Mulan: Downfalls of Cultural Accuracy
Originating as a folk song, the Ballad of Hua Mulan is an anonymous poem that recounts the pseudo-historical personage of a young female soldier during the Northern Wei dynasty. This legend was later adapted into a children’s book, inspiring Walt Disney Animation Studios to release the Asian-centric film Mulan in 1998. The feature was well received by viewers, grossing over $304 million, and followed by the sequel Mulan II in 2004. In these animations, Disney explores female heroism and subversive expressions of gender, yet remains highly Americanized and idealizes patriarchal structures. However, in the 2020 live-action remake of the film, director Niki Caro centers on the historical accuracy of Hua Mulan with respect to recent cultural movements. These varying images of Mulan’s intersectionality reflect the historically contextual influences on production and reception within the film industry.
Following the recent success of Aladdin in 1994 and company expansion to Florida, Disney eagerly decided to diversify their character production to attract international audiences, specifically the Asian film market. This interest in Asian-themed legends, including various novels and short-films, settled with a combination of two separate projects resulting in original Mulan production. To preserve cultural accuracy and respect, a collection of Disney’s designers and producers “spend weeks in China taking thousands of photos of trees, architecture, people and historic landmarks” (Abbott, 1998). Their research was translated through production emphasis on ethnic appearances and cultural values of loyalty, honor and familial kinship. The film also included contextual inaccuracies of Buddhist ritual and patriarchal biases of gender expression. Feminist critic, Mimi Nguyen claims the film ‘pokes fun at the ultimately repressive gender roles that seek to make Mulan a domesticated creature,’ (Nguyen 2001). These overly Americanised choices, in addition to China’s quota of foreign films, contributed to the film's poor results in Chinese box offices.
In contrast, Mulan was highly decorated in American accolades including a Golden Globe, Academy Award nomination and several Annie Awards for Best Animated Feature. Disney’s inaccuracies in production succeeded by American approval demonstrates these power dynamics in the film industry, specifically Hollywood’s viewer preferences of entertainment and individualistic cultures. Stuart Hall, sociologist and theorist, describes the ambiguity of representative difference in ethnic and racial foregrounds. Hall states, “these practices are inscribed by relations of power – especially those which prevail between the people who are represented and the cultures and institutions doing the representing,” (Hall, 1997, p. 225). These depictions of Mulan and Chinese tradition contribute to imbalances of representation in film and their varying reception across audiences.
Similarly, Disney’s success in live-action adaptations prompted the remake of Mulan, directed by Niki Caro. As a non-Asian director, Caro was not originally considered for this project, but was later recommended by Hong Kong superproducer Bill Kong. In an interview Caro stated, “I made Whale Rider, I saw that (authenticity and specificity) to be specific and authentic is to be universal, and I’ve continued to work in an identical way ever since,” (Rosen, 2020). The film’s priority in these aspects was supported by their use of a fully Asian cast, cultural advisors, and eliminating historically inaccurate characters from the original film. These presentations of Mulan, in reference to one another, shows the intertextuality of Chinese culture in film. Stuart Hall explains this accumulation of meanings to “describe the whole repertoire of imagery and visual effects through which ‘difference’ is represented at any one historical moment as a regime of representation” (Hall, 1997, p.232). Furthermore, Caro’s directing methods highlighted the film industry’s prioritization of cultural authenticity, including qualified actors and educated personnel.
Despite their attentiveness, the film’s disappointing sales did not surpass their budget. This failure, specifically within Chinese audiences, can be attributed to the film’s boycott of leading-actress Liu Yifei’s public support of police during Hong Kong’s 2019 pro-democracy protests. The backlash faced by this film displays cultural theorist Michael Shudson’s theories of consumer agency, specifically within diminished distances of actors and audiences in modern media (1998). He argues, “the quality of art lies in how it is received, or in how it is created within the context of reception, rather than in some quality intrinsic to the art object itself” (Shudson, 1998, p. 498). To explain, the audience's limited proximity to Mulan's actors influenced their reception of the film. The intimacy of these audiences is heightened by rises in social media platforms and accountability practices, which were not present in the original film’s production and release.
These contextual factors, including audience values of cultural accuracy and the personal affiliations of producers, were highly influential in the reception of Disney’s Mulan films. The progression of viewer agency, in timeline with these features, presents a variation of cultural authority and accountability, specifically from audiences to the film industry.
Works Cited
Haynes, S. (2020, September 11). Is Mulan based on a true story? here's the real history. Time. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://time.com/5881064/mulan-real-history/
McGuire, K. (2020, September 16). Mulan's 2020 box office explained: Was it a success for disney+? ScreenRant. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://screenrant.com/mulan-2020-movie-disney-plus-office-success-failure/
Nguyen, M. (n.d.). Who's Your Heroine? Poppolitics.com - who's your heroine? Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://web.archive.org/web/20080218080321/http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2001/01/05/Whos-Your-Heroine
Rosen, C. (2020, February 26). Mulan director explains why she was the right choice for the Disney remake. Vanity Fair. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/02/mulan-disney-niki-caro-chinese-filmmaker
Walt Disney Pictures. (2020). Mulan. United States of America.
Walt Disney Studio Animation. (1998). Mulan. United States of America.
Madi, I really enjoyed this blogpost! Your links to Shudson and Hall were very interesting when talking about the misrepresentation of Chinese culture through the media. Your post made me think about Andi Zeisler’s piece about what a feminist pop culture would look like. Zeisler discusses pop culture, saying “ pop culture grew out of low culture… defined more by what it wasn’t—elegant, refined, erudite—than by what it was” (2018). This refers to how pop culture draws inspiration from what was previously understood as second-rate to the dominant culture and gets reframed such that it becomes culture that is consumed by everyone. This links to what you wrote about how, although Chinese culture -- which exists outside of the dominant culture -- was meant to be showcased, the creators of the movie altered a lot of aspects around the movie to make it more palatable and familiar to the masses. Zeisler argues that a more feminist pop culture occurs on the lines of “production” and “representation” (Zeisler, 2009). Production refers to having more diverse writers and team members who work together when producing a pop culture artifact. This was not present with this movie since people outside of the culture were predominantly the producers and creators of the film, stating that they had experienced it by travel rather than through lived experiences. Representation on the other hand is the presence of diverse characters on screen. Since the movie was about Chinese characters this representation was present, yet because of the failure of production, the representation fell flat and truly did not represent the experiences of Chinese people well.
ReplyDeleteOlufikemi (Kemi) Ogunyankin