Mulan’s Cultural Journey to the West: From a Chinese Heroine to a Globalized Figure
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1403.34Keywords:
Mulan, Orientalism, Chinese elements, adaptation, subversionAbstract
Disney’s live-action Mulan (2020) was adapted from the animated Disney film Mulan (1988) and has caused heated discussion after its release. The film successfully wins the Western market because it incorporates Western elements, such as the image of the Xianniang from the legendary story. However, Chinese audiences fail to fully accept the rewriting of traditional Chinese heroine in this live-action film because it partly subverts the content of Chinese legend. From the perspective of Said’s Orientalism, this paper discusses the interpretation of Chinese elements in the film, such as Phoenix, qi, and the traditional Chinese ethics of loyalty, courage, truth, and filial piety, intending to reveal the operation of cultural capital in the international cultural market of film and television in a more comprehensive way. This paper will further discuss that the canonization of Mulan sheds some enlightenment on how to introduce more Chinese literary works into the world as part of world literature.
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