‘Mulan’ 1998: A Moment of Joy and Anxiety for Asian-American Viewers

Mulan was an important figure in my childhood. I grew up with Disney, and what I loved most was that out of all the Disney “princesses”, the one who looked most like me was also the most inspiring and genre-defying one. Mulan’s romantic storyline was second to her selflessness and heroism, which is pretty ground-breaking stuff when you’re 7. Given the recent release of the live-action remake (let me know your thoughts, I have many), I couldn’t help but reflect on the significance of Mulan. Yes, the 1998 Disney film was rife with problems. The film has often been criticised for Westernising Chinese culture and conflating Asian cultures more broadly.

I don’t want to make any excuses, but I do want to emphasise that it is important to contextualise the moment in which Mulan was made - at a time when Asian-Americans were treated as a genre, or a mere diversity box to tick. It is poignant that more than 20 years later, the very same story-telling of Mulan hosts an entire cast of Asians or Asian-Americans. However this time, the problem isn’t so much the representation. Rather, it’s the moral dilemma that it poses. The film has been criticised and has faced intense backlash: for pro-Hong Kong police comments made by its protagonist, Liu Yifei, as well as the film’s ties to Xinjiang, where human rights abuses against the region’s Muslim population have been widely documented.

Yet, in a recent conversation with my 7-year old cousin, she gushed over the film and loved how Mulan looks exactly like her. As a child, Mulan gave me a sense of pride in being Asian, even though she was just a cartoon. If my cousin is now able to see herself physically represented and takes inspiration from that, is it so easy to boycott the film? To what extent do the positive impacts of promoting diversity outweigh the context that the film was produced around? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I would love to hear your thoughts.

Isabella