Phyllida Archer-Dowd on Disney’s Mulan

Originally published August 14, 1998, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1291

And now we bring you the musings of Phyllida Archer-Dowd, co-founder of the Children’s Protectorate Council:

It is my sad duty to report that the Disney organization has spiraled even further into the depths of degradation, shattered family values, and outright poor messages that have epitomized the organization’s animated features over the past years. One cannot help but have low expectations for a company that endorses sodomy, after all. (How else to explain the appalling company policies which have led to the quite-proper boycotts organized by our Baptist friends?) Certainly Disney’s recent animation outings have underscored the continued erosion of the once-family-friendly foundations that once epitomized the company. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with its intense perversion of religious imagery and relentlessly dark tone, was absolutely horrid. Hercules was a film focusing on the adventures of ancient and discounted deities who have no relevance to today’s Christian society and certainly can only cause confusion in young children who are presented with the story-book Olympians as “gods.” It is left to the parents to try and clean up after Disney’s mess, and the company’s disregard for the difficulties of modern-day parenting is nothing short of horrendous.

But with the advent of Mulan, I’m afraid that we must truly take exception.

Mulan sets new standards of violence, disrespect, and mixed messages. I, for one, am astounded that this would be considered by anyone to be a children’s film. Any parents who take their impressionable children—particularly their daughters—to this tripe should have their parenting credentials seriously questioned, if not revoked entirely. Granted, the godless heathens in the film—set in ancient China—are not expected to have any comprehension of the Bible or the One True God, but the movie makers are presumably contemporary Americans. I’m certain that they must be versed in the sort of Christian messages we want our children to take home with them from movies. Would it have been so difficult to impart a few of them to America’s youth, rather than stampeding over them?

You can even make a sort of game of it. Name the commandment and see where the film disregards it.

“Honor thy father and thy mother.” Mulan is a girl in China who finds herself faced with a crisis of conscience  when her father is conscripted into the army. It is the clear, stated wish of her father to be able to serve the will of the emperor. But Mulan will have none of it. Even though she is merely a teenage, she is naturally convinced that her view of the situation should be the prevailing one. The film is set at a time when all women—but particularly young ones—had their duties and responsibilities carefully circumscribed. Everyone knew their place in relation to each other, and to their family.

But not Mulan, the nominal and titular heroine of the film. She argues with her parents. She publicly embarrasses her father by challenging the emperor’s orders right in the street. Even though he states that her actions are bringing shame to the family, she continues her arrogant behavior at the dinner table. “Honor” is an alien concept to her, whether it be the honor of her family or the Biblical mandate calling for honoring of a parent’s wishes.

“Thou shalt not steal.” Mulan, after a short time’s soul-searching, steals her father’s armor, weaponry, and horse. Ostensibly, she does it in order to save her father, but remember, he did not ask for, want, or need her help. That this child would defy both the word of God and her parents’ wishes is bad enough. But the film presents it as being a positive, even heroic, step.

“Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” Never has a commandment been more clear than that. There is no room for maneuvering; no confusion can possibly be drawn. It means that no prayers can be offered except to the Lord God, the divine being, the holy of holies.

Such, however, is not the case in Mulan, as I’m sure you can have surmised by now. Oh, they pray, all right. We see both Mulan and, more often, her father, praying. But they pray to no deity, no supreme being. Not even a heathen god. No, they pray to—get this—their ancestors. When matters are difficult, when Mulan’s father realizes the danger to which his daughter is exposed, he does not seek the help of God—any God—through prayer. Instead he presents his supplications to the shades, the ghosts, of deceased mortals. Something as unnatural as begging ghosts for help borders on the Satanic. Yet not only does Mulan present this as a good and proper course of action, but the gambit actually works. The ghosts of the ancestors hold a sort of reverse séance and put their heads together. (Except for the one ancestor whose head is severed from his body; incredible that Disney actually endeavors to portray something as ghastly as decapitation as if it’s a joke. Perhaps its next film should focus on the French revolution and feature a 10-minute knee-slapping guillotine sequence.) Their conclusion: A dragon, a red, fire-breathing (more Satanic imagery) dragon, is sent to retrieve Mulan. With no sense of irony, Disney casts—in a movie about a cross-dressing heroine—Eddie Murphy, noted friend of transvestite perverts, as the dragon. How did Disney miss employing Pee Wee Herman, we wonder?

And let us not forget the single most impressive, most hideous, achievement of this Disney film. It is so horrific, so appalling, that I can barely convey it to you. There is an aspect of Disney heroines that has remained immutable ever since Snow White first warbled her way into the hearts of 1930s audiences. A grand tradition that is now forever violated, forever lost.

Consider, if you will, “Thou shalt not kill.”

I will grant you that exceptions must be made for war. No one likes to kill, no one embraces the concept, but even the Lord Himself supported it in certain cases. When the Lord restored Samson his strength, it enabled him to wipe out the Philistines.

Likewise, there has been killing in Disney films before. For the most part, it has been extremely limited (one per film), of a storybook nature (evil witches, sorceresses, and such), adhering to the nature of ultimate good triumphing over ultimate evil (a message one really cannot dispute), and—most importantly—has been the province of male characters (and princes, more often than not).

Call me old-fashioned, if you wish, but I very much appreciated the Disney organization for keeping the hands of its young ladies clean. It was sweet and in keeping with the storybook texture of the films. The women were there to be saved by the men. It is bad enough that, in the real world, it is now acceptable to take women into the army, train them, and let them fight beside men. Women are the bearers of life, the providers of children. Theirs should not be the province of death of disorder. Men start the wars. Let men fight the wars. In these turbulent times, one could count on Disney to maintain the proper order of things.

Not any more.

Mulan is the first female in Disney animated history I can think of who has taken a life. And that is an understatement. She doesn’t simply take a life. She sets a new Disney record for carnage as, in her drag disguise, she strategically wipes out virtually the entire Hun army. There were thousands of soldiers by the look of it (not even ultimate evil, mind you—just soldiers, perhaps even conscripts, doing their jobs, probably with wives and children waiting for them at home). Never have so many died in a Disney animated film, and the hand at the rocket which caused this record-setting annihilation was the tapered and gentle hand of a woman. A woman.

As the screening I went to, there was only one genuinely entertaining moment, and it came from someone in the audience before the film even started. Comic book writer Marv Wolfman was there. Now, I have not been speaking to him ever since his vomitous and sacrilegious Tomb of Dracula (and there’s another one coming from Dark Horse, heaven help us), but he is still capable of being a witty fellow. Wolfman was describing the film’s premise to the gentleman sitting next to him, whereupon the individual said, “So it’s like Yentl.”

To which Wolfman archly replied, “It’s not Yentl. It’s Ori-Yentl.” Behind my hand, I laughed at that. Would that I had been laughing still by the film’s end.

And here is the most insane part: Mulan is being hailed as, not only the best Disney film in years, but one in which the heroine is regarded as a positive role model for young girls. By all means, parents, take your children to a film which tells young girls the following message: Hey, kids! If you’re willing to lie, to cheat, to steal, and to disobey your parents and leave them begging for Satanic intervention, you, too, can cause unprecedented carnage.

As for my children, I’ll be popping Snow White in the VCR for them. I consider it far less of a—pardon the expression—drag.

(Phyllida Archer-Dowd can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. And watch what you say.)