The film that I chose to annotate is Mulan 2020. It was directed by Niki Caro, and it was mainly written by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. Stars or characters were Yifei Liu, Donnie Yen, and Gong Li. When the film Mulan 2020 first came out, over half of audience called others not to spend around $30 to watch since it was unworthy for that price. According to reviews, there are mainly 4 reasons for its unworthiness—dull scenes’ designs, the lack of snappy background musics or songs, the gender values it reflected, an insult of Chinese traditional culture and shame. These reasons for its unworthiness can be concluded into one overall sentence from Johnny Oleksinski’s ‘Mulan’ review: Disney+ live-action remake delivers real guts, reinvention, “‘Mulan,’ however, while not totally original, transitions to live action with real guts and reinvention.”
The addition of new character, a sorceress, who fights by the side of the Huns, provides another gender role that females can take. Besides what Mulan does in the army and the war, the participation and the supporting role of a sorceress demonstrates women’s complex participation in the war. A sorceress is different from not only male enemies but also fellow females, traditional or normal women, who are usually portrayed as weak, ignorant, peaceful, generous, virtuous and circumscribed. Instead, such addition of this character shows us women’s potential to be what we call the “bad” guy. Below is the image of this added sorceress or "bad" woman.
This social construction of the sorceress which is built in the film Mulan 2020 can be connected with one of points of my 2 group members—“Female or male gender roles taught throughout heroes and supporting characters.”
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