thisisnotchina:

she was a clutz in the beginning in order to show her growth by the end. The audience needed to know that her competence and confidence in herself was hard won.

ok

we didn’t say the themes of filial piety and nation were not present in the disney film, like clearly a film about a daughter taking her father’s place to fight in a war is obviously going to be about these things. but what disney did, and is quite famous for doing, is took the source material and adapted it to have a moral that is ultimately quite different than the original intended moral. they notably did this with classic fairytales like the little mermaid: yes, the original had a romance element in it, but was primarily about her quest to become human so that she would have a soul, and finding true love was merely a means to get to that point. when disney adapted it, they threw out the major plot point about humans having a soul and mermaids not, and focused primarily on the romance being her driving motivation.

with mulan, they kept the filial piety but turned it into a vehicle to drive home the “girl power” theme. this is seen over and over again when the other soldiers talk about women and what they expect of women: you have lines like “did they send me daughters / when i asked for sons,” and there’s a whole fucking song all about the kind of women the soldiers all prefer. then you get to the scene where she is discovered as a woman and is sentenced to death, which absolutely was invented by disney and is not a plot point in the original ballad, where they basically don’t give a shit that she’s a woman. instead, she is celebrated and offered an official post but turns it down so that she can return to her family.

this is what we’re talking about when we say disney turned the film into a primarily feminist story instead of a tale that is primarily about filial piety.

-e