Disney's Mulan, Cultural Appropriation, and Exploitation

I’m late on this one I know. I wasn’t willing to spend thirty bucks back in September for a movie experience I knew was going to be far poorer than if I had paid half that at a theatre. So I waited for it to hit streaming for free to give it a shot. In the meantime I heard that it wasn’t very good, but I remained determined not to skip it entirely, partly out of sympathy for director Niki Caro and partly out of morbid curiosity.

Disney’s live-action Mulan I was actually mildly looking forward to early in the year in spite of my well-documented distaste for this series of creative dead zones by the most powerful media conglomerate on earth. Mulan was never one of Disney’s classics, a movie extremely of its time in its “girl power” gender politics and with a decidedly American take on ancient Chinese mythology. It got by on a couple good songs and a strong lead, but it was a movie that could be improved upon, and this new version looked like it had the potential to do that, emphasizing its epic scale and wuxia-influenced aesthetic in the marketing. Alas, these things may have been disproportionately advertised, or else I misconstrued them, and they’re not the only areas where Mulan disappoints.

The shortcomings it must be emphasized, have nothing to do with the elements cut. It was in fact a smart choice to do away with the musical numbers (though they still remain awkwardly enmeshed in the score) and the Eddie Murphy character, and ultimately distilling the love interest into two characters made no substantive difference. It at least helped the movie avoid the carbon-copy curse of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. But these movies have a tendency to overcorrect for perceived flaws in the originals. Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella especially went out of their way to “fix” things that were never a problem to anyone but intellectually lazy internet pedants. Mulan has a similar attitude, but in its’ case Disney had its eye on the right things that needed fixing. Yet even I was surprised how much it managed to make them worse in the attempt.

Fundamentally, Mulan is still an American movie appropriating Chinese culture –or at least a western facsimile of it. And this is something Disney did genuinely care to amend, even if only for the sake of the lucrative Chinese market. Their solution though seemed to be to just add more ‘Chinese things’. Like a number of these remakes, there is an effort made to imbue the story with a denser mythology, but here that mythology clashes with the specific mythological context it is set against. The movie applies westernized concepts of witches and the phoenix in tandem with Taoist aspects, which it misunderstands, most egregiously the principle of Qi; interpreted here as a kind of magic superpower possessed by a select few and unlocked by being true to yourself. Ironic that a concept that helped inspire the Force in Star Wars is now illustrated as merely a weak variation on that very derivation.

The movie can’t seem to decide which era of Chinese history it is set in. And it utilizes a cast of both Chinese and Chinese-American actors -some of whom don’t even attempt a consistent accent, like Rosalind Chao (who I was otherwise happy to see), Ron Yuan, and Ming-Na Wen in a too obvious cameo. Donnie Yen and Tzi Ma are appropriately shuffled into the standard roles for them, that of the disciplined general and dispassionate father respectively; and the movie works in appearances from notable Chinese staples like Cheng Pei-pei (of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon), and astonishingly, Jet Li. But at the centre of the film is Mulan, and unfortunately Yifei Liu is not very good. Mulan was always one of the more expressive Disney ‘princesses’, with a generally more compelling personality and character arc than many of her counterparts –a lot of which came down to Wen’s performance. Liu however plays the part with a very stilted graveness, never allowing much passion to seep in, or any real investment in most of her own actions. One wonders if she is perhaps trying to emulate Zhang Ziyi, who also played such action heroines with something of a detached attitude; but Zhang was always so alluringly enigmatic, and Liu betrays no depth beneath her oft-stated purpose.

This Mulan introduces a dichotomy too between its’ title character and a new villain played by Chinese cinema legend, Gong Li. The film appears to be making some kind of statement on the repression of patriarchy, how Gong’s character is essentially a slave to Jason Scott Lee’s Mongolian warlord while also assuming a kind of liberty that entices Mulan. Essentially though she exists to be taught a lesson about overcoming gender boundaries that doesn’t actually say anything at all, and proves to be only the latest example of Disney’s maladroit feminism, as well as an extreme waste of both a subplot and talented actress.

Many of the actors in this film have experience in martial arts cinema, which is informed by the choice of the filmmakers to make it more action-heavy than its’ predecessor. And indeed a lot of the fight choreography is pretty good, though it’s often shot and clumsily edited in ways that obscure its details and delineate its pace. In spite of everything, Caro isn’t a bad director, though she was wrong for this film and is very clearly out of her element with a martial arts picture. The only times the action is ever effective are in its moments of absurdity, such as Mulan kicking a spear into a guys’ chest from dozens of feet away. In general the films’ visual template is underwhelming for an epic story like this. The army that Mulan enlists in seems quite small and the films’ environments are rarely shot with the grandeur they deserve -though given where some of it was shot, perhaps that’s appropriate. And the production design is lacklustre -Mulan’s village very much looks like a stage, and the climax takes place on as bland a set as that of Zhang Yimou’s similarly-set The Great Wall (likewise a very disappointing turn from an immensely talented filmmaker).

Mulan has been scrutinized more than any other of these Disney remakes, and stirred up more controversy too. Because after attempting to shed that image, it was Disney returning to the well of cultural appropriation in a much more tangible sense than one of their animated films. Disney had already taken this significant Chinese folk heroine and made her their own, and a remake only stood to double down on that ownership. But the astonishing thing is that in attempting to halfheartedly atone for this, to be more culturally aware, Disney demonstrated they are less so than they were twenty-two years ago. In response to the criticism of the heavily white production team and the depiction of Chinese culture, Caro said “there is another culture at play here, which is the culture of Disney, and the director needs to be able to handle both.” And that quote really illuminates something:

A good remake of Mulan was feasible, but coming from Disney, it was always impossible.

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch

Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/