IT'S JUST A MOVIE, KATE MARIE. This Friend of the Perfesser, Kate Marie, complains that the cartoon Mulan II... well, you might think I'm trying to make it sound worse than it is, so let her tell it:

I just watched Mulan II (I have two young girls), and -- I kid you not -- "my duty is to my heart" appears to be the explicit message of the film (as it was in the Princess Diaries II). In the immortal words of Ryan O'Neal at the end of What's Up, Doc? -- that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. If you want a succinct and hilarious refutation of the idiotic notion that one's duty is to one's heart, watch the "Be Like the Boy" episode of The Simpsons.

Duty is a category which is by definition separate from "heart." It represents all those things -- family, tradition, state, law -- which have a claim on us that transcends personal affection and selfish desire. For goodness' sake, what does our generation make of Antigone? ("Antigone? Huh?" -- never mind.)

At the end of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (and in the finale of Martin Scorcese's film adaptation), the story's protagonist, Newland Archer, watches from a bench as his grown son enters the home of the woman blah blah blah...("blah blah blah" added)

Yes, this woman is actually subjecting her afternoon child-quieting videos to strict moral-aesthetic analysis. And not just the "How many swears in Ray" type of analysis you find in newspapers -- real, arcane wingnut analysis, of the sort we like to cover here.

It can be useful to examine the moral underpinnings of a work of art, but this is fucking Mulan II. Comparing it to Antigone and Edith Wharton is a little like demanding that your local school board candidates each state and defend their positions on global nuclear regulation or the Law of the Sea.

There has been a contingent of scolds doing this sort of thing for over a decade. One of its early practitioners, Melanie Kirkpatrick, plagued the Wall Street Journal in the 90s with similar kernel-picking exercises. Here's one of her classics, in which she faults Paul Rudnick's AIDS comedy Jeffrey for not being more about duty and honor. She thought the play's model should have been Camille.

This would seem an unusual recommendation to an author of light comedies, but you have to remember that, for a certain type of person, even pop art is not at all about pleasure -- it is about morality, or rather, that modern, debased version of morality called Values.

What horrible lives such people must lead, seeing dark messages everywhere -- in children's entertainments, in TV shows, in popular songs. Sounds like paranoid schizophrenia without the relief of upswings.

Kate Marie has two young daughters. I pray she isn't trying to scare the Mulan out of them a la Piper Laurie in Carrie: "First comes Mulan, then comes moral ruin!"