Loyal, Brave, and True.

**Note** the first half of this post does not contain spoilers, but the second half does. Make sure you don’t read past the “Spoiler Alert” unless you want to!

I know there’s a lot of controversy around the release of the live action Mulan, but to be honest, I had only heard about some of it, specifically around the main actress and her statements about the Hong Kong police. I don’t get into politics much and don’t necessarily agree with her opinion, but as a whole, I still wanted to support the release of Mulan. Any chance to have Asians in the mainstream media is still a positive thing to me and I was also just super excited to see a new movie! And so with a big bucket of popcorn, I spent Friday night watching Mulan on Disney Plus.

This film brought me to tears in so many ways. Not that I grew up in rural China or anything, but there were so many themes I identified with – the role of women in Chinese families, your duty to your family, and being true to yourself, just to name a few. As a kid, I was exposed to movies about ancient China, some kung fu movies, and some Chinese dramas. Mulan seemed to capture bits and pieces of those movies I remember, but with a wholesome Disney twist. Plus these type of movies always seem to bring up a lot of pent up emotions growing up in a Chinese family where we weren’t very expressive showing love towards each other. With my parents being from Taiwan and Singapore, I not only had a generation gap, but also some culture clash (however, I can’t complain too much since I still ate tons of fast food and watched a lot – I mean, A LOT of TV and movies). And with a lot of Asian families, there are many times some unsaid feelings and emotions hidden away, which I could feel while watching exchanges between Mulan and her family. Sometimes the most powerful moments are the silent ones, am I right?

*****************SPOILERS AHEAD*****************

I know a lot of people will give Mulan a hard time because they left out the comedy, the songs, and the sort of “Disney magic”. And even though I also missed these parts of the original classic, I can see why those things were left out since the tone of the live action Mulan was so much more serious. I loved how this movie provided a lot more insight into Mulan as a character and you were really rooting for her the whole time as she struggled to find her true self. Disney always finds a way to show strength in women and speaking of strong female characters, I loved Gong Li’s character of the witch! Her costumes and her whole appearance were just so bad ass and I found myself wanted to see more of her on the screen. Her relationship with Mulan added a nice twist to things in the end as well. Jason Scott Lee also made an amazingly scary villain and can we all agree that Ming-Na Wen at the end was just the best cameo every!? OMG, that moment just meant so much to me and just made me burst out into tears! I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that when I finished Mulan, I went back and rewatched the original cartoon just to feel nostalgic again.

Did you watch Mulan and what did you think? I would love to know!