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for two free months of valuable education Mulan was one of the last
installments of the Disney Renaissance it gave us a small glimpse into an
extremely prominent figure in Chinese folklore for people like myself it was
one of the few if not the only stories we ever heard from China do a quick
google search and you'll find storytellers told the story of Mulan on
film stage and in writing for millennia as part of the I'm going to go with
interesting Disney live-action reboots we will be seeing a live-action Disney
Mulan in 2020 I won't lie, I'm no expert on Chinese history so I want to find out
was Mulan real is she some sort of Joan of Arc figure or is this just an example
of a mythological figure well let's get to clickbait part out of the way first
Hua Mulan was not real the first written record we know of about Mulan was in a
song called The Ballad of Mulan it came from a book called the musical records
of old and new penned in the 6th century CE but we only know about this
through a surviving anthology made in the 11th or 12th century the title of
the text is the music Bureau collection the author Guo Maoqian refers to the
earlier book but we aren't sure if it's a direct copy either way the story of
Mulan existed as a simple poem all the way until the late Ming Dynasty author
Xu Wei converted the poem into a play it had the catchy title the heroine
Mulan goes to war in her father's place something got lost in translation there
this play became the definitive version of the Mulan story it elevated to a
special place in Chinese folklore to the point where now it's considered an
essential part of Chinese culture people have produced many different versions of
the Mulan story but mashing them all together here's the general plot we see
from the 12th century onwards yeah friends we're doing story time Mulan
discovers war is coming to China against quote-unquote the invaders they never
specified who the invaders are the Emperor drafts one male from every
family to serve in the army Mulan is distraught her father is too old to go
to war and her brother is too young to serve for some perplexing reason in the
Disney movie her brother is a dog Mulan's father trained her in soldiering
activity such as martial arts and sword fighting
so Mulan disguised herself as a man to enter in her father's stead over the
next decade Mulan becomes a hero of the battlefield without anyone finding
out she's a woman after several daring heroics she rises
in the ranks to general she earns the loyalty of her men and gains notoriety
for being an expert at military strategy after the war the Emperor meets with
Mulan and her soldiers to give them an award he offers her a position of a high
royal official but she declines it Mulan insists that all she wants is a camel to
go home to her family only then she reveals herself as a woman to her men
who respond with amazement she returns to her family a national hero hey
friends I want to keep giving this channel the time it deserves to put out
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Thank You Skillshare for helping me make step back possible the story is pretty
robust in Chinese folklore probably because it shows virtues that show up
again and again in Chinese culture Mulan is a symbol of both patriotism towards
the state and loyalty towards her father the attempt to balance your loyalty
towards your family and your state is at the core of the story and Mulan excels
at both and this story is compelling artists have adapted to stage and film
many times and more on the way for this I'm going to call in a better pop
culture expert than myself I want you all to welcome to the channel Scott
from the channel nerdsync hey thanks Tristan my name is Scott normally I
cover superheroes and comic book stuff over on my channel and normally I have
like a whole set full of comic books and cool stuff but not today
Mulan was hands-down my favorite Disney movie growing up as a kid no joke before
I was going to record this part I listened to make a man out of you like
maybe like four times mysterious as the Dark Side of the Moo- needless to say
I'm very excited to talk about this film the story of Mulan has been converted to
various media over the centuries but how did we go from a Chinese folktale to a
Disney movie starring Eddie Murphy as a pet dragon well Mulan the movie of many
Millennials childhood memories is not even close to the first film adaptation
that we gather have been Mulan movies since the silent film era there was even
a case where two Mulan films were released within a year of each other in
China in the 1920s heck Disney's Mulan wasn't even the only Mulan animated film
to come out in the year 1998 there was this kind of perplexing straight to VHS
one where Mulan is a caterpillar cool
but how did the house of mouse end up telling this Chinese story to a Western
audience well it all began in the late 80s when Disney set up an animation
studio in Florida after helping animate huge Disney successes like Aladdin
Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King they were allowed to make their own film
they decided the option a bunch of children's books by author Robert
Souci and one of them was the retelling of the story of Mulan so the two
projects on the table were Mulan or a story of a Scottish folk tale with a
dragon luckily at this meeting was animator Barry Cook who happened to know
a little bit about the role of Dragons in Chinese mythology Cook proposed to
add a dragon to the story of Mulan and just kind of go with that they throw
around some other ideas on how to make this movie which in retrospect would
have been terrible one of the ideas was to make Mulan kind of like a romantic
comedy in the vein of Tootsie or mrs. Doubtfire which no thank you
either way with the inspiration of a bunch of industry
veterans cutting-edge animation and a bomb musical number from Donny Osmond we
got Mulan a movie that I obsessed over as a kid and honestly I haven't I
haven't seen it in a while so I think I'm gonna go do that
back to you Tristan thank you Scott now audience you should definitely check out
nerdsync but first you should probably like share subscribe and write a comment
too pledging me your eternal adoration now cinemas changed a tad since 1998
there actually was an epic version of Mulan that came out in China in 2009 in
2020 Disney is going to revisit Mulan as part of their live-action remakes of
Animated Classics there's also supposed to be yet another Mulan movie that
Sony's putting out sometime in the next 10 years so if you like the story of
Mulan and you want to see it on the big screen you're in for a good decade you
know we're gonna keep mining this nostalgia for all it's worth until it's
completely hollowed out I mean it's still gonna be alright I hope anyways
Zàijiàn