Mulan Review: 6 Ups & 4 Downs

3. It Updates The Original Themes For 2020

To be fair, Mulan has always been one of Disney's more progressive and forward-thinking animations, free of excessively "problematic" elements, and so an update didn't really need to do too much to feel current.

Even so, the new Mulan does a solid job of updating the original themes of female empowerment and family for contemporary audiences.

The idea of a woman struggling in a man's world, where she's instructed to "know her place" is very much in tact here, though the script goes further to explore society's general infantilisation of women - that's women, not girls, as one character corrects another during the movie.

Beyond Mulan being encouraged to hide her chi abilities and be a dutiful prospective wife, the film also leaps off to examine its female antagonist, the witch Xian Lang, through a similar lens of servitude and enslavement.

Without needlessly beating viewers over the head with clunky or heavy-handed dialogue, the new Mulan crystallises and solidifies the themes of the original in an uplifting and gratifying way.