According to Frus and Williams, Mulan was Disney’s first animated film with a Chinese lead character with its first film produced in 1998 (156). Mulan was produced by Pam Coats and directed by Barry Cook and Tony Brancroft . According to Frus and Williams, Mulan tells a tale of a strong and smart young Chinese woman who is bored with life and in need of an adventure. She pretended to be a boy in order to be able to fight in the war in place of Fa Zhou, Mulan’s disabled veteran father and bring honour to her family.
Mulan goes through various challenges to achieve this but at the end she succeeds at bringing honour to her family and country. According to Frus and Williams, the story of Mulan was based on the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan who was a woman warrior that fought in her father’s place in the army and gained merits but refused any rewards and went back to her home country instead ( 157). Frus and Williams point out that Mulan’s story shows a young woman who is dissatisfied with her life and decides to embark on a journey in search of true self (158).
The goal of this paper is to critique ideologies and stereotypes of children’s’ innocence, gender roles and competence using Disney’s Mulan as a basis for the argument. To achieve this goal, this paper will be divided into two parts, the first part will discuss on how Mulan challenges certain stereotypes while the second part will differentiate Mulan’s behaviour from the general stereotypes and ideologies of the female child. Geopalakrishman and Persiani-Becker discuss on how roles are gendered in the sense that boys are expected to be tough and not cry while girls need boys to rescue them (103).
Since media portrayals have a huge impact on children it is important to examine what kind of portrayals are in children’s media. In the Disney film, Mulan, male children are portrayed as competent as they are sent to fight in the war to protect their country from the Hun invasion. The emperor decreed that one man from each family should volunteer to fight against the Hun army. For the fate of the entire country to be put in the hands of children, there must have been a high level of competence.
Although the female children were less active social actors as they were prepared by a matchmaker for marriage as their role was to find a suitable suitor to marry, Mulan goes against her societal roles and defiles authority by fighting in the war in place of her father and outshining her male counterparts in order to bring honour to her family. Frus and Williams point out that Mulan’s feminist mindset relate to children globally as it mirrors their quest for self- realization (165).
The story of Mulan shows that children are not innocent and in need of protection but social actors as there is a lot of responsibility placed on the children. The fate of the whole of china is in the hands of the children as they are trained to fight in the war against the Hun army. The children in this film are not only aware of what is happening around them but are also not shielded from the harsh realities of life as they are sent to experience war first hand. Mulan who didn’t want her aging veteran father to fight in the war went to great extents as mentioned earlier in this paper to take her father’s place in the war.
Mulan goes against the ideology of the roles of boys and girls as she doesn’t fit into the ideology of how girls should be. Frus and Williams point out that there is a gap between Mulan’s behaviour and the expected behaviour of young women in her society (159). Mulan is meant to impress the matchmaker in an interview so that she could be properly betrothed but this proved to be an impossible task and led to her dishonouring her family as the society’s expectation was that she could only bring honour to her family through marriage.
After failing to impress the match maker, Mulan jumps at the opportunity to fight in the war against the Hun army as she saw it as another chance to prove her worth. Girls were not allowed to fight in the war which led to Mulan disguising herself as a boy with the help of her dragon, Mushu. He also had to change her name from Mulan to Ping. According to Frus and Williams, “Boys are still the ones who lead active lives and engage in military combat and girls can only do so when they pretend to be male. (165). According to Frus and Williams, “Ping’s glorious triumph also led to the revealing of her secret” (162). Before Mulan’s identity was exposed, she had a voice in the midst of the men but after they discovered her identity, even if she was the sole reason they won the war, no one wanted to listen to what she had to say. Although Mulan went against gender stereotypes, the film also reinforced certain stereotypes.
After Mulan killed the Hun army’s leader the emperor offered to make her a member of the emperor’s council but she declined his offer saying that she wanted to go home instead. This reinforces the stereotype that a girl’s place is at home. According to Frus and Williams, Mulan’s victory as a woman was compromised by the possible engagement to captain Shang at the end (165). To restate the points in this part of the essay, the Disney film, Mulan questions societal ideologies on children’s innocence, competence as well as the gender roles of the society.
It challenges how children are seen as innocent and in need of protection when children in various parts of the world are defending their countries in battle. There are various differences between the society’s construction of children and childhood and how children are in the film Mulan. For example, Mulan portrays children as social actors with the responsibility of protecting China. Mulan opens children’s eyes to hash realities as in various parts of the world children engage in fighting wars.
According to McBride’s book The War Crime of Child Soldier Recruitment, “In 1998, UNICEF estimated that there were over 300,000 minors involved in more than 30 conflicts worldwide. ” (2). Children have been directly involved in historical events like wars for a very long time which shows that they are social actors. According to McBride, although the amount of children involved in wars worldwide reduced in places like Sudan and chad, there are reports of the recruitment of child suicide bombers in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan (3).
The concept of childhood is socially constructed and the way children are treated in various parts of the world differs. According to McBride, the Convention on the Rights of the Child provides that a child is a person under the age of 18 although in some non- western countries, at a significantly younger age, children are responsible for fighting in wars and getting involved in roles that will benefit the society economically (4). This proves that children are not as innocent or as non- competent as the society constructs them to be.
According to Hutchby and Moran-Ellis, “Children are neither as innocent nor as non- competent as common sense ideologies of childhood often make them out to be, but active agents who possess and can assert complex social competencies in their own right. ” (8). Mulan challenges the ideology that children are non-competent. The male children in china were giving the responsibility of protecting China by fighting in the war which is not a role that will be given to people except a level of competence is expected from them. The soldiers were trained by Captain Shang who was also a young man.
At the end, not only did the soldiers fight against the Hun army, with the help of Mulan they won the war and brought honour to China. Mulan also challenges ideologies on gender roles. It is important to try to change the ideologies on gender roles as it affects children, especially girls. According to Geopalakrishnan and Persiani-Becker, “Studies have speculated and reported on the effects of the gender inequality, specifically on adolescent girls, which results in a flawed self-image, lack of motivation and drive, and gender stereotyping. ” (102).
Geopalakrishnan and Persiani-Becker discuss on how children begin to form their ideas on gender well before preadolescence as they begin to understand what it means to be male or female (102). According to Geopalakrishnan and Persiani-Becker, at the preadolescent stage, children begin to develop attitudes towards games for various genders, activities and gendered occupational roles (102). The Disney film, Mulan goes against this stereotype as there was a twist in gender roles. Mulan ended up saving Captain Shang’s life while putting her own life at risk.
Geopalakrishman and Persiani-Becker point out how men are stereotyped to fix things while women are to become homemakers (103). Mulan goes against this stereotype as she enlists herself in the army disguised as a boy, learns how to be tough and “fight like a man” and ends up being the sole reason that China won the war with the use of her intelligence. Although Mulan goes against this stereotype, she ends up enforcing it at the end of the film as she declines the Emperor’s offer to become a member of his council and decides to go back home.
When she got home, she presented the Hun army leader’s sword to her father to show that she had honoured her family but her grandmother said “she should have brought home a man instead of a sword”. Mulan’s “Prince charming”, Captain Shang then goes to Mulan’s house at the end of the film which re-enforces the gender stereotype of women finding husbands and settling down to have a family although that wasn’t shown in the film. According to Geopalakrishman and Persiani-Becker, many recent authors of children’s books and films are recognising the importance of representing gender equality in children’s literature and are ncluding more relevant issues (103).
This led to the production of the children’s film, Mulan which is discussed in this essay. According to Geopalakrishman and Persiani-Becker, “with literature being such a powerful tool in today’s classrooms, libraries and homes, how gender is portrayed in children’s books can contribute to the image children develop on their own role and that of their gender in society. ” (104). How gender is portrayed in films are as important as how they are represented in children’s books. In conclusion, this essay discusses on how children are portrayed in children’s films using the Disney film, Mulan as an example.
It discusses on child innocence, competence, children as social actors as well as gender roles of male and female children. It goes further to use Mulan to question gender roles as Mulan goes against countless gender stereotypes constructed by the society. Although Mulan enforces some of the gender stereotypes, she mostly goes against the stereotypes of the female child. She enlists herself in the Chinese army in place of her father, tricks the Chinese soldiers into believing she was a boy by changing her name, cutting her hair and acting like a boy and finally helped China win the war.
