's Life was an idea in development at the studio before Jeffrey Katzenberg left," he says. "And one of the first things he did at Dreamworks was to buy a little computer graphics group and announce he was making a movie called Antz. This was a source of some irritation to us, and they did very much rush the movie through, making it in a couple of years, which is really pushing the envelope. So they got it out a month ahead of us, but from what I've heard, they appear to be two very different movies. Theirs is much more a Woody Allen movie."
It's going to be tough for any studio to really go head-to-head with the Disney juggernaut, which already has its release schedule planned well into the next millennium. The studio's slate for the next two years includes next summer's Tarzan, which is particularly spectacular, Roy says proudly. Next year will also see Toy Story 2, with the ambitious Fantasia 2000 opening on January 1st, 2000. "And the following summer is Atlantis, and then Dinosaur, which is a very complicated effects challenge."
So how has Disney managed to wipe the floor with the competition for so many years? "I think the single biggest thing we've had going for us has been our own history. That tradition follows us around and keeps us honest, and nobody else has that. It's so simple it sounds dumb, but there's an underlying truth there."
Mulan opened yesterday