A Costume Failure: Disney Mulan Costume Review

what the hell is that costume and that's the costume you're going with is that it is that the whole costume [Music] disney what happened to your costume design hello there my name is silver welcome to best costumes and this is my review of the most overworked and underdesigned superficial mess of a movie made this year oh sorry this is my review of disney's live action mulan costume designed by bina daigler the superficial costume design is not necessarily being a deigler's fault costumes in the story they tell can be affected by a variety of people in departments including directors all the way to the lovely executives at disney who i'm sure had nothing to do with these costumes being beautiful marketing material and abysmal costumes and the costumes really are beautiful in the trailer there's a pervasive use of saturated color that works really well to create a beautiful meson scene with the cinematography and the lighting and everything else that goes into that museum being the uh composition of what's on screen but despite the aesthetic visuals the film is boring and this is because the visuals are superficial for example the cinematography during any dialogue scenes is just repetitive close-ups it's shot reverse shot on the two people talking this is great for knowing who's speaking but doesn't tell us what the character is feeling or thinking or doing all the visual elements including the costume designer like this they pick one very simple element of the story and fixate on it the cinematography is repetitive close-ups the costuming is just showing what the person does for a living this is a farmer this is a soldier but we don't know anything else about them we don't know who they are or what their story is superficial costumes detract from a film because an audience wants to engage with the characters in costumes it doesn't matter if a costume was designed to just say that this character is a soldier an audience can't turn their brain off to the other elements of the costume the audience still wants to know why there is one random soldier in green or why these the soldier costumes after a giant battle are still you know the clean unblemished pristine unscratched costumes that these soldiers were in prior to the battle and when things like this don't add up audiences are asking why why are things like this and when an audience is asking why you've broken their suspension of disbelief you've lost them this is why i would consider superficial costumes to be so bad this is why i consider mulan's costume design to be so garbage mulan begins in the ordinary world of the story the ordinary world is the world where the protagonist feels most comfortable it's their comfort zone if you will for mulan it's the rural agricultural village in northern china this is an important location because it's the audience's entry point into the world of mulan so it's imperative that nothing break the audience's suspension of suspicion the audience's suspension of disbelief this early on in the film but that is exactly what the costumes do starting with the villagers the background characters are extras uh their specific garments feel fairly realistic uh they seem to be vaguely based on hong fu which is traditional chinese clothing and just like sort of generic peasant garb if you will uh but their garments are pretty good their garments are that superficial element that gets these are villagers the first sort of artistic choice i am going to say ruins the suspension of disbelief is the number of fabrics represented in the village every single costume here is like three to four or more different fabrics and this isn't just like different dyes we'll talk about the die in a second but this is full on like different weaves and fibers and that just feels really unrealistic in a village you know that's just kind of out in farmland it doesn't seem like they would have access to that diverse number of fabrics now this is a moment to mention that this film is not trying to be historically accurate so i'm not critiquing its like realism in terms of historical accuracy i'm talking about its believability because that's one thing costumes really are there for they're to create a believable world and that's what these costumes fail to do here even if that's just from the perspective of modern audience this is something costumes have to look at is what an audience expects and this to me was like way too diverse of a texture palette it just felt very artificial the dyeing is the other thing that adds to the sort of fake staged feel of the village there is a chaotic color palette here that feels very overworked it seems like there was a color palette made and then just more colors kept being added to it because there's not really like a defined color palette there's everything from very saturated to very dull color here from bright reds down to earth tones there i mean there's like purples and greens and blues and just the trims there's an insane number of trims and like little detail fabrics that it just doesn't feel like a real agricultural village it feels too vibrant but it doesn't feel alive either it feels very staged when the camera sort of first introduces you to the village it flies over the roof and sort of pans around the inside of the village it has this very staged feel and i really thought there was going to be like some big song and dance number like broadway or something i was sadly disappointed there was no song and dance number in the entire film now you can get away with some crazy colors and fabrics maybe not to the level disney went with here but you can get away with some of it and the way you do that without breaking the audience suspension of disbelief is you make those clothes look like they belong in the vir environment they're in i said the garments are appropriate to peasant farmers but they don't look like they belong to peasant farmers and the way you would do that is through distressing the process of distressing is performed by a breakdown artist and literally what they do is they carefully and very specifically break down a costume to replicate the wear and tear that the costume would have had through however it was being used so for the village something that should be quite you know prevalent throughout all the costumes is sun bleaching uh when clothes are out in the sun for a long time the the dye that's used to color them bleaches and because you know they're farmers in the 7th century they're not going to have the kinds of finishes and stuff that we have on our clothing so they're going to bleach from being out in the sun every day and that's something that's not seen in any of the costumes but would have been something that really made them feel more connected to farmers another thing is just distressing from regular wear and tear like just the hems of dresses or pants should be you know worn they're wearing these every day it's dragging along the ground also if they're bending over they're on their you know knees farming or whatever you know planting stuff their pants are going to be dirty there's potentially even going to be holes in knees there's going to be wear and tear on these clothing just from everyday living and this is what a breakdown artist does and this is what the costumes in the village of mulan really need because they just don't feel real they don't feel like they're costumes that have been lived in by real people and that's really the thing that just breaks the audience suspension of disbelief this early on in the film because this just isn't a believable village it really keeps you at arm's length it doesn't take you into the world and say this is a world that's living and breathing and that's really just due to the distressing yes the fabrics and colors as well but like i said you could get away with some of that if you had the distressing if you made it look like these fabrics belonged in this village belonged to farmers by far the worst offender of this lack of distressing is young mulan young mulan's costume introduces us to our protagonist this is a costume that should help the audience empathize with the main character we should care about her and the best way for a costume to get you to care about a character is to very honestly show their character traits now every character has internal and external character traits these might be some of mulan's external character traits external character traits are like demographic stuff it can be like you know gender race uh those type of things but it can also be what kind of world they live in aragorn luke skywalker and thor are all from very different worlds and you can see that in their costume this is example of external character traits but a character also has internal character traits some of mulan's internal character traits might be things like this this can be personality stuff but it can also be a character's want and need if you've ever taken a script writing class you'll be familiar with those terms but if not a character's want is their active and external desire or goal mulan's could be to save her father right that's why this whole story starts she wants to save her father a character's need is a hidden desire that has to be revealed through the story so mulan's might be to be true to herself as we see in sort of the later half of mulan that's something that's revealed through the story that's an example of a need so these are all things that need to be apparent in a character's costume going back to young mulan and one of mulan's like defining character traits is that she is a very active child in fact it is imperative that the costumes show that she's an active child because she has chi for some reason disney decided that she was going to be strong with chi i'm not even going to get into that creative choice but mulan is strong with chi and for some reason this means that she's really good at martial arts and really good at physical action and they develop this through the character by showing her do amazing physical actions now i don't know if anyone at disney has ever met a child or been a child but if they had they would know that the most active children the children doing martial arts in fields are going to be the most dirty young mulan should have like some serious wear and tear in her clothing there should be holes in the knees there should be you know roughed up sleeves she should look like she's been an active real child but the costume doesn't capture this it's very artificial looking it looks like this is maybe the first time she's ever put on this costume which kind of has the subtext that maybe this is a special occasion or that mulan is normally a girl who just sits inside neither of which are like true about the story right neither of those things are supported in the script so this costume really doesn't give us an honest picture of who mulan is and that's really bad costuming i say that but there is one thing this costume does do well and that is that they put young mulan in pants this is predominantly so that she can do her stunts this is sort of the superficial choice there but it does have the subtext of her not being aware of sort of the gender roles she is the only girl or woman in the village that is wearing pants uh without any sort of dress i think some of the women have like some sort of pant or something under their skirts but mulan doesn't even have a skirt on and i think this shows a lack of sort of awareness of gender roles which is a very defining sort of characteristic of young mulan that's sort of what the whole beginning scenes are like are meant to show really so i think that's good but it's a very kind of superficial thing it's like this is you know clothing of a young girl so it's small and you know she's an active child so pants but it just doesn't capture like a real feeling of the character the character doesn't feel real and alive through the costume there's also this really delicate embroidery on the front and really delicate uh just like trims and things that no peasant family is going to put on their daughter's clothing when they know their daughter is this like crazy she master child who's going to destroy her clothing it just feels very unrealistic before we move on if you are liking this review which hopefully you are might i interest you in liking this video it would really help me out and possibly subscribing so you can see more of these it would let me know that you'd want to see more of these and i would like to make more of these possibly on the witcher or the mandalorian or something like that uh if you have a suggestion of what you would like to see next post it in the comments but please like subscribe all the standard youtube things all right getting back to it so before we leave the village i want to talk about one other garbage here and that is mulan's matchmaker dress if you will it's from the matchmaking scene and this dress has a huge issue center front on the chest yes that flower that flower is a failed use of symbol or symbolism uh this dress should represent who mulan is not this dress is the antithesis of mulan this dress is the dress of a woman who becomes a submissive wife goes through the matchmaking process gets married right this dress represents everything mulan isn't this okay you get it right this dress is not mulan this dress in the story is telling us this is who society wants mulan to be okay i'm gonna stop laboring this y'all get it uh but this flower on the front of it is a magnolia flower mulan's name means magnolia i maybe still don't realize what the problem is when a character's name means something that thing becomes a representation of who that character is this is why in the animated version there are several scenes that take place under magnolia trees it's why when her father says what beautiful blossoms we have this year but look this one's late but i'll bet that when it blooms it will be the most beautiful of all we understand that he's not actually telling us about a flower he's telling us about mulan it's a metaphor for mulan so going back to live action version this magnolia flower is a representation of who mulan is on a dress that is the antithesis of who mulan is it's the giving us the opposite story of the rest of every other element of the scrim then the film god i'm getting really worked up here okay now take a breather this flower is saying that this dress represents who mulan is but it doesn't i mean this dress is the opposite i this really bothers me because it's such a simple thing the only job disney had here was don't put a magnolia flower on that dress literally every other part of the dress is fine i personally would have put it in a dark more like oppressive color but it's fine if it didn't have that freaking magnolia flower on it this is just a really simple but a huge mistake on disney's part i don't understand how they made this mistake but yeah so that flower is a huge issue it's a failed use of symbolism we'll come back to symbolism throughout this review because it's something that the costuming department in this film just never gets right i don't know if this has been a daegler's fault but someone really doesn't get the whole like symbolism thing in this movie so we'll be coming back to this but just know this matchmaker dress is an affront to costuming moving on to our antagonists starting off with bori khan bori khan is a confusing character let's say because bori khan is not actually an antagonist boricon is not an obstacle to mulan he is really not stopping mulan from doing anything bori khan is actually would allow mulan to be herself which is mulan's like ultimate need right which means also that the real antagonist is actually the emperor now this is not the takeaway disney wants you to have disney definitely wants you to think of bori khan as the antagonist this version of milan bori khan is our villain and you know that's that's okay costume designers are put in this position a lot where they have to re-brand a character as something that maybe the script doesn't support and this is an example of that boycott isn't really the antagonist like script-wise but disney wants him to be the antagonist now when put in this position the correct choice is to accentuate accentuate all of boricon's traits that back up him being a bad guy his aggression his you know scary bad guy personality his you know he literally promises the roaring leaders blood that's a very bad guy move the costume needs to support this it doesn't they go with the very superficial and cliched black bad guy costume but not even a good black bad guy costume darth vader's costume is black but it's a very strong bad guy costume it has great shape it makes darth vader literally larger than life the cape gives him a larger than life larger than like physically that actor is presence on screen he's you know taller his helmet's big his helmet's a very strong shape he looks very scary with the mask and the armor you have an emotional reaction to this costume it's scary it's an emotional costume boulon bori khan's costume is not an emotional costume it's just a cliched black bad guy costume with nothing to it the hair and makeup really do all of the like character development here they show that he's a bad guy the only thing the costumes do is not cover his face so that the hair and makeup can show his character the costumes don't support his character at all there's some like little bit of detailing on him there's you know some elements but he doesn't have a strong presence on screen this is because there is a larger mistake at play here and that is that boricon is in almost the same exact costume as the shadow warriors the shadow warriors are these guys it's i don't blame you if you didn't know they were shatter warriors it's like a throwaway line that the witch says but boyycon's in like the exact same costume costume as them this is like having darth vader with black armored stormtroopers and he was in that same armor like all of his sort of uniqueness his intimidating his presence on screen him being like the lead scary bad guy the baddest of the bad guys would be lost and this is what they've done to bori khan he has no distinct costume he doesn't look like a leader he doesn't look like the one who would be leading the roarin it's not a good costume and that will conclude part one of this review of disney's live-action mulan's costumes if you'd like to watch part two there should be a link somewhere around here before you go please like and subscribe maybe leave a comment let me know how i did uh and i do want to give a special thank you to zachary levine who composed my intro music if you would like to check out more of his stuff i have a link in the description thanks so much for watching you

Channel: The Best Costumes

Views: 4,167

Rating: 4.818182 out of 5

Keywords: Disney, Entertainment, Costume, Costumes, Best Costumes, Mulan, Live Action Mulan, Bori Kahn, The Witch, best costumes, Review, Movie Review, Mulan review, disney princess costumes, mulan costume, mulan review, mulan live action costumes, mulan nominee, mulan costume oscar, bina diagler oscar nomination, oscars, oscar nominations 2021

Id: 7_asAajuHds

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020