Where this new live-action feature crucially diverges from previous adaptations, however, is its creative treatment of Mulan’s disguise. Like in the 2009 film Mulan: Rise of a Warrior (starring Zhào Wēi 赵薇), Mulan’s enemies in the 2020 film are identified as the Rourans (330-555), while in the 1998 animation it was the Huns (3rd century BCE-460). Her country is identified as China without reference to a specific dynasty, although the costume and makeup styles remind us of the Tang, whose imperial family most likely had mixed ethnicity of both Han and non-Han Chinese. As in the 1998 animation, Mulan is portrayed as a Han-looking girl. The 2020 film sets the battles at the garrisons along the Silk Road, which are populated by multiple ethnicities and guarded by imperial armies. The conflict between Mulan’s state and a non-Han invading enemy did not really materialize until the turn of the 20th century, when China faced foreign invasions. For example, she is sometimes a girl in the Northern Wei, putting down a bandit uprising in the same state, and sometimes a girl with a non-Han father and a Han mother in Western Turkic Khaganate (581-657), attacking an army in central China.
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Mulan, her emperor, and her enemies’ ethnicities are depicted differently in the long history of the story. Mulan’s ethnicity in the poem is unknown. Similarly, the enemies are regarded as hu, a nomadic population on China’s northern border. Based on the emperor’s titles in the poem, he is normally considered a Sinicized non-Han Chinese, possibly one of the Northern Wei (386-534) rulers.
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The original poem is about a young girl who disguises herself as a male soldier, joins the army in place of her father, survives many battles, declines her emperor’s award, and only reveals her identity to her fellow soldiers upon returning home. As Mulan’s father narrates in the movie’s opening remarks, this is just one version among the many tales of the great warrior Mulan. Compared to Disney’s 1998 lighthearted animation, the 2020 production has clearly drawn more from previous Chinese versions of the story, including its earliest extant version, the anonymous “Poem of Mulan,” traditionally dated to the turbulent Northern Dynasties (4th to 6th centuries).