Mulan (2020): Disney Remakes claim another soul....

this video is brought to you by skillshare the first thousand people to click on the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare premium okay i was born with the mystical ability to perform barely adequate martial arts stunts truly i am a witch yes it is an ancient curse called too many midichlorians it means that no matter how awesome you are everybody's gonna hate you so keep that specialness inside sweetie by the way did you know our family protector is the phoenix that is reborn in fire isn't that something only western phoenixes do our bird isn't even called a phoenix shhh this is our super culturally respectful movie shh i'm the sister i'm afraid of spiders that's my only character trait my emperor were being invaded by some edgelord and a witch oh witches are the worst chi midichlorians must never be used for destructive purposes um but men have chi and we literally send them out to kill people yes that was the point of the line to lay out my blatantly sexist attitude i'm glad you picked up on that haha this makeup for my arranged marriage only allows me to have one facial expression completely unlike the rest of the movie ha empowering women means slamming down feminine things they have raised a bad daughter uh i pulled off a series of impressive balancing acts because you flipped over the table because my sister screamed at a spider how is this my fault mom sis you were there you want to stand up for me sorry sweetie honor well i'm gonna go die for the emperor now um dad know your place uterus haver i literally didn't say anything i'm taking your armor bye i regret every kind word i ever said to my daughter thanks dad i'm so glad i'm about to go die for this super supportive family whoa hey sorry i pushed you i will slit your throat hey i like you we should sniff each other's necks and hang out naked in a lake sometime men you will be put to death for breaking any of the following rules stealing desertion smiling or making any references to music numbers this is a super mature big kid movie and everyone has to look like you injected yourself with botox or on the verge of crying yo jude what kind of women you like man i like girls that are courageous [Laughter] this is the peak of our development i don't care what girls look like i just care what they cook like get out you're a comparatively impressive fighter but i still feel like you're holding something back but now i have carried two buckets of water up a mountain i have evolved that man is so great i totally let him bang my daughter oh no we're at the sunburn village everybody talk about how sad it is the kids will not understand how sad this is if we don't talk about it bros i'm scared about going to war don't worry we'll protect each other all of you who have had maybe 30 seconds of screen time hold there a witch i shall fight you with the power of the male genitalia that i totally have no you don't curses i have been thwarted you lost because there is nothing worse than lying about what you are now i'm gonna go pretend to be birds and also a whole bunch of other people did it ever occur to anybody that i might be the phoenix oh look my extra chest padding to reinforce my lie saved my life clearly this is a sign from the heavens that stripping off my armor and charging into a warring battlefield with my hair whipping in my face will make me a better fighter whoa bro these birds have completely blinded us we are completely helpless um birds aren't bothering me so i'm gonna go do whatever hey come fire over here where there's clearly five people foyer you've activated my trap card i am so sorry i lied to save my father's life to concede to your bs sexist rules please execute me well now you asked so now it doesn't seem like a punishment hey sister we're the same together with my ability to possess people and completely alter my appearance to humans and animals and your barely passable wirework stunks will be unstoppable and we'll start our own country with blackjack and equality if you're so powerful why do you follow this [ __ ] that treats you like [ __ ] hey he plays a very important part in my plan is it a bad boy thing cause it feels like it's a bad boy thing anyway no way i'll join you you kill people and my duty is to fight for the emperor well you're not in the army anymore and you know the emperor's killed like a bunch of people like his whole thing is that he conquers and kills people okay i don't like support everything the government does it's just like my family's here and i'm fighting more for them than i am for the country and i'm under contract that's exactly why we should wreck this [ __ ] besides worry khan's on his way to kill the emperor right now anyway oh thanks for that wait what did i say hey guys just reminding you that it's totally okay to kill me um but they're gonna go attack the emperor why should we believe a liar okay i literally am constantly offering myself up for execution because i lied anyway you said that you trust you said that you trust hua boy's name why do you not trust hua mulan hey that is my line yeah but if you said it then he would actually have to be assertive in front of a male authority figure and we can't have that but it's okay we all believe you anyway wow this moment would be really emotional if we had established any sort of bond between us whatsoever emperor we are being attacked we must get you to safety i shall face the avatar myself what a woman leading a man's army well clearly my entire life struggle for equality has been nullified so i guess i'm gonna go die now you cannot defeat me girl no you must protect your emperor even if you have to use your body as a meat shield i mean you can do it soldier this is the third time we did the kick the arrow trick so it's not really special anymore but doesn't matter i won hey mulan you want to put up your hair and go somewhere quiet okay you need to be over there thank you for single-handedly saving the entire kingdom minichlorian super soldier lady wanna be a general yeah thanks but i'm gonna go home okay we're gonna follow you there and keep giving you stuff until you say yes sounds like you're not really giving me a choice what kind of message would we be sending if we gave women a choice on whether or not they wanted to be girl bosses uh just and already you know i've really been trying i've really been trying to get to a place where i can painlessly co-exist with these disney remakes i barely said anything last year about aladdin and lion king except for that dig in my worst best list and a couple of angry tweets but i get it i know that these remakes are not gonna replace the animated films i mean it's disney like they're ever gonna stop pushing their most beloved animated classics into the face of every child on the planet till the end of time and i know that a lot of people who see these films are just cosplay curious i just want to see what it looks like in live action and that the psychological impulse to defend nostalgic things in spite of any shred of logic has resulted in numerous cases of toxic and regressive behavior within and outside of the realm of movies but considering this year has been one long unending personification of the this is fine meme guess who gets the honor of being my stress ball now as i have said multiple times at this point i absolutely did not need this movie to be the animated film because the animated film is virtually perfect exactly the way it is and that's not going anywhere and we already saw how well the past copy and paste jobs turned out i am completely fine with the idea of a completely different alternative interpretation if they had just turned out to be better movies but what does particularly get under the skins of animation fans about these films is when they're defended by fans and critics by being referred to as the mature or grown-up versions of these stories yes you can always tell when someone is a big kid when they use the term grown-up the use of this term is so derogatory and also usually untrue because they're only mature in the most superficial ways it's live action and they pull back on the comedy so now it's super serious it's that it looks mature to a seven-year-old and hey maybe that's what all these critics actually meant and that it comparatively seems better than the other disney remakes which is not saying a lot but if i am giving these people the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they're not just animation is for babies people they probably just mean this in terms of pulling back specifically on the comedic animal sidekicks and to be fair even animated disney has kind of evolved past these most disney pixar films made in the past two decades have kept these characters to a minimum except for olaf and if there is one thing i can say about the animated film it is not a problem at all that it's comedic but that a lot of that comedy originates from the very fun and exaggerated supporting cast to the point that our protagonist who in comparison has a much more understated personality can sometimes get lost in the shuffle though still retaining a significant arcane presence that and given that chyna didn't particularly care for the musical comedy version of one of their great cultural figures but only because these aspects don't translate well like what is basically a romantic comedy opera and given that the only time hollywood is comfortable with providing representation is when it's also attached to a nostalgic property that's guaranteed to make money anyway creating a version of mulan that has less comedy and focuses more on the action and the protagonist is not a terrible idea and then you remember that china itself has made a multitude of its own live-action mulan movies for its own cultural icon so no this movie still did not need to happen but since we're already here content-wise the most significant divergence that most audiences have been relentless about is that now mulan is a born martial arts master that is also magic okay so i get that this movie may not be the best time to have this conversation but conversations surrounding overpowered female characters tend to get very needlessly aggressive i don't know about you but i can recall a handful of times where there has been plenty of enjoyment to be had watching an exceedingly powerful or skilled person just carve through a crowd full of randos in fact many of the film renditions of mulan made by china usually start with mulan already having some degree of skill and there is some amount of logic to the idea that if you want to make a fun action movie to have lots of fun action stuff that your action star be able to do action stuff right from the start and not wait until the last third however if action is what you want to spend the last half of your film doing and being super awesome better than everyone else awesome fighter lady is the big hook of your protagonist then it's preferable that your action be good and the action is technically the most passable part of the film because it's the part where nobody's talking for those who don't know mulan is imitating the wusha style of martial arts films usually defined as being set historically with weapons sometimes with fantasy elements and often treats the laws of physics as predominantly optional like in crouching tiger hidden dragon where they're like air running through the bamboo and jumping on the surfaces of water so you have things in mulan where she's like backflipping on a horse and people running up walls and kicking arrows and other things that look kinda goofy there's some okay moments but only from the perspective of people who have never seen martial arts films before because the big draw of martial arts films is watching martial artists do their thing but too often mulan does the american action movie thing where they rapid cut and jerk the camera around to make fairly basic action seem more exciting than it is like donnie yen the guy from this fight fighting against jet li has the scene where all he does is swing a sword over his head while it continuously cuts back two unimpressed shots of all the soldiers watching this is essentially baby's first wusha film now i am completely guessing here but one of the film's big criticisms especially from chinese audiences has been treating the concept of chi like it's the force and i have a theory that maybe they decided to go in that direction because wusha action does look so unreal so they needed to explain it or else american audiences would be confused because if there's one thing we've learned from the beauty and the beast film is that everything needs to make sense not that that's an excuse it was still a horrible idea and not that it worked because you still had plenty of people criticizing how ridiculous and unrealistic it was and if it is for action's sake that you make that decision for your protagonist i would have expected maybe a little bit more action pieces in the first half of the film and not having the big inspiring standout moment of training being where she carries two buckets of water up a mountain now the chinese mulan films may not have been action masterpieces themselves but they had different focuses it was much more about military maneuvers and particularly her bond with her fellow soldiers and i did say i didn't want her to be overshadowed but character interactions are still great for development but in this film mulan only has a handful of prominent interactions with the others all of which are fairly brief and all where she does the least talking so you created the worst of both worlds mulan is still overshadowed in these moments but we also don't know anything about these characters or feel any camaraderie between them which is especially disappointing because now we feel absolutely nothing during the big i believe hua mulan moment and don't get me started on you you creepy creepy shang replacement still starting out as powerful didn't need to be a problem if they had given it a completely different story with a fitting conflict maybe we could have time skipped to mulan when she's a general but that would only be if they wanted to make something new and interesting and actually about the legacy of the actual person that may or may not have existed instead of making jedi elsa because the actual problem isn't about merely being skilled it's about being gifted which aside from removing whatever positive will there was by trying to make this more like the original ballad of mulan which pretty much stopped at directly referencing the very last verse about the two rabbits that was delivered with all of the rushed eloquence of sci-fi channels earthsea wind and i rode alongside two rabbits running side by side i think one was a male one was a female did you see those red markings on the side of it that's very attractive i've read about a dragon once with markings like those fascinating you tell me about the fire one night this undoes a lot of what animated mulan accomplishes well it's not merely that it removes the inspiring relatability of animated mulan's every woman starting at the bottom now she's here arc it was just as notable that mulan succeeded in a male space by not relying on traditional masculine strength but her own unique cleverness and ingenuity this directly calls out the limitations of systemic sexism that by turning away half the population as well as limiting your methodology for success you're actively depriving your country of capable talented people innovative methodologies and resources that you could be implementing but this mulan succeeds because she was accidentally born with the gift of chi that is usually only found in men thus she gets ahead by doing man things in the traditional man way this doesn't allude that any other woman could have accomplished the same thing if they had started at the bottom and worked hard because they weren't born with chi ergo there is no cause to change the system she's just the exception and otherwise they can keep doing things exactly the way that they always have and then injecting what is a completely different character into the animation outline naturally caused everything else to implode around it again i did not need this to be the animation because the animation is the animation all it needed to do was walk on its own legs but it insists on retreading the animated film and doing it really badly especially the training segment reads like cliff notes like it's jumping from point to point because it knows you've already seen it and better but even without the direct comparisons this is just a technically subpar movie from the writing to the acting there's no emotion tension or chemistry and it's just a series of baffling filmmaking decisions like i didn't need to see her cutting her hair because i know that historically at this time that men didn't cut their hair which is why she doesn't do it besides for me the badass moment of that scene is the electrosynth and i didn't expect this movie to break into another electrosynthetic but i did expect this scene to do something like it just cuts and she's in the armor you couldn't have even montaged her putting it on then there's this segment where she's traveling to the training and then she almost dies but then the phoenix is there and that was all like 30 seconds what was the point of that the clumsy adr is embarrassing you you do and of course everyone has already noted the honestly hilarious smash cut that goes from mulan talking to her general to the burned village you know part of the advantage of having comedy means that the dramatic moments actually feel dramatic when they happen they don't really stand out in a sea of perpetual emotional gray especially if you have virtually no transition for them this really does feel like what probably was a longer movie that someone just took a crass hatchet to just for the sake of getting it under two hours where's our hashtag karo cut and then you know the typical disney remake dialogue that sounds like 12 year old melodramatic fan fiction there's no struggle in the training arc because you already know that she's good at things so all of the conflict revolves her personal stress over concealing her powers and her identity so after mulan has a panic attack over showing her skills but is finally able to get a break in getting some of the acceptance she always wanted but we still need her to be constantly depressed about something and thus what i think is the true death nail in this movie's coffin that wasn't just the writing or the acting now mulan feels guilty about lying about her true identity because it's not a virtuous thing to do so just to prove that she is a virtuous realized woman she goes charging into a warring battlefield with no armor you know there's a part of me that kinda gets this purely from a visual and symbolic stance i mean yeah it's impractical but so is her back flipping on a horse at least this way we can recognize mulan in a wide shot and she stands out from all of the other soldiers plus you know she magic i was actually more annoyed by the fact that she does this literally right after not just her armor but her chest binding the symbol of her lie saves her life so of course right after that she takes all that off even symbolically it contradicts itself boy good thing that voiceover was there to clarify what was happening or else it would have been completely confusing but then that leads to the most insane part of the movie where she outs herself and virtually demands to be executed because honor because following the rules of a blatantly unfair system even if it was to save her father's life is more important than being alive empowering i know this is supposed to be symbolic of being true to yourself but it's in a situation where revealing who she is can result in her death like what is this trying to say real mulan or ballad mulan kept up this charade for 10 years and no one knew was she a bad person for 10 years because she lied that's like saying that we should shame every single queer person in history that didn't come out of the closet because they were too afraid of being murdered and i know that you tried to get around this by establishing that the punishment for dishonesty was not death but you kind of forgot about if i expose her like our own people will kill her 200 million dollar movie good god and this plays even worse alongside the witch character whose ultimate goal is about change or at least acknowledging that the current way sucks but then she dies but mulan lives because she followed the rules and was virtuous and knew her place and was willing to die for the emperor because that's how you get ahead girls don't make a fuss about a blatantly prejudiced system follow all the rules make absolutely no mistakes never be disrespectful to your superior even when they threaten you be a hundred times better than everyone around you and then literally offer your body and soul for the sake of protecting a problematic status quo like a good little second-class citizen and then maybe you'll be given equality one day playing this alongside the actual protests and the crackdown by the chinese government it may not have been intentional but it is not surprising that this has been read as virtually nationalistic propaganda it's odd because mulan has had many readings and reinterpretations throughout its history yes she's symbolized female empowerment and progression and change and equality for being a female warrior though she was far from the only one in history but especially in recent interpretations she's also symbolized traditional chinese values like family fidelity and military strength and patriotism in fact mulan has been used as a symbol for both sides of the current conflict and that feels like this movie it's trying so hard to appeal to two cultural audiences wanting to be different from the animation but also the same as the animation this movie keeps trying to thread that needle and it just flopped but hey at least chyna will love it right that box office cash cow we've bent over backwards to please well i certainly can't speak for if or how many people appreciated this from at least a representation standpoint there has been a considerable number of asian american and chinese audiences that have really hated this film from the laundry list of cultural inaccuracies to cartoonish outdated depictions including its relentless honor fixation and the amazement that a 200 million dollar film hired a mostly chinese cast and didn't double film it in chinese but a lot of the feedback has been the basics the acting is wooden mulan is stoic and unengaging the fighting is underwhelming and for a 200 million dollar film it looks oddly cheap in fact for all of the china didn't like the animation excuse because it has been over 20 years and it is a disney film there has in fact been a young generation in china that has grown up on the disney film and plenty of people in china also say that the animation is better even the handful of positive reviews usually mentioned somewhere hey guys they're just dumb americans they don't know any better it's supposed to be a fairy tale yes the super serious empowering grown-up movie that was too good for mushu and too good for music numbers is a dumb american fairy tale and that's before we get to the boycotts over filming a stone's throw away from sites of detention camps and usually even for unpopular movies i think it's important to acknowledge when a film is visually pleasing because movies are in fact a visual medium it's not all about narrative nitpicks but considering where they shot it i'm not prepared to give them that credit you'd think in the age of high quality green screen and digital map paintings and mostly filming in new zealand and again a 200 million dollar film and this is where you decide it's that important to shoot on location and then finally best of all because they didn't like all the attention the camps were getting in relation to the movie the government officially banned the chinese media from covering the movie at all right after it came back with a disappointing box office for its first weekend well i really hope all that artistic and moral compromising was worth it i'd feel barely relieved that at least the film's negative response means that people are acknowledging these ill practices instead of making excuses for them because if the film had been good they definitely would have hey at least it was for art if i thought at all that disney might actually learn something from this anyway thank you so much to skillshare for sponsoring this video skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes from art to music to business to freelancing personal productivity and of course film and animation indulging in or experimenting with something new and creative is a great way to break up your routine and keep yourself healthy and engaged especially if it's a passion or skill that you wanted to try but never knew where or how to start the classes are mostly less than an hour so are easily manageable and frequently come with resources as well as projects to get your wheels turning still with all of the stress these times are bringing it might be hard to get motivated to get these projects underway so i really appreciated real productivity building habits that last with thomas frank because sometimes you just need someone with a really friendly voice giving you very simple easy instructions to help you feel like you're getting anything done and i bet there'll be something that will help and inspire you too the first thousand people to use the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership [Music] you

Channel: CellSpex

Views: 484,139

Rating: 4.9488916 out of 5

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Id: ONVyLTBPz8E

Length: 26min 22sec (1582 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020