It is hard to view The Butterfly Lovers without thinking of Disney's Mulan.  They both originate from traditional Chinese tales, involve cross dressing females, and are told with similar styles of animation.  The main characters in the two films even look the same.  But unfortunately, the similarity is only superficial.  While Mulan is an entertaining and tightly scripted movie that is enjoyable by both adults and children, The Butterfly Lovers is the opposite.  It is a fairly trite and poorly scripted movie that will be hard pressed to entertain either children or adults.
 

Mulan?  No, it's Yingtai from The Butterfly Lovers.

Yingtai is a young lady growing up in China during the Jin Dynasty.  She wants to get an education, but only males are allowed to go to school.  So she does the only thing that she can, she puts on men's clothes and enrolls as a male.  On her journey to the school she meets Liang, another student, and the two decide to travel together.  During their trip they get to know one another, and soon Yingtai has fallen in love with the handsome and intelligent Liang.

When they arrive at the school, they meet Ma, the son of a rich and powerful Lord.  He's a braggart, and not too intelligent, and naturally falls into the role as the school bully.  Ma suspects that something is different about Yingtai, but he can't prove what it is.

After some time has passed, Yingtai gets a letter from her mother telling her that she has to come home.  Before she leaves, she dresses up in women's clothing, and confesses her love to Liang.  Unfortunately Ma also discovers her secret and decided that he wants to marry this beautiful and smart woman.  He has his father arrange everything with Yingtai's parents that sets things in motion that lead up to the tragic climax.

It was obvious from watching this movie that the creators were trying to mimic Disney films.  The animation style was similar, as was the formula of putting in several songs and a couple of cute anthropomorphic animals.  (Birds in this case.)  But while they were able to ape Disney's style, they couldn't copy the substance of Disney films and weren't able to capture the charm that allows both adults and children to enjoy them.

In Mulan for instance, the creators make sure that everyone's motivation is clearly established.  Mulan dresses as a man and joins the army to save her father's life.   In this film, they only state that Yingtai wants to go to school and that her parents agree to let her.  Why do they agree?  Why does she want to go?  How will that help her in her future life?  None of these things are discussed.

They also make the mistake of having the comic relief characters play a part in the drama.  When Ma is threatening to beat up Liang soon after he arrives at school, the love sick birds attack him in a humorous fashion and save the young man.  Not only did it feel like a Deus ex Machina way out of the predicament, it spoiled the tension that was building up.

Ma, the protagonist in the film, came across as a comic relief most of the time, falling down and messing things up.  That makes it surprising and hard to believe when he is the one that comes between Liang and Yingtai's happiness.
 
The music didn't always work either.  While most of it was more traditionally based songs, there were a couple of instances were the choice of music didn't fit with the film at all.  Ma's introduction is a good example, they gave him a hard rock song as his theme, that really clashed with the rest of the music in the film.

The animation was only mediocre.  The figures looked very two dimensional and lacked a feeling of depth.  There wasn't a lot of detail in many of the scenes too, and they resued some animation in parts, most notably in the musical numbers.  Overall a rather poor effort all around.

Audio:

This disc offers the viewer the option of listening in the original Cantonese or an English dub, both in 5.1, or a stereo dub in Mandarin.  There are optional subtitles in English and Chinese.  I viewed the movie in Cantonese with English subs and spot checked the other tracks.  All of the tracks has some hiss in the background.  This wasn't too bad in the two multichannel mixes, but it was very loud in the Mandarin track.  The English audio actually sounded the best, it was cleaner, with few audio defects that marred the other two soundtracks.  There was some distortion in the Cantonese and Mandarin tracks that was missing in the English dub.  Overall, the audio was slightly less than average.

Video:

The widescreen image was not anamorphically enhanced, and looked only fair.  The colors were not very bright, and the picture didn't shine like most recent animated movies do.  On the digital side, there were occasional video dropouts which was surprising.  Even worst, there was a large amount of edge enhancement that outlined all of the characters.  The DVD would have looked a lot better without it.

Extras:

This is a bare-bones disc that doesn't have any extras.

Final Thoughts:

This movie just didn't work for me.  With a poor script, average animation and only mediocre music there really wasn't much to like.  Added to that was a wretched ending, making this a movie that you should just pass by.  Skip it.