As I scoured my animated film collection for my latest blog post, I stumbled upon Mulan. I decided to Google the movie just to see if anything interesting turned up and voila, Hua Mulan! For those of you who are unfamiliar with Hua Mulan, she is a Chinese heroine of the poem the Ballad of Mulan. The story goes shockingly like the Disney version (minus the hunky man meat that is always needed for a Disney heroine) as noted in this website: Mulan’s father is called up to serve in the army but he is too old and his only son is too young, so Mulan dresses up as a man and serves in her father’s place. The troop she is in fights many battles over many years before going home. As in the Disney film, the emperor offers her a job, but she takes a fine horse instead (whereas in the film she gets an enemy’s sword and the emperor’s Medallion). Her sex isn’t outed until her fellow soldiers come to visit her. This Ballad has inspired many different works ranging from operas to paintings to featured length Disney films.

What interests me, however, is not that Disney did their normal hocus pocus with history, but that this piece of history is so feminist. As Wikipedia notes on the subject, this Ballad has been interpreted as a very early (perhaps as early as the Northern Wei dynasty 386-534) support for gender equality. Not only would that be subversive to the Chinese culture that was overwhelmingly a paternal system the ballad went on to inspire many other works as well as becoming a well entrenched folklore tale in the Chinese community.

Interestingly enough, Disney was hoping this film would help smooth over relations with China as they had soured over the release of Kundun, “a Disney-funded biography of the Dalai Lama that the Chinese government considered politically provocative. China had threatened to curtail business negotiations with Disney over that film and, as the government only accepts ten Western films per year to be shown in their country, Mulan‘s chances of being accepted were low”. So not only was Mulan historically based and Disney managed not to horribly butcher it, it was also used to help repair USA-China relations despite the fact that the story is so against the typical Chinese culture of paternity.

I commented on this blog and this blog.