Disney's mulan vs mulan rise of a warrior11/27/2022 (“The Disney brand is that you can’t actually show violence,” she noted, so there are no wuxia-style disembowelments or spurting arcs of blood.) “I was hugely inspired by his work,” Caro said. Popular veterans of his films (Gong Li, Donnie Yen, Jet Li) even have starring roles. The film has the look and feel of Zhang Yimou’s wuxia epics (think: “ Hero” and “ House of Flying Daggers”), with flowing robes and flashing swords, soldiers running across rooftops and sprinting up walls. “She’s breaking the rules without threatening the system.”Īnd this being an action epic, there’s much more fighting than in the original, particularly by Mulan. “That’s why, despite her transgressions, she was put on a pedestal even in premodern China,” Professor Dong said. Her cross-dressing is forgiven (there was a war on, after all), as long as she resumes her proper place as a daughter and wife, postwar. Filial piety also dictates that she return home to her parents after her tours of duty are over. The animated version portrayed Mulan as a novice (before that hummable boot-camp sequence makes a “man” out of her), but in the latest outing, we learn that Mulan has been trained by her dad from the time she was a girl.Īnother central theme in the legend is filial piety, with Mulan getting her parents’ blessing before heading off to war. In many tellings, Mulan is a skilled fighter before joining the army. “We dug in fairly deeply to look at the arc of the story,” said Jason Reed, one of the producers, “to see what elements had stayed consistent over time, and which elements had been tailored to fit the time and the medium that the story was being retold in.” They looked at plays and films, including the drama with Zhao Wei. There was the original ballad, of course, as well as regional variations, which they examined with the help of advisers from China. When the Disney filmmakers first started work on the latest Mulan story, they turned to a range of versions for inspiration. In the 1939 Chinese film “ Mulan Joins the Army,” the heroine is a skilled hunter, fighter and eventually, general the film ends with Mulan as a blushing bride. The screen adaptations further expand the legend. “Even after all those years and everything she’s put herself through, she kept herself untouched.” “Many versions emphasize her virtue,” Professor Dong said. In the 1695 novel “The Romance of Sui and Tang Dynasties,” Mulan meets a fellow female warrior who becomes her sworn sister in the end, Mulan takes her own life when the Khan summons her to be his concubine. “At the time, women in the upper classes would bind their feet, and the playwright wanted to make sure Mulan was seen as the ideal icon of femininity,” said Lan Dong, author of “ Mulan’s Legend and Legacy in China and the United States” and an English professor at the University of Illinois Springfield. In the 16th-century play “The Heroine Mulan Goes to War in Her Father’s Place,” she has bound feet. “Obviously, a lot of the international audience might not know the ballad, but for the ones who do, it’s nice.”Īfter the original poem, subsequent versions of the Mulan story added plotlines and details to flesh out the tale. “Any time there was an image from the ballad, I wanted to bring it to the film,” Caro said. On the big screen, she’s starred in silent movies (“Hua Mulan Joins the Army” from 1927) a gorgeous, full-color musical by the legendary Shaw Brothers (“Lady General Hua Mu-Lan,” 1964) a gritty, action-filled war epic (“Mulan: Rise of a Warrior,” from 2009, with Zhao Wei) - as well as a certain Disney animated movie, featuring a tiny red dragon. Over the centuries, she’s been celebrated in stage plays and operas, in musicals and TV series, in picture books and novels and young-adult fiction. In some, she’s a hardened army general in others, she has magical powers in yet others, she’s a crack shot with a bow. Long before fans criticized Disney for taking liberties with their beloved animated heroine, poets, writers, playwrights and filmmakers had been creating scores of wildly different versions of the legendary woman warrior. No big musical numbers and soaring ballads? No Mushu, the wisecracking dragon, or Li Shang, the movie’s clearly conflicted love interest? No “Reflection”? Many felt that the filmmakers were being unfaithful to the Mulan legend - or at least to Disney’s own version of it.īut Mulan has always been the most adaptable of heroines. When rumors of a live-action, nonmusical version of “ Mulan” began to trickle out a few years ago, many hard-core fans of the 1998 Disney original groused.
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