Yet somehow for Mulan, Disney has failed. For The Lion King, Disney chose an almost all African-American cast. In recent years, Disney has made a lot of good changes in its live-action adaptations of classic animated films: In last year’s Aladdin, Disney cast Mena Massoud, an actor of Middle Eastern descent, to star the title role. This kind of revisionist narrative is especially alarming when the Han-dominated Chinese Communist Party regime is trying to commit cultural genocide to ethnic minorities such as Uyghurs and Mongols. This can be found in both historic records and archaeological discovery.īy making the good guys Han Chinese and the bad guys the northern nomads, Disney not only eliminated Mulan’s original identity, but appropriated it to the Chinese. However, female warriors were rather common in nomadic cultures, where women have a relatively high social status. One of the reasons why Mulan is such a popular and extraordinary story is because it’s about a fearless female warrior, which is extremely rare in ancient history. Why are these details important? Well, the nomadic identity is essential for the story of Mulan. In The Ballad, the high ruler of the country is referred to as “khan” instead of “emperor,” a title later popularized by the Mongols and other Central Asian societies, but first used by the Xianbei. They did not rely as heavily on agriculture as the Han Chinese and they spoke a different language. In its source material, The Ballad of Mulan, Mulan belongs to the Tuoba realm (Northern Wei), an ancient nomadic clan of Xianbei outside of what was commonly known as “China Proper.” As nomads, Xianbei had a very different culture than the Han Chinese, the predominant ethnic group of present-day China. In the latest live-action adaptation, the villain is named Bori Khan and belongs to the Rouran tribe, while Mulan and the rest of the “good guys” are still depicted as Han Chinese. In the 1998 animated version, Mulan and most the “good guys” depicted in the film were Han Chinese the high ruler of the country is referred as “emperor ” the bad guys are depicted as Xiongnu, and the main villain is Shan-Yu.
However, this is what this version of Mulan is. I doubt that Disney would dare to greenlight such an adaptation. Imagine a live-action film adaptation of Pocahontas, with Pocahontas played by a white actress, and the story reworked to be about European colonizers trying to survive against the assault of Native Americans.
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