Mulan finds her place in her country through her own noble actions. Due to Mulan’s achievement of the four virtues, her disguise is eventually forgiven and her true identity is accepted by the emperor and her father. By depicting how an unconventional girl finds her place within the conventional world, the movie showcases a solution to finding a place for differences: by being good. This new representation of Mulan goes beyond early 20th-century adaptations that turn her into a feminist icon. If being honest to one’s family and country resonates more with traditional Chinese values of loyalty and filial piety, being honest to oneself is more consistent with contemporary views and would appeal more broadly to a global audience. Mulan’s disclosure proves that she is not only honest to her ancestors, family, army, and country, but more importantly, to herself.
The virtue of truthfulness in the 2020 movie is more developed than in the 1998 animation, and exemplifies an important contemporary value. As the title of one late 18th-century novel - The Story of the Loyal, Filial, Brave, and Heroic Mulan - indicates, the other three virtues of Mulan - loyalty (忠 zhōng), bravery (勇 yǒng), and filial piety (孝 xiào) - have been recurrent themes in Chinese versions of the story.
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Mulan’s decision to disclose her identity helps her achieve truthfulness (真 zhēn), the last of the four virtues extolled throughout the movie, and ultimately her full potential. In the 2020 film, Mulan decides to reveal herself before the end of the war, around the midway point in the movie. 1705) novel Historical Romance of the Sui and Tang and the 1998 animation, Mulan’s identity is revealed before returning home, but by other people. In some versions, such as Chu Renhuo’s (c. Most adaptations either gloss over the improbability of Mulan concealing her gender during her 10- or 12-year tenure in the army, as in the original poem, or resort to using external forces to help conceal her identity, such as friends, lovers, supernatural powers, or a miniature dragon named Mushu. Where this new live-action feature crucially diverges from previous adaptations, however, is its creative treatment of Mulan’s disguise. Like in the 2009 film Mulan: Rise of a Warrior (starring Zhào Wēi 赵薇), Mulan’s enemies in the 2020 film are identified as the Rourans (330-555), while in the 1998 animation it was the Huns (3rd century BCE-460). Her country is identified as China without reference to a specific dynasty, although the costume and makeup styles remind us of the Tang, whose imperial family most likely had mixed ethnicity of both Han and non-Han Chinese. As in the 1998 animation, Mulan is portrayed as a Han-looking girl. The 2020 film sets the battles at the garrisons along the Silk Road, which are populated by multiple ethnicities and guarded by imperial armies. The conflict between Mulan’s state and a non-Han invading enemy did not really materialize until the turn of the 20th century, when China faced foreign invasions. For example, she is sometimes a girl in the Northern Wei, putting down a bandit uprising in the same state, and sometimes a girl with a non-Han father and a Han mother in Western Turkic Khaganate (581-657), attacking an army in central China.
Mulan, her emperor, and her enemies’ ethnicities are depicted differently in the long history of the story.
Mulan’s ethnicity in the poem is unknown. Similarly, the enemies are regarded as hu, a nomadic population on China’s northern border. Based on the emperor’s titles in the poem, he is normally considered a Sinicized non-Han Chinese, possibly one of the Northern Wei (386-534) rulers. The original poem is about a young girl who disguises herself as a male soldier, joins the army in place of her father, survives many battles, declines her emperor’s award, and only reveals her identity to her fellow soldiers upon returning home. As Mulan’s father narrates in the movie’s opening remarks, this is just one version among the many tales of the great warrior Mulan. Compared to Disney’s 1998 lighthearted animation, the 2020 production has clearly drawn more from previous Chinese versions of the story, including its earliest extant version, the anonymous “Poem of Mulan,” traditionally dated to the turbulent Northern Dynasties (4th to 6th centuries).