I’ll Make an American Out of You: Reflections on the Orientalism of Disney’s Mulan (1998)

Disney’s repertoire of animated films has traditionally focused on predominantly white/Western characters, but the recent shift in the West towards opening up the cultural canon has recently seen its ripples in the arena of animated fairy tales. However, looking beyond the Western literary and folk traditions for inspiration comes with its own set of complications. Drawing upon Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), the present paper extends the scope of Said’s postcolonial analysis further East by examining Disney’s Mulan (1998). By doing so, it attempts to pinpoint the Orientalist gaze embedded in the film despite its supposed celebration of Chinese culture through adapting an Asian source text and spotlighting an all-Asian cast of characters. The paper argues that the film’s adaptation of the folk legend attempts to stress the foreignness and exoticness of its source culture while paradoxically erasing any meaningful traces of difference and heterogeneity in it by domesticating the legend both linguistically and structurally in order to appeal to a wide Western viewership. The paper does so by conducting a close examination of key scenes from the film to identify how the animation and musical styles are employed to underscore the binary opposition between East and West and to align the film’s protagonist with the latter. Specifically, the film’s supposed feminist message is examined to highlight how it is premised on the propagation of Orientalist stereotypes of Asia. Thus, the paper sheds light on some pitfalls that are to be avoided for such adaptations to go beyond token representation.