Revisiting Mulan: How Disney bungled a $200 million blockbuster
Credit: Disney
This monster post had been languishing in my drafts three-quarters finished for the better part of half a year. With the recent tensions over international fashion brands and Xinjiang cotton, I decided it was time to finally finish it. (There are a number of embedded Tweets in this post. Try refreshing the page if you only see the text appear.)
There have been plenty of words written about Disney’s live-action Mulan — I have no new ground to carve that hasn’t already been done by others much smarter and more knowledgeable than me.
But I had a few friends ask for my thoughts on the film and the criticisms around it, so I thought I would compile some of the conversations and articles around Mulan I came across which resonated or which I found illuminating.
Disney reportedly spent US$200 million on this film, and by all accounts, really wanted to “sell” this to the audience in China. Keeping in mind this film came two years after Crazy Rich Asians, there were a lot of expectations in terms of representation and basic accuracy in how language and culture are depicted, especially when these elements play a central role within a film that has a specific audience in mind.
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If you understand Mandarin, my favourite is probably this fantastic, spot-on episode of Loud Mumurs, a Mandarin-Chinese pop culture podcast. Full of sharp and hilarious observations (with just the right amount of snark), the episode covers a ton of ground.
This live-tweetfest of the film by Xiran Jay Zhao was also a gem (she apparently also did a YouTube video, which I never got around to checking out):
FILMING IN XINJIANG
The most troubling aspect of Mulan came after the movie’s release, when screengrabs of the end credits spread on social media showing Disney thanking a number of government bureaus and committees within Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The central government has drawn condemnation due to its aggressive and systemic mass detention of what is estimated to be more than a million Uyghurs in this western region. There had been numerous investigative reports in recent years documenting the human rights abuses, the forced labour, the separation of children from their parents, the strict control in so-called “re-education” camps, and what amounted to — at the very least — the cultural genocide of Uyghurs and other Muslim populations by the Chinese government. But over the last year, reports have also come out on the government’s campaign to control the region’s Muslim population, including this investigation by The Associated Press, which documents forced birth control, including IUDs, sterilization and abortion. BBC also has a harrowing account of alleged systemic rape and sexual assault on some of the detainees. In light of the cumulation of evidence, several countries, including Canada, the United States, and the Netherlands declared the government’s treatment of Uyghurs as genocide. Tensions have since escalated as various government bodies and China have imposed sanctions against each other.
Some have fixated their focus on whether China’s actions are considered genocide or not; but these debates over semantics arguably detract from the fact that human rights abuses are being committed in the region. Others have also falsely argued that these charges are based on a handful of “questionable” research by people who have not visited Xinjiang, but the reality is they have been well-documented by numerous and diverse sources, news and other organizations — from on the ground, through data, through the Chinese government’s own internal policy documents, and in combination with numerous eye-witness accounts.
Some defenders have argued they’ve visited Xinjiang, spoken with locals, or pointed to “news” and other reports showing happy Uyghurs thriving in a region being raised out of poverty — willfully or naively ignoring the fact that most residents would never dare say anything that did not toe the official line for fear of putting themselves or their loved ones at risk, that visitors and locals alike are likely under surveillance whether they realize it or not, or that any kind of guided tour, even an informal one, is also likely being monitored. They will never be allowed truly unfettered and unfiltered access.
I visited Xinjiang one summer nearly two decades ago, a time with visitors could travel freely throughout the region, when locals talked more comfortably about their lives, before Kashgar’s Old City was torn down. It is a different place now.
This piece by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) goes through how these mass interment camps first came to light in English-language publications. The earliest mention, according to the ICIJ, was in a Human Rights Watch report dated Sept 10, 2017. At the time, it was believed “thousands” had been detained since April that same year.
According to Mulan director Niki Caro’s instagram account, location scouting began on Sept. 24, 2017. A post four days later said “Northwest China Scout” that did not specify a location. Another post the following day did have a location tag indicating it was in Asia/Urumqi. Still, the tag was easy to miss, and I found the use of “Northwest China” interesting. Is that just a film industry practice of trying to keep locations a secret/surprise? Or was there something more to it — such as the crew being advised not to specify Xinjiang for politically sensitive reasons?
One could argue the possibility there was a lot of ignorance around what was happening at the time: scouting occurred the same month the first hints of what was happening was documented in an international NGO report. The principal photography for the film reportedly happened between August and November, 2018, around the same time news of what was happening was finally gaining some traction in Western media and the gravity of the situation expanding in magnitude. It was August 2018 when the United Nations sounded the alarm over “credible reports that China had detained a million or more ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang.”
Even so, Disney handled the situation egregiously. It is a multinational media and entertainment conglomerate that should have done more careful due diligence from the start. Even without the reports on the mass detentions, the government’s crackdown on the region was no secret to anyone who followed news about China, from confiscating passports to banning long beards and veils. And if Disney somehow found itself in a situation of “too late, we really screwed up” — it should have figured out a better way to approach the issue other than thanking more than half a dozen Xinjiang government ministries and departments in the film credits. The police security bureau in Turpan, for example — a government branch that operates some of the camps, according to a BBC report — was among the agencies included in the acknowledgements. It seems unbelievable they thought any of this would go unnoticed. But perhaps this was a calculated risk for Disney? I wonder if someone decided upsetting the Chinese government and the influencial and lucrative Chinese consumer market was a far riskier financial proposition than any toothless international backlash?
For more reading on this aspect of the Mulan backlash, Vox gives a summary of why all of this is so problematic. The article also touches on other elements of the movie that were also concerning, including the positioning and portrayal of Han Chinese vs the darker-skinned “villains” — who indisputably had a pretty legitimate bone to pick with the emperor. As Jason Scott Lee, who portrays Bori Khan, explained in an interview with the New York Daily News:
“For me, Bori Kahn was about presenting his culture … It was a culture that was kind of being stomped on by the Chinese Empire and being pushed out from their native lands … For me, Bori Kahn’s quest was not only to avenge his father, but also to avenge the land that was taken away, and reviving and empowering his own people.”
Author Jeannette Ng digs into this further in her excellent Foreign Policy piece on the film and its “accidental regurgitation of China’s current nationalist myths”.
At this point, I should note that more than a year before the film was finally released on Disney Plus on Sept. 4, 2020 (postponed and eventually released online due to the COVID-19 pandemic), the film was already drawing heat outside mainland China, with critics calling for a boycott after lead actress Liu Yifei expressed support for Hong Kong police on social media as pro-democracy protesters clashed — at times violently — with authorities throughout the summer of 2019.
忠勇真: THOSE CHARACTERS ON THAT SWORD
Credit: Mulan, Disney
When the new posters with Christina Aguilera were released, my Twitter feed erupted over the Chinese characters “忠勇真” prominently featured in the image. They were meant to be a translation of “loyal, brave, true” (somehow awkward to me, even in English) — a key theme throughout the film. A second poster showed these characters overlaid onto Mulan’s sword, reminiscent of the engravings we often see in C-drama weapons.
But the three chosen characters were a red flag for diaspora audiences who could read Chinese and were already skeptical the film would do anything to advance representation in Hollywood storytelling.
At the most basic level, the characters chosen to represent “loyal, brave, true” read like they were found through Google Translate without any consultation with a language expert. (And they are indeed the characters that come up if you ask Google to translate them. Their language tool is pretty good, but light years away from perfect.)
For many, using these three poorly chosen characters demonstrated a lazy understanding of Chinese. It is a rich language; characters and words often have layers of meaning. At the bare minimum, the consensus seemed to be there were much better Chinese characters that captured the spirit of some of these themes.
Meanwhile, the truly saavy and experienced were also beefing about the pedestrian, Arial-equivalent font used for the characters and their placement on the sword.
As far as I understand, a Chinese sword would typically not have unrelated characters like these carved into the blade. In wuxia dramas, it’s often the name of the sword. In actual historical artifacts, carvings within the last 300 years or so seem to often be some kind of serial number and/or regiment identifier, along with a single word or cohesive expression of inspiration.
The Twitter mockery was priceless. I was pretty amused at the idea there might be people inspired to get a 忠勇真 tattoo. As Frankie Huang tweeted, “the bad tattoos are coming.”
气: MAY THE FORCE QI BE WITH YOU
I also saw a lot of exasperation when the movie first came out about Mulan’s “qi” (air or breath, 气 / 氣). A lot of viewers derisively compared the qi depicted in Mulan as being too similar to The Force or midi-chlorians in Star Wars canon. There are some similarities, but they are not the same thing.
Chinese traditional medicine, martial arts, and Daoist (Taoist) philosophy are very much rooted in the principle that an energy or a life force flows through all living things and must be cultivated in order to strengthen it. One is not born with “strong” qi as Mulan’s father tells her and qi is 100 percent not gendered in any way, contrary to the nonsense he also said.
Anyway, this was a fun thread on qi and how it works. (Also, definitely go watch The Untamed.)
孝: FIILIAL PIETY
So. Filial piety is complicated. It was never an explicit topic in my family growing up (my parents never really told me I needed to be more filial, for example), but the ideas behind it were infused into so many aspects of my upbringing that it colours so many of my actions and thoughts to this day. It is considered a core “virtue” in Chinese culture — stripped down to its simplest definition, it is respect for one’s family elders and ancestors. This in itself, of course, is arguably universal to varying degrees and obviously not unique to Chinese culture. But Disney’s version — “devotion to family” — at best narrows that definition considerably and at worst is a Westernized and wholly inaccurate characterization of the concept. Mulan’s story is very much about filial piety, but not exactly in the way it was portrayed by Disney. As Tony Lin explains in his great, informative thread on the subject, “it has a strong sentiment of blind obedience to family elders.”
COSTUMES, MAKE-UP, TULOUS, AND THE REST OF THE MOVIE
There were many other issues that have been brought up which, for me at least, are secondary: historical accuracy or faithfulness, and aesthetics.
In China, it seemed like a lot of people complained about or mocked the costumes (that is nevertheless getting award nomination accolades in Hollywood!), the particularly bad application of the Tang dynasty makeup, and the fact that Mulan, born in northern China, lived in a Tulou, a distinctively southern architecture.
All these discussions reinforced my bafflement over the hiring process throughout this movie. The only person in the entire behind-the-scenes line-up — director, producers, screenplay writers (four! of them!), composer, cinematographer, production designer, art direction, costume designer — who was Chinese was William Kong. That is not how you tell stories of other cultures in 2020. Kong, a producer in the 2002 film “Hero”, was one of 10 producers/executive producers on Mulan. When the film faced criticism over whether they consulted with any Chinese experts, Kong was the one they pointed to — from an optics point of view at least, he comes across like a token and a potential scapegoat of sorts. Did they have trouble finding other Chinese experts on language syntax, translation, philosophy, etc.? They also had an entire cast at their disposal who could have offered input.
It really seemed like Disney perplexingly was constantly off the mark on multiple fronts — Xinjiang, representation, authenticity (note I am distinguishing this from accuracy). Perhaps this is the product of trying to please a Chinese audience, please the rest of the world, while simultaneously failing to tell a story from outside the culture with the care and nuance required to do it justice.
Setting aside all these issues … this was not a great film. I felt nothing watching it; the story was very basic and still managed to leave gaping holes in logic; the dialogue was stunningly bad. On top of that, they somehow managed to turn a feminist story of female empowerment into something that is at best, significantly diluted. Some argued the film failed to “challenge the patriarchy”.
All this to say, the entire film was beyond disappointing. Especially when I recall how excited I was to hear Disney was planning a live-action version of Mulan. Granted, that was several years ago, which I know feels like several lifetimes ago these days — both in terms of actual time passed as well as in how quickly conversations around Asian representation have evolved over the years, thanks in large part to Crazy Rich Asians, and the critical acclaim of The Farewell and foreign films like Parasite. Small screen hits like To All the Boys I’ve Loved on Netflix also helped.
Even with all the signs this was not going to be the dream production I’d hoped, there was still a great deal I was willing to overlook just to support a Hollywood movie where the people on screen looked like my family. This was me over a year before the movie was released:
My friends, however, were merciless less kind about the film:
Obviously, there is still a ton of work that needs to be done. So, as details of the film began leaking out and after finally watching it, it was clear that basic “representation” … was no longer enough.