The Disney peril?

According to the legend, Hua Mu Lan, sometimes called "the Chinese Joan of Arc," took her father's place in battle and led the Chinese troops to victory. I first met her as "Fa Mu Lan" in Maxine Hong Kingston's novel "The Woman Warrior." The tale's heroine raised my fist in the air. She was a virtuous, bad-*** sista.





But the film "Mulan," released in the midst of intensifying anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States, is yet another Hollywood treatment of Asians as exotic. Recently, heightened political interest in Asia has prompted a commodification of anything Eastern -- spirituality, fashion, food and even women, as the sheer number of female Asian roles in film shows. Suzy Wong, Madame Butterfly and geisha girls played this role in the recent past. The new Asian female characters may be more empowered and less passive this time around, but they are still sexual and are usually still paired with white men.





Since she impersonates a man for most of the movie, Mulan is thankfully not the clichéd object of "yellow fever," nor a Disney-style sexpot like Pocahontas, who ran around in a low-cut deerskin, or the Little Mermaid with her strapless tube top and sexy fishtail. Instead, Disney depicts the up-to-date Asian woman riding her horse with the Great Wall rolling in the distance, eating pot stickers, bowing to her father -- all nonthreatening images of what Westerners love about Asians. Disney's Americanized Hua Mu Lan is an affable character with G-rated allure -- she has Eastern looks with Western values. Her face, according to a Disney release, is "based on the Chinese ideal of beauty with its round egg-shape and cherry blossom lips." Her free-spirited personality and forthright manner make her palatable to Western audiences. She is a banana -- yellow outside, white within. With her anglicized name, her perfect unaccented English and her wild gesticulations, it is easy to see she is not a Chinese woman warrior, but an Asian-American feminist. My mother -- a first-generation Asian-American -- would say this film shows we've come a long way.





But this is Disney, after all. Most people my age are cynical about Disney's simplistic, hyperromantic epics, and too savvy to be manipulated. With our anti-corporate attitude in the age of takeovers and technology, Disney is an enemy. In "Mulan," the simplistic banality of the Wonderful World is evil because it is culturally imperialistic. By focusing on a girl whose "irrepressible spirit clashes with her tradition-bound society," the film shows China as an unfree society.





Indeed, the view of China is one-dimensional and stereotyped throughout. Mulan is summed up in fortune-cookie prose: "The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of them all." A musical sequence ends with Mulan and other conscripts leaping in the air, giving a kung-fu kick and exclaiming "Hi-Ya!" A brass gong reverberates every so often. Mulan's sidekick, a dragon named "Mushu," shouts, "Call out for egg rolls" at the end of the film. Mulan's arch enemy, Shan-Yu, has slanted, malarial yellow eyes and an ominous, anthracitic visage. In their duels, there is a striking visual contrast between Mulan's western qualities and his "Oriental" features.





Of course, the film ends with a triumphant Mulan in the Forbidden Palace, throngs of Chinese bowing to her reverently, after she has sent the villain rocketing in the distance on a firecracker. In Disney, goodness will prevail. In Disney, the West will always win.

The Disney peril?
Something gives me the impression that you made this decision before seeing the movie. How dare the "enemy" even try to tell a story that impassioned you enough to raise your fist in the air.





Perhaps we should look at the fact that this story would never have been told by those original animators in the 40's %26amp; 50's that brought those classic Disney princess to life, like Cinderella %26amp; Snow White. Why wouldn't they? Because it never would have sold, in the end it is a business and they would have needed to create somthing that society was ready for. So even if this version of Mulan is not the classic Chinese version you prefer, maybe we can see it as a baby step, and in another 50 years a version will be done that lives up to your standards.



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