Two animated movies compared
Two animated movies compared:
Mulan (2020) directed by Nikki Caro, and adapted version to the animated Mulan (1998), directed by Tony Bancroft, Barry Cook, with adapted Ming-Na version Wen, Eddie Murphy, B.D. Wong, and Miquel Ferrer as voice-overs.
The two movies are based on a poem, "The Ballad of Mulan," composed in the fifth and sixth century CE. At the time, China was divided between north and south. The rulers of the northern dynasties were from the non-Han ethnic groups, most of them from Turkic peoples such as the Toba whose Northern Wei dynasty ruled most of northern China from 386-534.
This background explains why the character Mulan refers to the Son of Heaven as "Khan"-the title given to rulers among the pastoral nomadic people of the north, including Xianbeione of the many reasons why the images conveyed in the movie "Mulan" of a stereotypically Confucian civilization fighting against the barbaric "Huns" to the north are inaccurate. (Mulan substituted for her elderly and decrepit father who had no sons to answer the conscription of the Imperial Army to defend the emperor and the Middle Kingdom.)
Despite the apparent anachronism of the story, MuIan 2020 nevertheless succeeded in showing us the virtues that are central to Confucian China, namely the authentic characters engraved in Mulan's father’s sword such as zhong for loyalty, yong for bravery, and zhen for truthfulness, not to mention the all-important character of xiao for filiality, as embodied in the person of Mulan who took over her father's role as a warrior. Furthermore, traditionally the rulers of the Middle Kingdom had been seen as the heads of family writ large, as "father official" or "mother official."
Given this tradition of honoring the rulers of China, it is quite understandable that the prodemocracy demonstrators in contemporary Hong Kong protested Mulan 2020, albeit also quite anachronistically. (It is quite remarkable that between 1998 and 2020, a period of more than only two decades, advances in East Asian Studies had progressed to the popular level as shown in Mulan 2020, not to mention the all Chinese cast which hitherto in Chinese movies had been played by non-Chinese.)
It is quite significant that Mulan 2020 was filmed in South China with the round houses (tulou) of the Hakka peoples. All the cast of characters are Chinese, albeit of different stripes. Liu Yifei (b. 1987),the main character was chosen to be Mulan out of more than a thousand women who applied for the role. Yifei migrated to the US at age 10 with her mother; she was chosen not only in her own right as a model, an actress, and singer, but her ability to communicate in English.
The animated film Mulan 1998 was essentially a film meant for an English-speaking audience with voice-over by such stars (as mentioned above) including the famed Lea Salonga of the Philippines. It is more light-hearted with songs designed for singalong by the audience, while Mulan 2020,,being more serious, had no songs except the lyrics of "Reflections" and "Loyal, Brave, True" of Gregory Williams’ underscore as shown in the credits during the closing,
Mulan 2020 was strongly criticized by people especially in Taiwan, Thailand, and Hong Kong for its acknowledgment of gratitude especially to the Publicity Department of CPC Xinjiang Autonomous Committee for filming in the city of Turpan where a million of Uighurs were detained in "educational facilities" and forced to undergo indoctrination and even sterilization to limit their population.
Despite the various mixture of politics, ethnicities, feminism and patriarchy, Hollywood, whose main interest is the box office, has nevertheless produced in Mulan 2020 and Mulan 1998 exciting and entertaining films that are also in the most part, educational.
— Franklin J. Woo