Mulan | Full Movie | Movies Anywhere

This lovely, energetic and painterly film, based on an ages-old Chinese legend about a young warrior heroine, is one that achieves a nearly perfect blending of elements -- adventure, romance, comedy, music and art -- that define the genre.

When you see the Walt Disney Pictures animation wizards working near the top of their game like this, you wonder why any other studio ever tries to muscle into their territory.

A quantum leap beyond the labored pretentiousness of The Hunchback of Notre Dame or the self-conscious chic of Hercules, Disney's 36th full-length animated movie is far more than a grand family film. It's a grand film, period.

As good as Mulan is -- and there are long stretches when it is simply wonderful -- the movie could have still been better, if only its makers weren't so insistent on treating it like such a... cartoon.

Puncturing the period stuffiness of its animated features with incongruous bits of pop culture ephemera is the puritanical studio's bid at hipness. It works improbably well. But it's Mulan's quaint unhipness that makes it such a respite.