The X-Files: Fight the Future/The Land Girls/Mulan/Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen's/Beyond Silence

Roger Ebert - Host: "Mulan" is one of the very best recent Disney animated adventures: Original, fresh, great to look at, and with a story that reaches a little more and takes bigger chances than is usually the case. It's the kind of family movie that adults can enjoy on their own. Its only weakness is in its songs, which didn't seem especially memorable to me, but this isn't a musical anyway, really. It's a thrilling adventure, and some of the animated sequences, like a wall of enemy horsemen racing down a snow-covered mountainside, are as good as anything the studio has done.

Gene Siskel - Host: Well Roger, we simply differ here. Uh, comparing it to other recent Disney animated features featuring young women as, uh, the center of the film, I think this really comes up short compared with, uh, Ariel in "The Little Mermaid", her story. Belle in "Beauty and the Beast". I did not get behind this one at all.

Roger Ebert - Host: Oh, I think- and Pocahontas, too. I think that the thing here is, she is free-standing. She is the person who, out of her own will and imagination, controls her own destiny. She's not just trying to, y'know, go along with the team as they are in the other pictures. I think she's the most interesting...

Gene Siskel - Host: Actually...

Roger Ebert - Host: ...Independent Disney heroine I've seen.

Gene Siskel - Host: Well actually, I think all three of those young women in the other features were quite independent, they were not going along. One didn't want to be a mermaid, if you recall. She wanted to be human, basically.

Roger Ebert - Host: Yeah, that's true. But nevertheless...

Gene Siskel - Host: Her masquerade, frankly, wasn't as good as, uh, Barbara Streisand in "Yentl". I didn't feel a sense of jeopardy. In "Yentl", there was, y'know, her whole life collapsed. I never felt that...

Roger Ebert - Host: There's got to be some kind of difference between an adult drama and a family animated cartoon, don't you think? In terms of how serious it can be taken and how seriously we're supposed to take it? It's a fantasy.

Gene Siskel - Host: Are you saying we can't take this film seriously?

Roger Ebert - Host: Uh... I think...

Gene Siskel - Host: Sounds like it.

Roger Ebert - Host: You take it seriously as an animated family cartoon, you don't compare it to "Yentl". It doesn't...

Gene Siskel - Host: Well why not?

Roger Ebert - Host: ...They come out of different worlds.

Gene Siskel - Host: I'm not, I'm comparing one element. And here's another one, maybe you'll object to this: In terms of what she does, the notion of a young woman being strong in battle... "G.I. Jane".

Roger Ebert - Host: ...She...

Gene Siskel - Host: I didn't, I thought, y'know, the story, the saga, the endurance of Demi Moore was more impressive.

Roger Ebert - Host: I, I'm just aghast. I don't understand, I mean, this is the kind of genre that it's in.

Gene Siskel - Host: I compared...

Roger Ebert - Host: It does a wonderful job.

Gene Siskel - Host: And I compared it earlier to "Beauty and the Beast" and to "The Little Mermaid". Same genre.

Roger Ebert - Host: Well I just think that, basically, my bottom line is...

Gene Siskel - Host: And lemme just, you did the same thing. You know where you did it? When you said the songs weren't good. Because the songs in these other movies were spectacular.

Roger Ebert - Host: That's what I said.

Gene Siskel - Host: But that's what YOU'RE doing, you're comparing them.

Roger Ebert - Host: The artwork here, the story, the characterization, the action, the originality, the drawing...

Gene Siskel - Host: On the subject...

Roger Ebert - Host: It's wonderful.

Gene Siskel - Host: On the subject of artwork: If you look in the background, you're gonna see a lot of blank walls. I was very surprised.

Roger Ebert - Host: Not at all. What you see is, it reminded me of the great Japanese cartoonist Hiroshige, from two centuries ago.

Gene Siskel - Host: Not in the way I saw the picture, not at all.