| nudity |
2/10
While preparing her for the matchmaker, one of the women at the boutique strips Mulan naked behind a screen and dumps her into a tub of soapy water. Mulan appears only in silhouette behind the screen, and then everything below her neck is concealed beneath the soap suds.
In sequences played for laughs, the Fa family ancestors and Mushu squabble and snark about Mulan's disguise, describing her as "Miss Man" and a "cross-dresser" in a "drag show" while disputing what this implies about her moral character.
At one point, Mushu stares at Mulan's chest while boastfully claiming to have the power to see straight through her armor. Taking offense at this, she gasps in embarrassment, and holds one arm over her breastplate.
While introducing herself at the training camp, Mulan takes Mushu's advice to slap Yao on his backside because "[men] like that."
At a few points throughout the movie, several characters trading insults drop a few subtle innuendos about each other's sexuality.
Shang removes his shirt for the training sequence, prompting a snark about his being a "pretty boy" from Yao and some ogling from Mulan.
At one point while disguised as the male Ping, Mulan insists on slipping out of the camp to a nearby pond one night to bathe. Mushu respectfully covers his eyes with his ears when she removes her clothes, and all of her private parts remain either out of frame or concealed beneath the water in the pond for this sequence.
Later, much to Mushu's alarm and distress, Ling, Yao, and Chien-Po arrive at the same pond and start stripping, also intending to bathe. We briefly see them in silhouette from behind as they're shedding clothes, and then only from above their waists or below their thighs. Mushu, meanwhile, cries out "Oh! We're doomed! There are a couple of things I *know* they're bound to notice!"
While these three men and "Ping" are introducing themselves to each other, we see them framed between the naked Yao's calves as he stands proudly declaring himself "king of the rock" (a small island in the middle of the pond) and daring them to try to depose him. While nothing above his knees is in the frame for us, Mulan covers her eyes, clearly embarrassed at what she's seeing. After Mushu rescues her from having to play their game by scaring them away, Mulan summons her horse Khan and slips behind him to conceal herself while getting dressed. The three naked men, meanwhile, scramble up onto the rock and are briefly shown in silhouette.
Mulan then complains that she never wants to see a naked man again, whereupon dozens of naked men stampede right past her into the pond, everything below their waists just out of frame.
Seeing Mulan lingering longer than she should as she gazes after Shang, Mushu chides her for flirting and orders her to her tent.
In the "A Girl Worth Fighting For" musical sequence, Ling gets out a rice-paper pin-up of his ideal girl, and Mulan briefly averts her eyes in embarrassment until it is revealed to be chastely drawn. The men sing "You can guess what we have missed the most since we went off to war" while gazing appreciatively at some pretty young women picking rice, and Mushu lets out a wolf whistle. Several of the rice-pickers ogle "Ping" and titter to each other about the handsome young "lad" in armor while Mulan blushes and turns away.
After a doctor tends to a wound to her chest, we briefly see Mulan topless with her breasts tightly wrapped in surgical bandages. In alarm and embarrassment, she then pulls a blanket up to conceal them.
Several the men disguise themselves as female concubines to get past some guards, with one nervously asking Mulan whether his dress makes him look fat (and therefore unattractive). One of the guards they're snookering remarks that these "concubines" are ugly, but the other disagrees and actually seems to be trying to flirt with one of them briefly. |
| violence |
Some war violence, but nothing graphic
The session at the matchmaker's shop is played for slapstick comedy, with a brief struggle resulting in the matchmaker's tumbling into a brazier and getting her backside scorched. Frazzled and furious, she then smashes a china teapot to punctuate an angry rant.
During the Fa family ancestors' conference, Mushu gets manhandled and tossed around a bit while the ancestors give him conflicting instructions, and he's then hit in the face with a gong. His clumsiness also gets him squashed under a heavy object at one point, with him complaining that he must have "twisted something."
During one of the Hun invasion sequences, several burning buildings on a mountainside appear briefly in the background. Shan Yu's men flush two Chinese military scouts out of the underbrush, and he briefly hauls one of them up by the throat in one hand while boasting that he demands to meet all of China's strongest armies in battle. After he dispatches them to deliver this message, one of his archers draws back his bow to shoot one of the two fleeing scouts. The scene blacks out before he lets the arrow fly, but a sinister chord as it does so heavily implies that the archer did indeed shoot and kill one of them.
When her horse Khan laughs at her attempts to impersonate manly behavior and speech, Mulan petulantly flings one of her shoes at his head.
When Khan sees Mushu's actual size for the first time, he demonstrates his contempt for how small the dragon is by trampling him. Then, when Mushu mistakes him for a cow, Khan snaps at him.
When Mushu boasts about his supposedly being able to see through her armor (while looking at her chest), Mulan takes offense and slaps him.
An unnamed soldier is shown boasting to the others that a certain tattoo he's gotten on his belly makes him immune to physical harm. Yao punches him in the stomach to test this superstition.
On Mushu's advice, Mulan introduces herself by slugging Yao, and then slaps him on the butt. Chien-Po manages to calm him before he carries out a threatened retaliation, but his insulting dismissal draws a further insult from Mushu that enrages him again. Clumsy in his fury, he accidentally punches Ling instead of Mulan, after which Ling knocks Yao into Chien-Po while Mulan makes her escape. A brief chase ensues, and then the three men stumble into a line of men, knocking them over like dominoes. This precipitates a lively camp-wide brawl played for laughs.
During the training sequence, Mulan and her fellow trainees suffer several pratfalls and other slapstick injuries: Yao takes a flaming arrow to his rear, Ling smashes his own face while trying to break a block with his head, and Mulan gets tripped, pelted with stones, and given a black eye in a sparring match. Shang takes a few blows from his trainees as well, and Chi Fu gets his mustache singed when a stray cannon shot blasts his tent to cinders. None of these injuries (though they include teeth being knocked out) are ever shown to have any permanent impact, however.
There's some mild horseplay and jostling between the men in the bathing sequence, and during the "A Girl Worth Fighting For" musical sequence.
Shang's unit finds the smouldering remnants of a village the Huns have destroyed. While no bodies appear among the ruins as he orders his men to search for survivors, one of Mulan's discoveries heavily implies that the Huns possibly found and slaughtered villagers--elderly, women, and children--along with the military men defending it.
The silhouetted bodies of several dead soldiers and war horses among ruined carts and caissons, all partially covered in snow, are shown at a distance in an extremely brief shot.
Shang takes an arrow to the armor on his shoulder, which knocks him off his horse, but doesn't manage to draw any blood.
Hun archers fail to hit any of Shang's unit with several waves of plain and flaming arrows, but do manage to set one of his ammunition caissons alight, exploding it. Shang's men return fire with cannons rescued from the caisson, successfully wiping out their attackers. Some of the Hun archers cry out as they're blasted, but no corpses or body parts are ever shown tumbling from the mountains where they were perched.
Mulan successfully touches off an avalanche that buries Shan Yu and his entire army. Only Shan Yu and five of his toughest troops survive this catastrophe. Though none of his men are shown being swept away, Shang seems to have lost many of his own troops as well, since he used to have dozens of them marching with him and is never shown with more than ten after the avalanche.
Right before the avalanche consumes him, Shan Yu furiously slashes "Ping" across the chest with his sword. While no blood shows at the time, some of it does leak through the armor later, and Shang is shown ordering his men to get medical assistance as his soldier loses consciousness from the injury.
Off-camera, someone dope slaps Yao for asking whether his dress (concubine disguise) makes him look fat.
While Shan Yu and his inner circle of Huns do engage Shang and his troops in hand-to-hand combat near the end of the movie, most of the fighting is done unarmed, and no one swinging a blade manages to draw any blood. Shan Yu does manage to do a lot of property damage with both his fists and his sword, however, as he slashes and smashes his way through a heavy gate, several pillars, a wall, and a roof in one scene.
Shan Yu's falcon also causes them a lot of trouble, dive-bombing Mulan on the battlefield and later snatching a sword out of Shang's hand. Mushu finally puts him out of commission by torching all of his feathers off with his breath.
Shan Yu takes a rocket to the chest which flings him into a whole tower full of fireworks, and is killed in the subsequent explosions. Again, this is shown from a distance, and we see no corpses or body parts come tumbling out. |
| profanity |
A few subtle innuendos:
Yao calls Mulan a "chicken boy" (vulgar slang for coward/catamite/both) and Mushu calls Yao a "limp noodle."
At one or two points where a character gets interrupted while saying something, he or she may potentially have been about to use some salty language. |
| alcohol |
Mulan's father is indicated to be drinking some kind of medicinal tea under his doctor's orders--possibly some herbal form of heart medication.
The incense the Fa family is shown burning in the ancestors' shrine in several scenes produces a sweet-smelling smoke which serves as a mildly psychoactive drug when inhaled, though the Fa family is only ever shown burning it for quasi-religious ritual purposes. |
| frightening |
A sequence involving a burned village and slaughtered army may be too intense and frightening for very young children, though the vast majority of the carnage is implied rather than shown.
The Battle of the Tung Shao Pass, in which Hun archers unleash multiple barrages of plain and flaming arrows on Li Shang's Chinese artillery unit, and the Chinese troops return fire with their cannons, is a very intense action sequence which may be too overwhelming for younger children, particularly in the second half when Shan Yu's enormous horde of Huns on horseback arrives. Its outcome, in which Mulan boldly risks her life and the lives of all her fellow troops to bring a deadly avalanche down on the horde and succeeds, albeit at a terrible cost to herself, is likely to be even more intense and frightening for younger children, especially when watching Mulan, her friends and fellow soldiers, and Shang all struggling to rescue themselves and each other from the mighty torrents of snow, ending in a literal cliff hanger as the avalanche sweeps Shang, Mulan, and her animal companions over the cliff. Also, being rather long, this sequence may be too emotionally exhausting for children with shorter attention spans.
The following sequence, in which Shang struggles to the very last moment with being duty-bound to execute Mulan, though carrying out this penalty is an act of both despicable ingratitude and terrible injustice, is also extremely intense and suspenseful. It may be too emotionally disturbing for younger children.
BBFC - (U): mild threat, violence. |
