True to Whose Heart? Comparing Disney’s Two Versions of Mulan
Me reviewing Mulan, but also make it a meta-commentary on my childhood and my feelings toward cultural authenticity in Asian America.
[Dedicated to Erin, who is 100% to blame for me writing this. Truly, I hate it here.]
**WARNING: This is NOT a spoiler-free review. It is also a few hundred words longer than it needs to be, because I am a squirrel-for-brains who cannot consume any piece of media without framing it in the context of every feeling that has passed through my body at some point in time.**
Let’s discuss the most contentious things first: in mid-2019, Mulan’s lead actress Liu Yifei drew criticism for her support of the CCP during the Hong Kong protests. Disney met with ire when it announced that it would charge $30 on top of the usual Disney+ subscription to view Mulan through November. This weekend, though, one of my dad’s friends bought the movie, and my curiosity got the better of me. (Plus, my remaining brain cells calculated that $30 divided by 5 viewers now made it cheaper than if we had seen it in theaters.) I’ve tried to break this review into manageable pieces. There are so many links! I’m sorry in advance.
[Meme share courtesy of my friend Shirley / sourced from Subtle Asian Traits]
New Stuff I Liked:
The live-action plays up its fantastical elements, and the costuming and scenery have a resplendence that the 2-D animation doesn’t. There has been some criticism of the round huts that Mulan’s family lives in, as they are unique to southern China and Mulan is supposed to have hailed from the north. However, the sheer multiplicity of Mulan stories speaks, to me, of a character that transcends historical accuracy, a bit like King Arthur—taking on a variety of forms, and ultimately meaning something a little different to each period that tells it.
Honghui (Yoson An) is Mulan’s new love interest, and he’s pretty cute! He and Mulan share a tender hand touch; as someone who regularly swoons over fingers brushing in period pieces as the pinnacle of bottled romance (looking at you, 2005’s Pride and Prejudice), this one also has my seal of approval.
The introduction of Xianniang (Gong Li) as Bori Khan’s “witch” and Mulan’s foil adds a new dynamic and an exciting female character to the mix, allowing the film to more deeply explore the various paths for women in the movie’s verse.
Lots more martial arts and actual fight scenes, a homage to the wu xia genre and visually fun.
There’s a new banger from Christina Aguilera.
THE COMMENTARY
A professor once taught me that every film has a premise—a driving force, an engine that makes the rest of the story possible. Mulan is premised on character; as our titular heroine, who she is and how she behaves are the means that launch us through the plot, but Disney’s live-action and its animated version paint her very differently.
Live-action Mulan is The Chosen One. From a young age, she demonstrates a superior attunement to the universe, described by her father as qi. She is a born warrior, full of athleticism and preternatural reflexes. However, she is told to suppress these instincts because leaning into them fully would brand her as other, a witch. Indeed, suppression is the name of Mulan’s game; Liu Yifei plays her as a relatively stoic, interior character, with a stiff upper lip and a commitment, above all else, to honor the words on her father’s sword: “loyal, brave, and true.”
The animated Mulan, meanwhile, has no particularly auspicious qualities at the start. She’s a bit klutzy and prone to being late, and while there are early flashes of her ingenuity (building a contraption for her dog, helping an old man checkmate his opponent), she’s riddled with self-doubt. She wants, badly, to do right by her family, but all her best intentions seem to go awry.
What results, then, are two different narratives. The live-action Mulan is preoccupied with power, and what it looks like when women wield it. In Xianniang’s case, she is feared and ostracized, leading her to become the enemy’s right hand as she tries to topple imperial China in order to create a place where she hopes her magic will not be reviled. Mulan, meanwhile, gains respect for her battle prowess while masquerading as a man. Though initially rejected after she reveals her identity, eventually her superior fighting skills lead her comrades to put her in charge of a small force riding to save the emperor. The meditation on power and its dynamics even extends to the decision to split Shang’s iconic character into two: Donnie Yen as the straightforward, fatherly Commander Tung, while Yoson An’s Honghui is friend/love interest/comrade in arms. This choice, producer Jason Reed explained, was in part a response to the #MeToo movement; he noted that “having a commanding officer that is also the sexual love interest was very uncomfortable.” There’s another part of the movie that could be read as a reaction to #MeToo: when Mulan returns to camp to warn Commander Tung that some of the Rourans have survived the avalanche, Honghui steps to her defense, saying, “You would believe Hua Jun. Why not Hua Mulan?” Afterwards, other men pipe up, adopting the rousing cry of, “I believe Hua Mulan,” which made me think of #MeToo’s accompanying behest to “Believe women.” It’s interesting to think about what’s gained here—a presentation of allyship—by putting these words in Honghui’s mouth, versus how the 1998 version plays it, where Mulan is the one to call out the hypocrisy against herself.
Ultimately, 2020’s Mulan plays up the “feminist” angle, but in a very binary way. Mulan achieves the full height of her power when she stops holding herself back, which in the movie largely just translates to letting down her hair. The metaphor here seems to be that embracing her femininity is her true strength, and we’re left with something along the lines of: “Hey, look! Women can do what men can do.” Mulan is a great warrior, but she doesn’t particularly change anything. She’s a great warrior in the way that everyone in the movie understands great warriors; the only thing that’s different about her is that she isn’t a man.
Animated Mulan, meanwhile, succeeds on the basis that she doesn’t think like everyone else in her unit. “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” is two-and-a-half minutes of her getting her ass whooped in training, but then, on the brink of getting kicked out of the army, she succeeds in scaling a pole to retrieve an arrow—not through brute force, but by cleverly reimagining how to use the hand-weights. She takes down Shan Yu through a combination of misdirection, hand-to-hand combat, and resourcefulness. Time and again, it’s her ability to marshal everything she’s learned, traditionally feminine or masculine, that proves her unique strength and shifts the paradigm, not only for herself but also for her fellow soldiers.
As compelling as I think that makes the animated version, it is by no means a perfect movie. Mushu, while iconic to many American audiences, has been viewed as a trivialization of the role of dragons in Chinese culture. The drawings lean heavily on physiognomy to delineate the “bad” guys from the “good,” making the Huns gray-skinned and yellow-eyed. The hair-cutting scene and the emperor’s bowing to Mulan have been criticized for fundamentally misunderstanding Chinese history and culture.
The question that inevitably arises is: who is Mulan for? As beloved as it has become amongst much of the Asian diaspora in America, Disney’s 1998 version flopped when it premiered in China. It was too American; Mulan was too individualistic. Since then, China’s box office has become a juggernaut, something Disney is well aware of. Money talks, and steps were taken to emphasize Mulan’s filial piety more overtly in the live-action; at the end, the emperor extols her for embodying the fourth virtue of being a great warrior, “devotion to family.” At the same time, everyone working on the film was mindful of the animated version’s legacy, and careful to say that there’d be something for old and new fans alike.
I have long since given up on believing that any piece of media is meant to be some deliverance of Asian America on screen. “Asian American” as an identification has proven to be vast and unwieldy, moving from roots in political agitation and the Third World Liberation Front to more recent critiques of boba liberalism. I am wary of anchoring any of my politics in simple “representation” as a rallying cry. Still, I can’t deny that it’s nice to see people “like me” get labeled by mainstream Hollywood as having stories worth telling. And I am endlessly fascinated by the ongoing debate of who gets to tell those stories, the ceaseless clamor for some nebulous “authenticity.”
My issue with authenticity is that it’s not an objective judgment. If we take authenticity to represent an object’s distance from its source, its adherence to basic facts, then it perhaps becomes more measurable but less exciting. If, on the other hand, we interpret authenticity as a work’s ability to strike some inner chord in us, to unearth a truth that might not have been articulated before but has relevance when brought to light, then the conversation becomes more interesting, especially when applied to culture.
For as much as diaspora Twitter gets clowned on for being about mangoes and missing the motherland, there’s something to be said for when it does the work of portraying culture as a constant interrogation and negotiation between history, self, and the future. Culture is not a fixed, essential point. I think so many people of color, myself included, are desperate for stories of ourselves, to be told what parts of the places our families left behind we can lay claim to and emulate. Sticking too closely to these scripts, however, risks asserting that there is a single “right” way for us to live and interpret our heritages. To do so mistakes the purpose of fiction, which should be to illuminate, to inspire, to frame questions in new ways.
It’s something I’ve grappled with as a writer. Back in college, when I drafted the script for our Vietnamese Student Association’s Culture Night, I was constantly on edge wondering if the story I’d chosen was “Vietnamese enough,” or if I’d leaned too far into certain images to the point of their being stereotypical. That internal doubt is one I’ve worked hard to squash, so that I can be braver and explore the conflicts and themes I’m interested in, outside of anyone else’s scrutiny. It’s something the tweet below articulates well, and a luxury that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen espouses when he calls for narrative plenitude, the idea that in a world with enough diverse storytelling, no one has to bear the cross for being the most genuine or truest version. Because of that, I hesitate to label which of Disney’s versions of Mulan is “better,” because that depends on what you’re coming to the table for. (And I would also inquire why we think that a mega-corporation with a questionable record of cultural appropriation would be a reliable champion, anyways.)
My fear, though, is that the new Mulan’s obsession with righting past wrongs and catering to a version “truer” to mainland China may have sacrificed some of the heart that made 1998’s version so compelling. I watched the two back to back so that I could compare them with fresh eyes, and I can say this: I resonate with the animated one more. There’s a scene at the end that brings me to tears—when Mulan returns from the war and falls at her father’s feet, nervously offering Shan Yu’s sword and the emperor’s medal to him, proof of her accomplishments. And he pushes them aside and gives her the words of affirmation she’s been seeking all along: “The greatest gift and honor is having you for a daughter.” It reminds me of all my childhood years chasing contests and certificates for my work, as if winning accolades were the way to prove to my parents that I could do “this”—be successful and make them proud—but what I really wanted was for them to just celebrate my writing for what it was: the way I processed the world, the way I knew how to be.
Cast aside by the army and shivering in the cold, 1998’s Mulan voices that she went to war to save her father, but also, maybe, to show that she could do something right, and according to her own measures. It’s the difference between a soaring war epic and the more mundane but no less taxing struggle of encountering yourself in the mirror every day and believing you are worthwhile.
2020’s Mulan—both movie and heroine—are caught up in proving themselves to the world. 1998’s Mulan was about proving her worth to herself.
Do you have a favorite version of Mulan, Disney or otherwise? Tell me about it in the comments below!
As always, this article is free to share, and if you’d like more content like this sent directly to your inbox, then go ahead and subscribe. :)
‘Til next time. <3