Dis­ney gives Mulan the live-action treat­ment with a new trailer

Hav­ing brought us new takes on Dum­bo, The Lion King, and Aladdin in 2019, the Dis­ney Live-Action Remake Express will con­tin­ue to chug onward in 2020 and repur­pose even more famil­iar IP. Next up will be Mulan, the folk­tale of an ordi­nary girl break­ing with the mores of gen­der to serve in the mil­i­tary, bring hon­or to her fam­i­ly, and save all of China.

The new­ly released trail­er cycles through the famil­iar beats of the sto­ry, but also promis­es a new grandeur of scale that’s become the default for Disney’s non-ani­mat­ed tent­poles. Where the car­toon orig­i­nal offered Asian-influ­enced art design and rav­ish­ing pops of col­or, this update brings CGI extrav­a­gance and block­buster spectacle.

Liu Yifei takes over in the title role, as a clever and coura­geous daugh­ter whose light is kept under a bushel by a soci­ety with old-fash­ioned ideas about the role of women. When her father (Tzi Ma) gets draft­ed to serve in the war effort against the approach­ing Hun army, Mulan pos­es as a man so that she may go to the front in her dear old dad’s stead – but she’ll have to care­ful­ly main­tain the ruse if she doesn’t want to be found out and expelled in shame.

There have been a hand­ful of major depar­tures from the pre­vi­ous film, how­ev­er. For one, we see nei­ther hide nor hair of Mulan’s plucky ani­mal side­kicks, Mushu the drag­on and Cri-Kee the crick­et. To that same effect, all the musi­cal num­bers have been excised, though the melody of sig­na­ture tune ​“Reflec­tion” per­sists as a scor­ing incidental.

For all that the new film does away with, it also adds a new char­ac­ter in the witch Xian Lang (Gong Li), seem­ing­ly invent­ed so that there will be some­one to sum­mon tor­rents of CGI gob­bledy­gook. It all seems to ges­ture toward a desire to deliv­er a more grown-up Mulan, and yet not too grown-up.

Films of this ilk – not fun enough to be children’s enter­tain­ment, not so mature that they can be engaged with on an adult lev­el – have had a poor track record in recent years, and the spot­ty CV of direc­tor Niki Caro doesn’t pro­vide much reas­sur­ance. But even so, the prospect of get­ting a prop­er wux­ia epic into West­ern neigh­bor­hood cine­plex­es may be too excit­ing to pass up.

Mulan comes to the­aters in the UK and US on 27 March, 2020.