Film
Among the many films inspired by the legend of Hua Mulan, Disney's Mulan is probably the most famous. Perfect in its ninety minutes of adventure, action and musical, Mulan makes an art of its minimalism and simplicity. Three years after Pocahontas a new Disney princess, for the first time as a real heroine destined to become a feminist and emancipation symbol. Having received a call to arms for her elderly father, Mulan decides to take his place and disguises herself as a man to join the army and prove her inestimable valour. When one considers the fact that the film's overall theme is war, certainly not the most encouraging of topics, the film's success is even more extraordinary: Disney may have lost much of the visual and narrative pleasantness that animation has always sought, but the authors managed to portray the conflict as a looming presence, without showing it directly except with schematic duels or significant reticence. The film's comical companions, the guardian dragon Mushu and the cricket Cre-Kee, lighten things up and create situations often on the level of the much more ironic Hercules.
Art
The American Gothic is a work of art from the 1930s that has inspired endless reinterpretations in pop culture and continues to stand out for its modernity. A few years earlier we saw it in Beauty and the Beast, now we find it again in Mulan. Grant Wood's work portrays in a few strokes the everyday, anonymity, a snapshot of life that is probably irrelevant and mediocre: a sixty-year-old farmer holding a pitchfork, next to him his sullen-faced daughter and in the background a wooden house in the Carpenterian Gothic style. Wood seems to have chosen the style and subject matter of the painting to create an image that embodied the ethics and puritanical virtues that, in his view, well defined the character of Midwesterners struggling with the Great Depression, but the result was perceived as an almost grotesque and caricatured portrait that almost seems to mock the crude lifestyle of American society at the time. Iowa farm wives, for example, protested against the work perceiving that they were being caricatured and mocked by the painter.
The same puritanical virtues are embodied by Mulan's ancestors, who in the form of spirits we see gathering in the temple of the Fa family to try to resolve the uniqueness of the descendant. Like a sort of tableau vivant, or non-living in this case, two of these ancestors assume the same position (complete with pitchfork) as the characters in American Gothic, insisting precisely on the question of honour "Traditional values will collapse, not to say go to ruin!" laments the ancestor with pitchfork in hand, reliving the drama of Americans in the Great Depression while simultaneously explaining the importance of these values (based on good reputation and marriage), also from an economic point of view. In this way, Disney wants to emphasise a correlation between the two civilisations, the American and the Chinese, historically rivals but paradoxically not so different.
External Links
Watch Mulan on Disney +
Painting:
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