When most people think of Disney films, they imagine pure innocence and a world in which their wildest dreams can come true. It’s not until we’re older that we realize the politics of race and gender are consistently at the forefront of many of their films. The reason why this is so important is the fact that their target audience is so young and impressionable. From a young age we are taught largely through these films just how it is we are supposed to act. Once you realize just how prominent Disney films are with respect to the subject of gender, it is easy to think that Disney uses its popularity in the wrong way. The case is different however, with the film Mulan. The film offers something different in the way of gender representation that is uncharacteristic of Disney films.
Being a young woman, Mulan is expected to uphold her family’s honor by finding a husband and doing all of the tasks that are expected of women in the Chinese culture. Honor is extremely important to them so when she fails to show that she is capable of being a good wife, she realizes that what being a woman means in the context of this film, isn’t who she really is. This is some heavy stuff to take in especially taking into consideration the target audience. Before this film, being a young child watching a Disney film meant that you fell in love with a Disney princess; someone who longed for her prince charming while looking extremely beautiful and that was how women were supposed to look and act. Mulan is definitely, given Disney’s record in the past, not a movie that the viewer would readily expect from them.
At its very heart the film aims to teach the audience that it really doesn’t matter whether you are male or female. Determination and strength are, above all else, what is truly important. The film ends up showing that both men and women are capable of possessing those qualities. Mulan has to go through the process of learning what it means to be a man. She begins to learn that there are responsibilities and expectations that go along with that. She struggles at first, but she ends up proving that she is up to the task. While the characters in the film are fooled by her male appearance, we as the audience know she is in fact a woman. We look at Mulan and are able to recognize that what she has done is pretty remarkable all the time knowing that she is a woman.
Mulan is a step forward for Disney. The fact that they can step away from the perfect Disney princess that characterized their main female characters in the past, and create a character that embodies what really matters on the inside whether she is male or female shows that Disney perhaps realizes they have a responsibility towards their viewers. While the film is not without its gender profiling such as the scenes where the songs “Be a man” and “A Woman worth Fighting For” both represent some of the traditional expectations that Disney is known for putting on men and women. In the end, the film makes it clear that men and women are more equal than has been represented in Disney films in the past. The fact that while defending the emperor against the Hun invasion the men decide to dress like women reinforces this idea.
