Is your outside allowed to match your inside by your society and culture? It's this question that has made Disney's 1998 film Mulan a touchstone for the Western LGBTQ+ community, though there is, of course, the usual wrangling about how analogies to transgender or crossdresser life experiences should be applied. But the capacity for the story, particularly the song "Reflection", to be applied to different life experiences is one of the great assets of fantasy storytelling. After the lifelessness of the songs in Hercules, it's no surprise Disney parted ways with Alan Menken at last (temporarily--he'd return for 2004's Home on the Range) and for the first time employed Matthew Wilder in the role of songwriter with David Zippel returning from Hercules to write the lyrics. The result is two songs, "Reflection" and "I'll Make a Man Out of You", that have enjoyed greater longevity than anything from the three Disney films preceding Mulan. Meanwhile, the story benefits from a greater narrative simplicity and tonal consistency compared to Hercules and Hunchback and the Chinese inspired visual designs are lovely and simple. They aren't, though, Chinese, any more than the story or the characters, which is largely the cause of the film's low popularity in Asia. Where I live, in Japan, people seem barely conscious of it. Last year, ahead of the live action remake's release, I had to search high and low before I found some Mulan merchandise at the Disney Store on a shelf facing the wall in a corner. The live action remake was never released theatrically here in Japan, only on Disney+, despite the fact that there has not been a lockdown or cinema closures here during the pandemic. And, of course, the troubled releases of both versions of the film in China have been well publicised. One of the complaints about the animated version is that the characters look foreign to East Asian viewers and anyone who has lived in the culture can tell you how very American the characters do look in Mulan, most importantly for their physical mannerisms. But there's also the matter of beauty--there's long been a strange disconnect in Hollywood not just between Hollywood's idea of Asian beauty and East Asia's, but even between Hollywood and western enthusiasts of Asian media. Why, in this day and age, when BTS is wildly popular in the U.S., are casting directors not getting the picture? Just imagine the missed potential for the upcoming Shang-Chi movie, for example. That being said, Mulan's Western sensibility doesn't diminish the film's appeal to me. As a fan of the 1941 Thief of Bagdad, I have a long enduring love for the fantasy version of other cultures courtesy of a Western lens and, while Mulan never reaches the level of The Little Mermaid, I'd say it's as least as good as The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast.
Despite the absence of animator Glen Keane, one of the film's virtues is that it was made before the studio lost appreciation for sex appeal. There are two scenes of Mulan (Ming-Na Wen/Lea Salonga) bathing, the second one with a horde of naked men, which ends with her proclaiming her hope never to see a naked man again. Scenes highlighting the heroine's shyness about her own naked body is a recurring element in movies about women warriors who dress as men--and, yes, there have been lots of those, a few of them starring the great Maureen O'Hara. But my favourite is Jean Peters in Anne of the Indies.
That movie is a heavily fictionalised version of the story of Anne Bonny (not unlike how Mulan drastically differs from the poem that inspired it), an actual, historical female pirate, but whose exploits were much more limited than the various tales about her would suggest. As I happen to have a webcomic about female pirates, I've done a little research into the matter of women at sea in the age of sail. So I can speak to the question as to whether or not women ever dressed as men and went to war in the disguise--yes, they did. And they went to sea, too, in conditions where one would assume it's far more difficult to conceal one's sex. In the often crowded and squalid conditions below decks, there was little to no privacy, more often than not. How did women conceal their sex? For the most part, we simply don't know. But it certainly happened. In the early 19th century, there was even a black woman serving in the Royal Navy. Aspects of her story may have been romanticised but this, too, is a significant detail--the fact that people were pleased to romanticise narratives of female warriors suggests attitudes about women in service weren't quite uniformly snarlingly misogynistic as modern portrayals of the past would seem to suggest. Personally, my theory (as expressed in Dekpa and Deborah) is that many of the women who served aboard ships were known to be women by their shipmates though the exact psychology of such awareness may have been subtle. I suspect there were many cases were shipmates knew on some some level that their crewman was a woman but easily suppressed the knowledge beneath the occupations of normal shipboard routines and chores. And, of course, one of the most successful pirates in history was a Chinese woman.
All of this is to say that, at its heart, Mulan is a very modern story. The humour is certainly very modern, with Eddie Murphy, voicing the diminutive dragon Mushu, making rapidfire pop cultural references in the mould of Robin Williams' Genie. The terms "cross-dresser" and "drag" are thrown about--this is a movie about modern American culture, not ancient Chinese culture.
In light of that, it's interesting to consider how the movie shows Mulan earning the right to her identity within her culture. When her "I Want" song, "Reflection", presents her problem (and it functions much better than the ones in Hercules, Hunchback, Pocahontas, or Beauty and the Beast), the idea that her self-perception is so at odds with how other people perceive her, the rest of the movie doesn't resolve the problem via a change in Mulan's culture but via Mulan's own actions. Mulan changes, not her culture. She proves herself with her valour and cleverness so that, in the end, when she warns her comrades about the Hun attack, they listen to her because she's earned their respect for her past displays of prowess. Notably, most of the soldiers don't want to see Mulan punished when her sex is revealed. The nature of Mulan's arc is emphasised by how it's mirrored in Mushu's--Mushu proves through his endeavours that he's a real dragon, other characters aren't expected to just call him a dragon just because he says so.
And that's where this movie may be at odds with the identity politics of the past five years--and, honestly, how many young people could take a valuable lesson from the film.
Mulan is available on Disney+.
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This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
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