EVERYTHING CULTURALLY RIGHT AND WRONG WITH MULAN 1998

have you ever impulsively made a video criticizing a movie and it blows up so much you're basically obligated to become a legit youtuber that's me that happened with my review of mulan 2020 and since so many of you asked for my thoughts on mulan 1998 the original cartoon here it is to start off full disclaimer i love the cartoon it's one of my favorite movies and also it never marketed itself on authenticity and like the 2020 movie which like put up authenticity as a shield to justify filming near muslim concentration camps in xinjiang it was just oh like the 2020 movie tried to act like it was doing chinese people a gigantic favor by making it uh so authentic and like accurate to the original ballot but it was actually none of that it was just like a bunch of pandering toward the chinese government which no one likes so this video is not meant to diminish the value of the cartoon i know it was important to many of us i'm just pointing stuff out for purely educational purposes also i first live tweeted this on twitter and two artists who actually worked on mulan 1998 showed up to add their commentary so i'll be including those on the screen alright let's start so this movie opens with an ink drawing on a landscape to let you know how asian it is right away this is the asian disney princess you guys this is a reference to the most prominent style of painting in chinese art ink brush painting classical chinese painting isn't like in europe where they try to go for realism and they use realism as the golden standard for how good art is though i know they didn't do that during odd periods so don't come for me art nerds in classical chinese art the goal is to capture abstract vibes and as little strokes as possible mostly because it was black ink on pale paper so if you mess up one stroke you messed the whole thing up so like classical chinese artists i i assume that they were basically painting like so it was very minimalist and all about the vibe the energy and the artists really liked to paint mountain landscapes and plants maybe the occasional bird or cat this cat painting was done by an actual emperor by the way what have you been doing with your life so yeah being realistic isn't everything in ireland and therefore you shouldn't bring out realistic european oil paintings to make fun of other cultures art i've seen it happen stop doing it some brush strokes of the great wall make a neat transition into the actual great wall on it the watchtowers are flying dragon flags in history they probably would have flown the name of the dynasty instead but i understand that this movie wasn't trying to go for like an actual dynasty it's just like a general chinese inspired fantasy movie which is valid because a mulan doesn't even technically belong to a single dynasty because she's a folklore figure not a historical one sorry to those of you who thought she was real she probably wasn't but her stories generally take place from about a thousand to one point seven thousand years ago in the northern and southern dynasties or the soy dynasty or even the tang dynasty so a hawk comes and knocks the helmet off a patrol soldier revealing his top knot or what some people might call his man bun it's true that most dudes in ancient china had their hair in a man bun this is because in confusion believe every part of your body is a gift from your parents and therefore it is technically their property and you should not damage it so you weren't allowed to cut your hair because it would be disrespectful to your parents i know mulan's haircut scene later in the movie contradicts this i'll get to it so suddenly the huns scaled the great wall and the soldier sets off a signal fire this was a great way to quickly give military messages across the watchtowers these columns of smoke were called langnian or wolf smoke in chinese because they were made from burning wolfdong or just general alamo dung mixed with sulfur and salt pitter salt peter put english this gives the smoke that really like nice dark color that can be seen from a distance then comes the iconic line not all of china knows you're here as iconic as this is it it's pretty weird that he's calling it china that's a name westerners came up with it probably comes from china's first imperial dynasty ching chinese people themselves either say the middle kingdom the heavenly dynasty or just the name of the dynasty that's currently ruling with a great attach to the front of course like the great king and by the way the depictions of the huns in this movie is really racist and demonizes central asians this is probably the movie's biggest blunder i mean yellow eyes why and this is not even getting into whether the huns actually correspond to the asian nomad people they're usually associated with the xiongnu and even if they're supposed to be the shonu they're several centuries off from all of the dynasties that mulan stories take place in so like this aspect of the movie is just one big mess so the hun leader burns a flag probably kills the soldier off screen and we go to the imperial throne room which is very fancy at first glance but if you look closer why are there three humongous dragon scrolls just hanging above the throne i'm a former theater kid i know what it takes to weave fabric of that size and that can't be paper i know they're making a reference to chinese art squirrels but this is not the place to do it it would have made more sense for the dragons to be sculpted around the pillars or repainted as a mural on the wall anyway the general dude comes in like oh no the huns have reached our northern wall and shifu whose name is probably a reference to the chinese word for bullying chiefu is all no one could get through the great wall it is a very ancient chinese thing to be overconfident about the strength of your dynasty but in this era so many nomad tribes are getting through the wall that the dynasties on honestly stopped caring about maintaining it the great wall wasn't always this like monument of national pride i think that's actually a pretty recent thing like for most of history it was like this symbol of imperial oppression instead because of the manpower required to build it also here it's officially revealed that the leader of the huns is called shan yu that's probably derived from chan yu the actual title of the hans or xiongnu but if you put this in front of a mandarin chinese speaker they're going to be like shinyu yams and possibly flash back to those street vendors selling them from a whole furnace back on the streets of china so the general suggests they pump up the palace defenses but the emperor makes him send the troops to protect the people instead this makes you like him for half a second and then he sends out the conscription order though it is true that most adult men in ancient china would have been considered to be in the army reserves the military system back then was that most soldiers weren't full-time they were mostly farmers at home farming until they were caught to war or had to do hard labor and massive construction projects more than one dynasty fell because they put too much of this burden on the people finally we get to mulan she's memorizing admonitions for women this was a common thing for girls back then like instead of knowledge about literally anything else they were primarily taught feminine virtues especially from a book written by the gender traitor ban zhao in the han dynasty it praised the three obediences and four virtues which was to obey your father before marriage obey your husband during marriage and obey your son after widowhood and then having feminine virtues feminine speech feminine looks and doing feminine work which basically meant shut the hell up and be a humble servant for your family but i have to point out one major mistake in the scene when it comes to the scroll it's clearly based on a bamboo scroll which was what chinese people wrote on before thailand invented paper in the han dynasty they're essentially slips of bamboo tied together with string and then you write vertically down the slips but here the characters are written across the slips like someone rotated them 45 degrees in photoshop also they're written in simplified chinese which didn't exist until like 50 years ago and of the virtues i could read most of them make sense they're exactly what mulan is saying but the last two tangent and drenshi poised and punctual they don't sound right to me in a chinese historical fantasy context i don't think i've ever heard of an ancient mother-in-law yelling at her daughter-in-law to be punctual though i have to give the staff credit for at least getting it right that classical chinese was written vertically from right to left you can tell by the position of mulan's hand here and she is holding the ink brush correctly instead of holding it like a pen you're supposed to hold it like this so your hand never smudges the ink but in the background what is happening with her chopsticks and her rice she stuck her chopsticks vertically in the rice she should be glad none of her family was around to see this because they would have started throwing hands the reason for this is that sticking chopsticks like that in rice looks a lot like the incense offerings to the dead so doing this in front of someone is basically cursing them to die do not do this you have to lay your chopsticks across the bowl next the rooster crows and mulan rushes to find her dog when she's running through the house and there are scroll paintings on the walls that's accurate especially the bamboo chinese painters love their bamboo and also that random pot of plant is also accurate oh and there's something else that's like semi-accurate of the strings of chilies and garlic in the kitchen and that is very chinese but chilies like that did not exist in the old world until the colonizers took them from the americas native americans didn't spend thousands of years cultivating crops like chilies chocolate tomatoes corn potatoes and vanilla just for us to pretend like they were there everywhere all along and that's something we have to acknowledge at historically inspired media so mulan ties a sack of chicken feed to her dog and makes a run after her bone on a stick this is the first example of her using her wits to solve her problems as the dog runs through the estate it does look kind of right most properties in ancient china were many small buildings boxed off by like one set of wall that's why so many characters to do with living places are in boxes the dog runs through a moon gate something iconic to chinese gardens they're built so only one person can enter at a time but the ancestral shrine confuses me in so many ways like why is it in a pavilion instead of right in the main house like where our ancestral shrines should be and why is the faw family allowed to use a dragon emblem when that should be reserved for the imperial family why is it all stone steels and why is there no elevated altar with food on it why do they have to put their offerings on the floor i did watch a behind the scenes video for this movie and apparently the production team designed the shrine like this because they went to china and saw some people worshiping their ancestors tombstones this is why a lot of times surface level research isn't enough because clearly they didn't actually go into a traditional home and see how an ancestral shrine looks in private historically the ancestor tablets were usually made of wood and pretty small and lined up in rows on the altar i had to change filming locations because of my cat so i guess we're back here anyway mulan comes in and reminds her dad that the doctor said three cups of tea in the morning and three cups of tea at night tea does reportedly have health benefits but an ancient chinese doctor is more likely to prescribe herbal medicine which is brewed like tea and generally has a murky reddish color and a bitter flavor how it works is that the doctor gives you a list of herbs and then you go to an apothecary and they gather everything on the list from these tiny drawers every time you walk past the chinese dried food shop and there's this pungent smell that hits you that's either traditional herbs or dried fish so in this scene i'm going to assume that mulan brewed herbal medicine for her dad and that's what she means the dad isn't happy about this though he thinks she's late for her matchmaker meeting which is apparently vital for her to uphold the family honor generally this movie's obsession with honor does stick out to me especially if you listen to the mandarin dub because it translates honor as wrong when i hear that i'm like nobody in china talks about honor this much though i think it's just a case of awkward translation because if you translate it as face instead as in you'll make the family lose face if you're late then everything sounds right mushu even uses the phrase i will not lose face later in the movie so they are aware of it i think asian inspired media in the west does tend to overuse honor but imagine if you applied my fix to zuko i need to get my face back you do zuko indeed you do still hot though and then we cut to a view of the streets showing you various modes of transportation in ancient china these are actually fairly accurate you have a rickshaw uh palanquin for nobles what i'm assuming is a messenger on a horse and laborer pushing carts also a little detail i noticed is that most clouds of smoke in this movie are modeled after how clouds are drawn in classic chinese art very neat but inaccuracies come back at the matchmakers first of all the assistant refers to mulan's mom as fali implying that's her name that would not be her name chinese women don't change their family names when they marry and if she were born to a completely different fa family her mary fajo would be a huge taboo back then because that's considered incest now she could potentially be called auntie fa antifa which is basically referring to her as a wife of the faw family but this wouldn't be her name plus this movie went for the mandarin pronunciation of mulan so the family name should have been hua instead of pha she's hua mulan in mandarin chinese it means flower magnolia secondly there are paintings of phoenixes in front of this house this would also be a taboo because phoenix represents the chinese empress but i can forgive all of this because grandma is here i swear i would have also forgiven the entire 2020 movie if they just copy and pasted the grammar in just like don't even hire an actor just cut out this cartoon version of her and paste her in space jam style i'm just kidding i could never forgive giving money to police brutality and muslim concentration camps also the headband that grandma is wearing i'm pretty sure it was inspired by the character design of the grammar and dream in the red chamber this is kind of the same kind of thing that lan won ji wears so the grandma decides to test if her new cricket is lucky or not by walking straight through traffic crickets are indeed considered lucky in china and to certain people delicious mulan gets to the makeover place on their family horse actually accurate to this era because this was one of the few eras in chinese history where women were allowed to ride horses on the street like men but it seems very unrealistic to me that a girl like mulan whose family has a house as nice as theirs would go on location to get cleaned up and meet the matchmaker more likely the aunties will come to her house the matchmaker included the matchmaker would ask for the year month day and time that mulan was born aka her shenzhen and then match it with the bots of potential male suitors gotta see if they have gran finn you know but it's accurate that mulan would have absolutely no choice in the marriage because marriage was considered a family affair so it was more the union of two families instead of two individuals matchmakers back then were basically like real estate agents they were in charge of negotiating marriage terms like the bride price that the dude's family paid to the girls yeah in china the husband's side gives money to the wife's side there's a saying in china that's even persisted to modern day a daughter married off is like water thrown out the door her husband's family is considered her true family women were technically allowed to go back home but this was generally only in cases where something really upsetting happened to her like being born in a patriarchal society that doesn't value women's work and treats them like baby making machines anyway an actual chinese girl's matchmaker experience would not have happened like this though they got some superficial aesthetic things right like the painted folding screen and the look of the wooden bath bucket though if they did some really deep research they could have shown the auntie making the bath water soapy by using soap beans instead of some random bottles of stuff oh on this shot where mulan is kneeling on a short platform actually accurate to her time tall legged chairs and tables didn't come into china until around this era and then it took another few centuries for them to fully catch on and for chinese people to shake off this belief that kneeling was the most proper way to sit so when mulan is with outsiders and trying to gain their respect this is what she would do and the mirror in front of her does seem to be modeled after an actual bronze mirror artifact once mulan walks out the other girls in the background do seem to be modeled after artifacts too but mulan's own outfit stands out as very acronistic seeming to me it's too casual not a style a girl or her era would have worn onto the street it appears that she has to go to different places to get different parts of her makeover done which is very confusing even if a makeover place did exist which it probably didn't it feels like it should have been all inclusive but i understand that this is the most efficient way to characterize mulan by having her interact with different people like figuring out the two grandpa's chess match and handing a girl's doll back to her after a boy took it when i live blocked this on twitter i did get a confirmation from a storyboard artist saying they made this entire sequence up so at the clothing store i guess her mom and an auntie tighten a silk sash around her as sing about how men like tiny waists which would not be true for this era beauty standards are very very flexible and passing trends and in this era it was trending toward chubby being beautiful the matchmaker does acknowledge this later by saying mulan is too skinny to be good for birthing sons which would be a woman's primary job and by the way the hairstyles of most characters are surprisingly accurate like more so than most c dramas because they don't have any chinese adults walking around with their hair half up half down just to look pretty basically all of the adults have their hair totally up and the children have hairstyles that are very iconic to chinese children children are allowed to cut their hair because it's their parents making the decision for them but no adults are not allowed to cut their hair by asking their parents permission no one would know you got permission so you would end up looking like a criminal because getting your hair chopped off was a type of criminal punishment when mulan goes to yet another place to get her makeup done her lips are painted on with a brush if they wanted to make it really chinese they would have gone with her pressing her lips on lip paper and the general look of her makeup the pale face powder likely made of ground rice powder is not a reason to complain or say it looks japanese it really was the fashionable thing to put on back then but her eye shadow is too dark if they insisted on doing eye shadow it would have been more peach again i've got an infographic of actual makeup elements iconic to this era on my instagram you can check it out in the link below after the auntie finishes mulan's makeup mulan insists on making a spit curl out of her hair this is her equivalent of that neon streak of hair seen on every asian female character in a non-historical media made by white people her mom finishes off her hairstyle by putting a comb in it accurate straight up putting a comb in your hair is a great way to reinforce your great hairdo then the grandma's here again she makes mulan eat an apple for serenity which is a pun because apple in mandarin is pingu which sounds like serene fruit though apples like this wouldn't have come to china until a few centuries after this so nitpick the apple miraculously does not ruin mulan's lipstick oh my god mulan what brand are you using the grandma also drops a pendant into mulan's waist sash for balance this type of pendant would have actually been flaunted outside of the sash which is the whole point but whatever because then comes of jade [Music] after that mulan leaves for the matchmaker and she's all helped me not approve my family tree not something she would say when her family tree is already uprooted because she is an only daughter with no brothers after she marries she wouldn't be considered part of the family anymore so this lineage of the file family is it's already done it's you know it dead i know this is some bs but it was the way things were this is why people were so desperate to have sons so mulan goes with a whole line of other girls to the matchmaker's place which definitely would not be how this process would go down this would not be a group audition thing would you audition for your real estate agent you would not also she wouldn't be going in alone there's no way a girl would meet with a matchmaker without her family because her marriage had everything to do with them as well as her but anyway then comes the matchmaker disaster sequence that we all love i'm a little concerned that mulan splashed an entire pot of steaming hot tea right onto the matchmaker's face like that is grounds for a lawsuit right there which could happen in ancient china because china's had a robust legal system for like two thousand years now thanks shangyong mulan actually got off easy an incident like this would have lost the hua family a lot of face so it makes sense that i sent her spiraling right into singing reflection also known as that one song that awakens something in every queer kid i know it i see you then there's a scene with her dad comforting her that it's short believes better than what they did in the 2020 movie now that i think about it the reason the 2021 had so little emotional impact is because little mulan didn't genuinely mess up her dad in that scene was just telling her to hide her mystical oriental superpowers here mulan actually did make a fool of herself so it's nice that her dad showed that you know he doesn't care about the impact on their family image he just wants her to feel better but the remaining time together will be short because then the conscription notice arrives this is announced by someone pounding the drum in a drum tower which was a staple at the center of every city to announce times kind of like the big ben chifu is the one who brings the proclamation to mulan's town which is unrealistic given how high ranking and close he seems to be to the emperor he wouldn't be doing random messenger duties but i understand that this was a creative liberty taken to keep the number of characters low also confirmed by production staff so fajo decides to tough it out and gets his war stuff out of storage soldiers actually did have to bring a lot of their own stuff when they got conscripted the army provided very little except rations in really militaristic eras like the qing dynasty if you committed a crime you actually had to pay suits of armors as fines next in the family dinner scene we see mulan's family eating literally nothing but rice and tea they can't be struggling to this degree they're not college students they were able to afford a makeover for mulan usually at chinese meals everyone gets their own bowl of rice and then share a bunch of dishes at the center the storyboarder john sanford confirmed that he neglected to put the dishes in mulan tries to convince her dad to value his own life but gets yelled at which is a very asian family thing then after seeing silhouettes of her parents arguing she decides to take matters into her own hands i still don't know what's going on with this family shrine i've never seen an incense be burnt sideways but i don't care because the music's great the animation is amazing and the emotions are all there now comes the hair cutting scene her cutting her hair would actually make her look more conspicuous because boys aren't supposed to cut their hair either so this scene got left out of the 2020 movie for accuracy reasons even so this scene is way more emotional than the 2020 movie because it's so dramatic there's her grandma getting a raven simone style vision her dad falling in the rain the imagery of the comb on the ground and the swinging doors sad grandma it's just all so good then comes george takei and mushu who was left out of the 2020 movie because apparently he offended mainland chinese audiences due to being a dragon i think they might have misinterpreted audience reports about that i mean i don't think chinese people take dragons that seriously anymore i think they just didn't get eddie murphy's humor because like why cast eddie murphy as a chinese dragon the movie also makes a big deal out of family guardians but as far as i know that's not an actual thing in china while the ancestors are arguing mushu is reading a paper with a title that makes no sense it's like beijing army code tiger white people tattoo nonsense back at it again the ancestors insist that mushu awaken the great stone dragon ultimate guardian of the hua family it was only here that i remember that that statue outside is supposed to be a dragon not a lion i don't think i've seen a dragon statue in china that's so scrunched up like usually it's very like sine wavelong musho accidentally breaks the statue and starts freaking out but realizes that he can make everything right if he goes anyway and makes mulan a war hero then it cuts to the huns who have captured two imperial scouts the scouts are like the emperor will stop you but shaun yu is like um no actually he invited me in by building his wall and challenging my strength get it right this implies that the great wall was either built or reinforced only recently again it's not really a thing that happened in this era but to showcase how villainous and evil the huns are they kill one of the scouts off screen while sending the other to deliver an intimidation message then we check in on how mulan's doing she and mushu have finally met she thinks he's a lizard which he aggressively denies which is possibly a reference to how only western dragons are seen as lizards eastern dragons are based on snakes instead which does have a reference later on in the movie together they go to the military camp where mushu gives some terrible advice on how to pass for a man at one point chiang pul picks yaw up and tries to calm him by reciting naomi toefl the subtitles say they're muttering gibberish but it's actually not gibberish it's a legit mantra out of a buddhist classic if you watch journey to the west then you've probably heard it out of tungsten's mouth also chimple is probably a monk who are among the only people who are socially allowed to cut their hair then comes some excellent slapstick comedy where yao ling and champu wreck the entire line of soldiers waiting for porridge the three-legged cauldron here is clearly based off of the ritual vessels of the joe dynasty in the commander tent we are introduced to bisexual legend li xiang and his general dad the war map and little monopoly figures to represent troops was a common strategy tool and you can see them a lot in historical c dramas xiang is very delighted with himself about being promoted to captain making me remember just how much of a nerd he is but he walks out to absolute chaos among the soldiers who all throw mulan under the bus when shang asks mulan's name mushu gives her the idea of ping which would make her name hua ping meaning vase if you are a tumblr kid you probably remember that post where it explains that this is slang for gayness this is true it's one of the slang along with cut sleeve shared peach and comrade xiang punishes the soldiers by making them pick up every single grain of rice which reminds me of that poem that must have gotten drilled into your head if you went to elementary school in china you know the one about the farmer working under the sun and how every grain of rice is a result of his hard labor the next morning we get a close-up of mulan's shoes and socks i have to say the shoes and socks in this movie are on point and look distinctly ancient chinese when giving mulan breakfast mushu also commits the sin of sticking the chopsticks upright in the poll and this is a very dubious breakfast the eggs on the porridge okay fine but bacon there was probably no bacon that looked like that in ancient china so this looks like a very american breakfast a chinese breakfast would have stuff like tea eggs fried dough sticks steamed buns or straight up just a bowl of noodles like breakfast can be anything really chinese people don't really subscribe to the notion that you have to eat light for breakfast it's actually very weird for me to eat nothing but cereal like i try to do that because i try to be white i try to i tried to be white once never again once mulan catches up with the rest of the soldiers shang comes and takes off his robe top to the benefit of all of us this movie was truly ahead of its time there is no female fan service only male the weights they use here are clearly modeled after battleground coins the first standardized currency of imperial china thanks qing shuang these coins were round on the outside to represent the sky and had a square hole to represent the earth in ancient chinese belief the sky was round and the earth was flat so it was like a bowl turned over a surface they were close you guys very close also this hole made it easier just to string the coins together then comes i'll make a man out of you one of the greatest disney songs if you're gonna do a training montage this is the only acceptable way through the whole thing xiang refuses to stop being shirtless and we are eternally grateful for this why are they training with both staffs they're the original weapon of choice for chinese people before metal working got more refined whole wars were fought with these staffs there was this legendary war between the two big ancestors of chinese people the yellow emperor and the flame emperor where apparently so much blood was spilled that these stats were hydroplaning on the blood and here imagine if sean looked down for like 15 degrees this whole movie would be 50 minutes shorter and obviously gym was not part of the curriculum of ancient chinese schools unless you were rich or elite you probably wouldn't even go to a single day of school but lines like these are for comedic effect so they get a pass fireworks they were indeed invented in china though it would be at least a century after this era in the song dynasty which follows the tongue dynasty before that people would scare off evil spirits by throwing bamboo into fires which would produce a loud crack shang is shirtless even when firing mulan in the middle of the night amazing but then comes the most pivotal moment of mulan where she figures out how to climb the pole with her wits instead of brute force after that everyone's training takes a turn for the better at one point after mulan defeats shang during sparring sean gives mulan the same look that nala gives simba and you know what that means shang is by 2020. now back to the huns shani randomly commits environmental damage to remind us that he is indeed evil his falcon brings him a little girl's doll and the other hands pull some sherlock holmes level analysis to figure out that the imperial army has reached the village in the tonghao pass they then decide to pull a sneak attack on them meanwhile mulan goes to take a bath i appreciate how they had mushu cover his eyes with his ears he's a true ally but right after she gets in yao ling and shampoo show up one of them throws off a very anachronistic pair of heart pattern underwear this is something an ancient chinese person definitely would not have worn for the longest time pants were even open crotch under the robes so those pretty boys you see in c dramas if this was before a certain time period they were swinging free down there mulan is obviously freaked out that they came but there's a sweet moment where ling tries to make things right with her after all the bullying mushu saves her from the awkwardness by biting ling's butt which makes ling thinks there's a snake in the water chinese dragon are known to turn to snakes when they're seriously injured it happened to the dragon king of the ec and a myth on their way back mulana musha overhears saying his troops are not ready to fight mushroom is pissed about this because he needs mulan to be a war hero so he sneaks in the chiefu's tent and makes kriki write a fake message from the front lines obviously this painting is meant to be comedic but it's accurate in that the artists would frequently write short poems at the corners of paintings and snap it with a snap from what i can read of the chinese on this it basically says for loyal brother chi fu on a day of a spring month it's legit but the letter kriki writes oh boy not legit chinese i'm pretty sure they took all these characters from a chinese takeout menu because it's got a fragrant crispy skin kung pao one character from general so's chicken oh my god and after ricky rewrites it to sound more urgent as mushu demanded it's still the same characters but mushu makes a puppet out of a suit of armor and delivers the nonsense letter to chifu anyway while writing a panda pretty sure this will land you in jail if you tried this in modern day the letter does work though somehow and the troops march off to the tune of a girl worth fighting for they pass landscapes inspired by iconic chinese tourist spots like the mountains of guilin the statues of the loman grottos and rice terraces this silly bro song ends up making one of the best cinematic transitions ever to the massacred village it's so effective because they walk in complete stunned silence as the realities of war hit them for the very first time they don't show a single corpse they probably can't yet this movie makes you feel the loss of all these lives and then even though shang just lost his father he keeps his composure and continues to lead the troops to the imperial city but mushu accidentally sets off one of the firework cannons from mulan's cargo and arrows descend from the huns the imperial troops fend off a few with the cannons but then an entire hun army comes there's only one cannon left and shang commands y'all to aim it at xiang yu but mulan figures out that the best way to go for a party kill is to hit the snowy peak and cause an avalanche instead she loses her match as shan yu closes in but remembers that mushu is a dragon who can spit fire which reminds me that i totally forgot to mention this but chinese dragons don't spit fire they spit water but anyway mulan hits the mountains buries hundreds of huns alive and cements her reputation as the disney princess with the highest kill count and she's proud of it too very shanyu wounds her in the process but she manages to escape with shang for a moment anyway then a second later he slips away from her and she has to surf her horse to go get him they drop off of the snowy cliff hang by only the sturdiest rope ever but shampoo comes in clutch and saves them all apparently here we were robbed of sean saying he wants to kiss mulan ah disney in the middle of the celebrations mulan's wound acts up and she passes out i don't know where they found a doctor in the middle of the snowy mountains but he is dressed like an actual ancient chinese one he has a box and gourd full of medicine he makes sean dramatically discover that mulan has breasts she says she doesn't mean for it to go this far what does she mean here because she saved his life shawn decides that it's only right to spare her which she probably isn't actually allowed to do so he just takes his troops and leaves instead of executing her left alone qrikey makes a tiny campfire and mushu starts roasting a dumpling over it this implies they were carrying dumplings as rations which would be they won't perish in like two days mulan and her animal companions have a really nice moment together where they cheer each other up but then shanyu turns out to be alive after all and yells so loudly that mulan discovers this actually all of the huns with distinctive character designs turn out to be alive and mulan watches them head to the imperial city in the city a celebration parade is going on because they think they've won the war these brass instruments shown in this shot are so now iconic to northern china and they are so loud usually they're blown at weddings or funerals the troops are very sad in spite of their assumed victory though probably because of what happened with mulan but even after mulan shows up they don't believe her about the hans being alive she heads to the imperial palace to find the emperor instead the equivalent of a karen asking for the manager except mulan is justified in this the palace is clearly modeled after the forbidden city which was only built 600 years ago and the whole thing is still there it took like over a million workers 14 years to build the troops then march up to meet the emperor those girls in charge of holding giant fans behind the emperor actual job in ancient china they just did this to make him look cool there's a wider shot of the palace which makes it look tiny the forbidden city is supposed to be a city palaces in ancient china weren't single fancy buildings but a huge complex and believe it or not the forbidden city is actually one of the smallest imperial palaces on record the daming palace during the tang dynasty like actually of this era is 4.5 times larger than the forbidden palace just as the emperor congratulates shang for winning the war it's revealed that chanyu blended in with the animal statues on the palace roof which are also directly taken from the forbidden palace also his fellow huns have pulled a trojan dancing lion to get in this is what you get for hiring unnecessary dancing lions the huns kidnapped the emperor into his own palace which actually happened quite a few times in actual history and the troops tried to bust the door down using one of the stone lions beside the door by the way usually these lines are supposed to be like male female pairs and they're differentiated by like the male has a smooth ball under his claw and the female has a cub but then in this shot both of these lions have smooth balls so you know what they're gay they're gay lions the palace is guarded by gay lions in my original thread i said that they were lesbians i'm sorry that was wrong i remembered it wrong so anyway mulan thinks they won't break it in time so she gets an idea to dress her friends and drag thankfully nothing happens to the emperor in the time it takes for them to get into full drag they climb the palace pillars using their silk sashes also known as p bull in an excellent gender role shattering parallel to their manly training sequence but actually this scene is very offensive i do have one huge grievance with it why isn't shang in drag meanwhile the huns have taken the emperor up to the balcony where xiang tries to force him to bow to him ling yao and shampoo try to get past the huns disguised as cocky mines change falcon almost blows their cover but mushu straight up singes it a random note here mongolian barbecue is not mongolian in the slightest it was invented in taiwan in the 1950s by a comedian anyway the squad defeats the huns using the fruit they used for fake boobs allowing shang to burst onto the balcony and save the emperor shangyu starts angrily yelling again and knocks away sean's tiny back up knife shangri tries to credit zhang for his defeat but mulan corrects him like the strong female protagonist she is xiangi chases her onto the rooftop while mushu scams some firework people for some fireworks shiny thinks mulan is out of ideas but mulan disarms him with a fan which was apparently a real martial art technique that the production team referenced the chinese on the fireworks here just says danger and here you know shanyu is dead but they do not explicitly address this because this is a disney movie the squad chiefu and the emperor reunite on the stairs where the emperor lifts off all the rule-breaking things mulan did but then bows to her for saving them all aww everyone else also bows but since they always have to be of a lower status than the emperor they go all the way down into a koto the emperor wants to make mulan a member of his council but mulan says she wants to go home just like in the original ballad also pause for him here the chinese says general lee report so the emperor gives mulan his pendant and shanyu's sword as proof of what she's done and she hugs him to answer yao's question no she is definitely not allowed to do that so mulan and xiang have their iconic awkward palace goodbye and then the emperor roasts shang for it back at the huawei's day mulan's dad shows her the ultimate level of asian parent affection even higher than a plate of cut fruit a hug but grandma is still asian parent and happy with mulan because she didn't show up with a boyfriend that is truly like peak asian family right there but then kyu shang showing up he's still awkward but mulan invites him for dinner while grandma invites him to stay forever while george takei lovingly watches over them the ancestors then have a dance party where they dance like white people and so ends one of the greatest disney movies so even though this movie was culturally inaccurate in places that didn't stop me from enjoying it so much because it had so much heart which was what the 2020 movie was missing like i am honestly not that pretentious about historical accuracy i mean most chinese-made historical media aren't even that accurate i just want to have a good time my anger at the 2020 movie was because it failed to give me that good time and also because using authenticity as a shield for its terrible terrible business practices like if you're gonna be all oh we're respecting chinese culture more this time and then you deliver us that movie like of course we're gonna get mad at you and after we're watching this original cartoon and i honestly find it to be more accurate and respectful and it feels more like an eastern story too the 2020 movie was just a blatant cash grab that felt utterly flat because it was too scared to do anything exciting for fear of offending the chinese government but that just ended up making everybody hate it like my god everybody hated this movie if you didn't hate it my wish my expectations for media could be that low so anyway thanks for making it to the end of this probably gigantic video i don't even know how how long the final version is gonna be and then who am i to have rambled about all that well i am an actual chinese person and i am an author my debut science fiction novel comes out fall 2021 from penguin random house it's a pacific rim meets the handmaid's tale reimagining of the only female emperor in chinese history uza tien check it out on goodreads if you're interested also i'm sorry this video took so long for me to make i want to thank everybody who supported me on kofi to help me get a new computer and camera because honestly my old equipment was so bad it took me like 20 hours to edit my first video and also like a bunch of stuff happened i was very busy but hopefully you guys enjoyed this video enough to forgive me for the long wait and if you want to see more videos from me consider supporting me on kofi anyway bye

Channel: Xiran Jay Zhao

Views: 1,921,892

Rating: 4.9675722 out of 5

Keywords: mulan, mulan cartoon, mualn 1998

Id: 8SHC7CnmErM

Length: 39min 5sec (2345 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020