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From Disney Mulan he tried to please everyone and ended up pleasing no one.
The live remake of his animated classic, which just released in Chinese theaters today, was supposed to win over a new generation of Disney fans in China. Instead, it looks like it could be a huge failure. It only generated about $ 1 million in advance sales, signaling yet another blow for a film already mired in controversy for being shot in part in Xinjiang, where Uighur Muslims are interned in camps. And in a move that surely won’t help generate publicity, Chinese authorities have banned state media from reporting on the film’s release.
Numerous observers have noted that Mulan a very specific ideology is advancing: Han Chinese nationalism. That is, the idea that China, as a nation-state, is defined and dominated by the Han Chinese people, a narrative that leads to minorities such as Muslim populations of Mongolian ethnicity, Tibetan and Uyghurs in the peripheries of China are seen as in need of assimilation. As writer Jeannette Ng put it, the film “makes the current nationalist mythology of a China dominated by the Han the basis of its history.” And anyone who tries to “undermine the Han Chinese ethnostate” becomes the real villain of the film, wrote Aynne Kokas, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.
This Han nationalist narrative is featured in the Mulan posters for the Chinese market as well. While the film’s posters for markets around the world primarily focus on Mulan as the individual lead, there are notable differences in the Chinese posters.
This is not the first time that Disney has adapted its Mulan posters for the Chinese public. When the original animated version was released in 1998, Disney modified its posters for the Taiwan and Hong Kong markets. While posters for North America and other Western markets focused on a pensive Mulan dressed as a soldier against an ominous red background, market research suggested that it wouldn’t work for Chinese audiences, who wanted brighter colors, action, and a good dose of patriotism.
