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| Disney’s Mulan (1998) |
If you watch the actual movie, as I did, as a European expat teaching in a Hong Kong international school and grappling with cross-cultural questions on a daily basis (you try teaching A Bridge To Terabithia to a class of city-dwelling Chinese boys) — not so much. Mulan has always been a problematic text for me because it tries so hard to be culturally sensitive and gender-aware that it positively creaks, and those creaks can be heard by the least-savvy member of the target audience. Its sins are not the sins of historical omission of, say, Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, but are all the more egregious because they come from a place of awareness. Mulan is an attempt to fix something that was perceived to be, if not wrong, unbalanced. This clumsy attempt to wedge The Ballad of Mulan into the rigid, alien form of a Disney narrative (which, among other things, demands musical numbers, a comic sidekick and a Prince Charming to come home with at the end) doesn’t fix anything, and only serves to remind us what is broken about our global culture. The road to hell is, as ever, paved with good intentions, particularly when it heads from the West to the East.
Back in the mid-1990s, Disney had a very specific agenda when it came to China. They wanted to get back into the regime’s good books after the PR disaster that was Kundun. They wanted to replicate the success of 1994’s The Lion King in the region. And they wanted to soften up the government and local politicians when it came to breaking ground on Hong Kong Disneyland, and paving the way for the Shanghai park. What better way to win friends and influence people than by honoring a popular Chinese legend in the form of a Disney film?
So, ever mindful of the accusations of racial insensitivity that had been tossed at Aladdin and Pocahontas, and anxious to get it right this time, Disney sent key artists on the movie to China, for a three-week tour of Chinese history and culture. Three weeks! You can totally “do China” in three weeks. This was enough to give them all the visual reference points they needed, and the whistle-stop, touristic nature of their impressions is very much in evidence on the screen. Every Chinese guided tour cliché is tossed into the scenery hotchpotch, from limestone mountains to the Great Wall to the Forbidden City. This isn’t so bad – other Disney movies are set in a vague Mittel-Europe of mountains, forests and lakes – but the loving attention paid to trotting out the visual truisms of courtyard complexes, brush calligraphy, cherry blossoms et al is just window-dressing. Mulan does look like China, but only if you’re leafing through your holiday photos back in your Florida office.
It’s a shame the screenwriters weren’t sent on the same tour. Mulan is peppered with crass jokes about Chinese food orders (because that’s what Americans can relate to about Chinese culture, right?), disrespectful references to ancestor worship, superficial homage to Buddhist practice and some kung-fu styling, of the Carradine kind. Given that Wu Xia is a rich, diverse, centuries old storytelling tradition, it also seems a shame that the writers didn’t draw more deeply on those perspectives. Instead, they send Mulan on a tired, Western Hero’s Journey, plugging her variables into the 12-step formula tried and tested by countless Hollywood protagonists. She doesn’t ever think like a Chinese woman. She’s never more American than when her rebellious individualism (bombing the mountaintop) wins the day – her filial obedience was only ever lip service paid as a convenience in Act One. Even in Han Dynasty China, it seems, it’s best to follow the American Way.
There’s nothing particularly Chinese about Mulan herself, who is so brutally meant to be not-Disney Princess and not-Caucasian it hurts to look at her for long. Poor little Other. She’s shown wearing Japanese make up, and has a facial structure more suggestive of Vietnamese than Chinese (Disney really was embracing post-colonialism). For half the movie, she also has to be not-female. The lack of detail on a 2-D Disney face meant the animators had to design her as able to switch between genders via her hair – and something subtle going on with her eyebrows. The resulting face evokes, more than anything, a pre-op kathoey who hasn’t yet taken advantage of Thailand’s booming plastic surgery clinics in order to make zer gender-reassignment complete.
Oh, Mulan. She’s meant to be non-offensive, and she ends up being not-anything. Despite claims to the contrary, she’s not a feminist hero. She has to dress as a boy to achieve selfhood, and refuses political influence in order to return to the domestic constraints of her father and husband-to-be. The movie itself doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test, if you consider that the only topic the other female characters discuss is Mulan’s marriageability – a hypothetical relationship with a man. The final defeat of the antagonist is achieved by the male Mushu riding on a phallic firecracker, as Mulan flails helplessly at his feet. Positive female role model? Case closed.
Nonetheless, Mulan did brisk business worldwide – apart from in China. It perhaps had most impact on second or third-gen Asian-Americans, who could relate to the over-simplified view of China, and feel a connection with this stereotypical version of “their” culture, lacking many other reference points. For Asian-Americans across the board, not just Chinese-Americans, Mulan’s brown, angular features represented something vaguely familiar, which made a delightful change. For Chinese-Chinese, Mulan was a thoughtless Western blunder. For Asian-Americans, particularly little girls, Mulan was a rare screen representation of aspects of their selves. Mulan drove the story, at the center of almost every scene, instead of pushed to the periphery as a “typical Asian” shopkeeper, geek, or whore. They could even purchase Mulan merch – although it’s still impossible to buy a doll, a t-shirt or a pin showing Mulan in warrior mode, she’s always got her hair down, and is wearing her hanfu frock. For a generation of Twinkies, Asian on the outside, American on the inside, Mulan was significant, a role model in the Disney pantheon of princesses. It didn’t matter that she was a bit low-rent (no castle, not really a princess), and she hadn’t snagged a proposal by the end of the movie (that happily ever after is a ‘maybe’), she allowed Asian-American girls, many of them adopted, to hold their heads high. And for that alone, you have to love her.
Mulan wouldn’t seem like such a frustrating, failed attempt to push gender and cultural boundaries if it had been followed up by other stories of empowered female warrior heroes. A Disney version of Joan of Arc or Boudicca could have been a blast. Unfortunately, since 1998, it’s been pretty much princess as usual. On the bright side, Disney achieved some of their other goals with Mulan. Hong Kong Disneyland (itself the subject of accusations of crass cultural insensitivity) has been doing brisk business since 2005, thanks to a US$2.9billion investment by Hong Kong taxpayers (of which I was one). The majority of tourists are from mainland China. They come to marvel at Western icons like Mickey, and an all-American Main Street that’s a replica of the one in Anaheim. Thanks to the ubiquitous presence of Mulan images, they stick around. It feels a tiny bit more like they might have a stake in the happiest place on earth.
The resulting face evokes, more than anything, a pre-op kathoey who hasn’t yet taken advantage of Thailand’s booming plastic surgery clinics in order to make zer gender-reassignment complete.
Really?
It’s really not okay to use ‘pre-op kathoey’ as a term of derision.
How is that a term of derision?
I’m with you on Mulan being a very American retelling of the Ballad of Mulan, with the safe, ordinary American virtues of rugged individualism and pseudo-second wave type messages.
However, the line about Mulan failing as a feminist hero seems a little cloudy given the other things you mention. It seems like you’re saying that tales in which female heroes attempt to work within semi-historically accurate gender norms are invalid regardless of what they accomplish– essentially that temporarily subverting your gender is an unacceptable cost for subverting the patriarchy.
However, given that you say Disney versions of Joan of Arc or Boudicca would be better implies one of two things. First, that these stories would be given happy endings, and their characters would be able to succeed publicly as women and break completely out of the confining politics of their time. Far more uplifting to be sure, but at Pocahontas levels of cultural ignorance ans essentially historical fantasy. On the other hand, these stories having a sort of “Man for All Seasons” ending (not that Disney would) where steadfastly holding true to your identity and being murdered by your enemies for it is admirable. Which is not necessarily a bad story/message, but one that adults would certainly have an easier time grasping than children.
Also, you correctly note that the filial piety angle is all but absent from the film, being far more culturally alien to Americans… But when Mulan returns to her family, for that reason, you cite it as a failure to grasp agency from a Western feminist sort of reading, rather than a nod to more Chinese values. Certainly, that interpretation is consistent with the angle that you use to analyze the movie, but it also creates a damned-if-you-do scenario where every nod to Confucian values is necessarily a failure.
Whenever I hear about Mulan being a feminist hero, all I can say is “Tamora Pierce did it better.”
“She has to dress as a boy to achieve selfhood, and refuses political influence in order to return to the domestic constraints of her father and husband-to-be. The movie itself doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test, if you consider that the only topic the other female characters discuss is Mulan’s marriageability – a hypothetical relationship with a man. The final defeat of the antagonist is achieved by the male Mushu riding on a phallic firecracker, as Mulan flails helplessly at his feet. Positive female role model? Case closed.”
Case closed? Did you even WATCH the movie? Mulan’s marriageability is a topic of the discussion because the movie’s representation of that society is one in which marriageability is the only valuable quality in a women, and the entire movie is devoted to refuting this idea, so I don’t understand how that makes Mulan less of a role model. And yes, she has to dress as a boy, because in that army as in most armies women were not allowed, which is simply a function of the setting.
More importantly, Mulan successfully endures training in the Chinese army while managing to convince everyone that she is a man. In the process, she becomes demonstrably proficient in, at the very least, hand-to-hand combat, archery, and explosives. While the other soldiers were rushing off to die in a futile battle, she saves them all and decimates the majority of the Hun army by being intelligent and resourceful enough to initiate an avalanche. Instead of resentfully allowing the Huns to take over the capital after being publicly ostracized by the very army she helped to save, she continues to fight to save the people of her country in a display of moral integrity. And she certainly does not “flail helplessly” at the feet of the antagonist; she manages to sustain herself in combat with him much longer than Shang did and specifically situates him in a position that ensures he will be hit by the firework.
Let’s briefly consider the accomplishments of the other Disney ‘princesses’/heroines.
Sleeping Beauty: pricks her finger on a spindle and gets rescued by a prince.
Snow White: befriends woodland creatures and dwarfs, gets poisoned by an apple for being too attractive, and is awoken by a prince.
Cinderella: gets delivered from the mistreatment of her evil family by a prince she met at a ball.
Ariel: trades her voice for a pair of legs because she is in love with a prince, rescued from Ursula’s deal by said prince.
In this context, you’re really choosing to complain about Mulan not being a positive female role model? I think that your belabored complaining is a symptom of one of the reasons that the term “feminist” has such a stigma associated with it, and that so many people – including women – decline to identify themselves as feminists. It’s in the looking for things to bitch about and dramatizing things that aren’t really there. There are so many instances of anti-feminism out there, and really, you choose to bitch (in a blatantly inaccurate manner, by the way, considering you complete disregard of all of Mulan’s previous accomplishments in favor of the one scene in which Mushu is actually helpful) about Mulan, of all Disney movies?
The final defeat of the antagonist is achieved by the male Mushu riding on a phallic firecracker, as Mulan flails helplessly at his feet. Positive female role model? Case closed.
Um … no.
Mulan comes up with a way to rescue the Emperor, defeats bodyguards, fights Shan Yu off, comes up with a viable plan while being chased by a bloodthirsty war general, delegates to her friends, and pins Shan Yu down so that he can be killed. The entire climax is a fantastic representation of teamwork. Nobody is trying to “be a hero” and win honor, they’re all working towards the common goal of saving the ruler of their country, and Mulan is the mastermind behind this plan. Mulan. Is the mastermind. She plans how to save the Emperor, and the male soldiers follow her lead. I find that pretty feminist.
Considering symbolism for a moment, what about the scene towards the end where Mulan uses her folding fan (feminine symbol) to twist Shan Yu’s sword (masculine symbol) out of his hands, enabling her to pin him to the roof and kill him?
This review confuses me. There are quite a few contradictions. For example:
First you mock the idea of pushing a Chinese tale into the traditional Western fairy tale mold: “This clumsy attempt to wedge The Ballad of Mulan into the rigid, alien form of a Disney narrative (which, among other things, demands musical numbers, a comic sidekick and a Prince Charming to come home with at the end) doesn’t fix anything.”
However, you then seem upset that Mulan isn’t a “true” disney princess: “It didn’t matter that she was a bit low-rent (no castle, not really a princess), and she hadn’t snagged a proposal by the end of the movie (that happily ever after is a ‘maybe’).”
Which would you prefer? I agree the movie is somewhat problematic, but I’m not sure these reasons are fully fleshed out.
Yes, Mushu does end up ultimately killing the villain in the end, but Mulan told him to go there! Also, she was the one who defeated him and had him pinned SO that Mushu could ride a firecracker into him (that sounded sooooo wrong, but never mind). Also, she basically wiped out the whole army in the mountain.
“Phallic Firecracker”? Are you serious? It was shaped like a normal firework- stable cylindrical tube with a point roof so that it doesn’t meet as much wind resistance when it is set off- stop trying to make something out of nothing, it undermines everything else you’ve said.