A Cultural Analysis Of Disney's Mulan

The two authors begin by stating the definition of cultural deformation. When Disney borrows “precious treasures of world culture” they don’t just copy it, they use it and distort certain components to adapt it to the culture it intended to reach through adapting strategies such as addiction, omission, specification, explication and alteration. (Tian and Xiong) The two authors go into depth in comparing the ballad to the film in terms of characters and plot. They state that the film adds characters such as Li Shang, Grandmother Fa, and several other while some details in the plot were also added in such as the matchmaking for Mulan, her father’s prayer to the ancestors, the capture of the emperor by the Huns and so on. The film also omits some of the details from the ballad such as Mulan being an only child, which is not the case in the ballad because Mulan has an elder sister and younger brother. Furthermore, Mulan is not seen weaving at the starting of the film nor is she camping by the Yellow River. (Tian and Xiong) The specifications in the film let us understand why certain characters have certain names for example the parents are not given names in the balled how ever they are labeled by Chinese characters which is that it used to address parents in China, but in the film the parents are names Fa Zhou