Asian Women Who Kick Anime Ass

Watching the fight scene from MULAN. Great movie. The girl soldier sends her big brute of an enemy flying off the roof with an ancient Chinese dragon rocket in his belly. Don't mess with Mulan boys! Also, how can you lose with Eddie Murphy as her tiny dragon lizard sidekick?!

Here's what Roger Ebert wrote at the time it came out in 1998:

The visual style breaks slightly with the look of modern Disney animation to draw from Chinese and Japanese classical cartoon art; in the depiction of nature, there's an echo of the master artist Hiroshige. In a scene where the Hun troops sweep down the side of a snowy mountain, I was reminded of the great battle sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's ``Alexander Nevsky.'' There are scenes here where the Disney artists seem aware of the important new work being done in Japanese anime; if American animation is ever going to win an audience beyond the family market, it will have to move in this direction, becoming more experimental both in stories and visual style.

Animation often finds a direct line to my imagination: It's pure story, character, movement and form, without the distractions of reality or the biographical baggage of the actors. I found myself really enjoying ``Mulan,'' as a story and as animated art. If the songs were only more memorable, I'd give it four stars, but they seemed pleasant rather than rousing, and I wasn't humming anything on the way out. Still, ``Mulan'' is an impressive achievement, with a story and treatment ranking with ``Beauty and the Beast'' and ``The Lion King.''