#Shan yu concept art movie#
The elevator pitch for the film is, "Young woman fills in for her ailing father to fight in the Emperor's army by pretending to be a man, outshines her male counterparts and then saves China." The movie goes to lengths to have us believe Mulan ( Ming-Na Wen) is an archetypal badass. Further, this rigidity trains millions of young women, feminine men and other genders to feel like they're not strong enough, or indeed worthy of their humanity, because they don't naturally exhibit traditionally masculine tendencies.Īt first blush, "Mulan" looks exactly like the kind of movie that traffics in the regressive ideology of the badass paradigm. Simply being a physically domineering badass doesn't mean you won't be swept aside when the plot demands it (see Tasha Robinson's excellent article on "Trinity Syndrome" for more). The product of this is a "strong female character" in the most literal sense-but not where it matters. For the paradigm to work, these women must be physically strong and, if possible, they must defeat men in combat to prove how strong they are. In the process, their female leads lose nearly (if not all) agency and complexity.įorcing female leads to function as physically imposing forces implies that traditionally male characteristics are necessary for women to achieve agency in the badass paradigm.
This can manifest in a few unfortunate ways, leading to a phenomenon I like to call “badass fatigue”: filmmakers relying on badass attributes to excuse thinly written female characters. But issues arise when this approach is relied on exclusively to produce "strong female characters." It reduces female strength to how well it can imitate male physicality. These kung fu mastering/gun toting/butt kicking women (think Trinity from " The Matrix") were physically imposing and more aggressive than their predecessors. To combat this trend, filmmakers started to turn damsels into badasses. They existed for male characters to fight over or rescue. In many (if not most) action films throughout the 20th century, female characters functioned as damsels. To explore "Mulan's" subversive tendencies, we must first understand what archetypes the film challenges. ("Lilo and Stitch" did feature Tia Carrere as Nani and use some Hawaiian authentic music, but largely relied on a white cast and crew.) And yet as unique as "Mulan" was for pulling such a diverse and interesting cast (in 1998, no less), it is even more remarkable for its treatment of gender and sexuality.
"Mulan" sticks out even more than "Lilo and Stitch" for managing to cast a largely Asian-if not always Chinese-stable of actors. The other film that fits this mold is, of course, "Mulan." Among those were " Lilo and Stitch," a radical film for its time and, along with this year’s " Moana," one of the only mainstream examples of a non-white, non-princess to come out of the Mouse House. Millennials are especially familiar with the tail end of that wave-when smaller films popped up in the wake of giants like " The Lion King" and "Beauty and the Beast." It was around the time the studio began to pivot toward 3D computer generated animation (a trend that gained steam throughout the 2000s) that a few truly unique films made it to production.
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