It’s as far from Sleeping Beauty as it is close to the premise of The Hunger Games, with a sickly dad instead of Prim, and Katniss doesn’t have to pretend to be a dude.Īnd yet, for reasons mystifying to my non-kid-having self, Little Mermaid is the one that gets most talked about, to the point where the casting of an African-American kid actor as Ariel made the big “splash” around the internets this week, because it turns out a lotta people are literally insane about that Little Mermaid movie. Oh yeah, and then she goes to the front line of the war. As opposed to the inexplicably more-treasured Little Mermaid (“If I’m good, maybe God will give me feet?”) and Beauty and the Beast ( “If I’m pretty and kind enough, maybe the big monster/misunderstood prince won’t kill me?”), both finely crafted entertainments they may be, but HOLY CRAP is Hua (or Fa) Mulan’s story more dramatically active than that shit.Īs per the very very old Chinese folk ballad, Mulan is a young girl who volunteers to join the army so her sickly father won’t get conscripted into it except women of this time can’t join the army, so she has to cross-dress and adopt a male persona just so she can get into the grueling training program. Look, again, the whole genre is not my favorite escapism, with its weird-wobbly ideas of inclusion (Is Bianca from The Rescuers a Disney Princess? Are women characters obtained by Disney via corporate merger more or less in Club Princess than Bianca?) but I’m reading the messaging, and the messengers. I could quibble over the question of which filmmakers get to make Asian American movies - oddly, it’s fewer Asian Americans than you’d think - but a.) Whale Rider is unusually great and narratively relevant to Mulan, b.) intersectionality happens, and c.) I’d much rather quibble with why is it that Disney’s Mulan is not the most beloved of all the Disney Princess Things when it’s clearly the best one of them all?!? …depending on where/when you start counting the Disney films, and whether you restrict the Princess label to characters with human heads. They’re coming out with a live-action Mulan next year, directed by Niki Caro, who is not Asian as far as I can keyword, but she made Whale Rider, which is a purty durn good movie.
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