What Disney Got Wrong

There’s so much. So, so much.

I love “Mulan”. However, though Disney attempted to research Chinese culture before making the movie, there are still many, many cultural inaccuracies incorporated throughout the movie. Here are a couple.

1. Displays of Affection: for Mulan to actually hug the Emperor when receiving her medal would have been incredibly weird to the people watching the scene unfold. In Chinese culture, public displays of affection are either non-existent or few and far in between.
2. The Food: the first inaccuracy occurs when the Emperor’s council calls for order in the training camp and the men call out different food dishes as a joke. Most of the dishes they yell are Americanized Chinese food or not traditional Chinese dishes. Mulan also eats porridge, bacon, and eggs for her first day of training and that made the scene quite unrealistic.
3. The Matchmaker Scene: marriage interviews are typically between the two families interested instead of many girls being individually interviewed and matched up.
4. The Grandmother: many phrases Mulan’s grandmother says are too modern for her age. In one scene near the end of the movie, she says, “Sign me up for the next war!”. Many Chinese viewers thought a couple of her phrases seemed too young to be realistic.
5. For much of the movie’s Chinese audience, “Mulan” just wasn’t Chinese. There are many more little historical discrepancies scattered throughout the movie, like the fact that if the movie were really set in the correct time period, fireworks wouldn’t have been invented/that advanced, and there are still more differences when it comes to actual Chinese culture versus Western culture.

One of the main take-aways for viewers to remember is that Disney is a global company that strives to appeal mainly to the U.S. While “Mulan” was dubbed in Chinese, that doesn’t change the fact that several aspects of the movie that are supposed to be “Chinese” have a Western gloss over them. This has been an issue in the past with Disney’s different films set in other cultures. The film flopped in some provinces in China largely due to the fact that it was seen as lazy and poorly researched. It is, after all, a Disney movie. While representation is extremely important in media, Disney has always taken baby steps towards being culturally correct. Although I still love “Mulan”, that doesn’t mean it should be used as a history lesson.