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As production began, Disney consultant Robert D. Mulan started out in life in 1994 as a straight-to-video short called 'China Doll', in which an oppressed Chinese girl was whisked away by a British prince to live happily ever after in the West. But while The Emperor's New Groove gave us a passable farce where we could have had a genuine epic, this film gives us an interesting if flawed look at another culture where we could have had another rote, crass princess story.

As with Mark Dindal's film, the project originally began as one kind of story which was subsequently combined with another, very different project, from which the final product was assembled. Much like The Emperor's New Groove two years after it, much of the finished nature of Mulan can be explained (or at least rationalised) by a cursory look at its production history. But it is one of the more interesting Disney films of the 1990s, with visual beauty to spare and a more interesting female lead than many Disney offerings. It goes against Disney's generic strengths in many aspects, exploring a real historical figure rather than the heroes and villains of European folk tales, and in exploring this subject, it clearly doesn't go far enough in its ideas or characterisations. Mulan comes from the same, late period of the Renaissance, but fares slightly better in its execution. In the case of Tarzan, the film-makers took Edgar Rice Burroughs' iconic, pulpy story, which played with ideas about human culture and the 'missing link', and turned it into a pretty but generic story with too many sidekicks and an unconvincing villain. In my review of Tarzan, I spoke about how the established conventions of the Disney Renaissance were increasingly applied to stories which could not be adequately served by them.