"China is anxious to be part of the global community. The formula is part of an evolving mainland genre that has seen filmmakers incorporating more nuanced, entertaining storytelling into patriotic plots. While the Disney film wove comedy into a Disney-esque plot about a young girl breaking out of the confines of tradition to pursue her own destiny, the new Mulan focuses on patriotism, filial piety, romance and the difficulties of war. Zhao may have gotten the role because of her tomboy image in action films such as Red Cliff and So Close, but in Mulan, she appears with full makeup and long, glossy fingernails even as a soldier. The film stars Vicki Zhao Wei, who shot to fame in the late 1990s playing the wide-eyed lead role in the television series Princess Pearl. The film's Hong Kong director, Jingle Ma, says the new 115-minute Mulan is a sweeping melodrama that depicts the central character as an action hero, dutiful daughter and wistful romantic. It will hit screens in Hong Kong this week, and negotiations are on the table for release dates in the U.S. 27, the $12 million, mainland-funded live-action war epic premiered in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia. In 2006, she announced the production of a Chinese Mulan, and now that version has opened to reclaim the global Mulan-mania. "Now that foreigners can produce a popular movie out of the story Hua Mulan, why can't we Chinese present its own to the world?" "We commit ourselves to be a media with a sense of national responsibility," she told the state-run People's Daily. That didn't sit well with some Chinese, including Guo Shu, executive president of Starlight International Media Group, an entertainment company based in Beijing. (See China's long road to prosperity.)Īlthough it was too American for audiences in China (where it performed abysmally), Disney's Mulan was a smash hit in the rest of the world, where it reeled in $300 million. And posing for a photo with Mulan is a must for hordes of tourists at Hong Kong Disneyland. Disney has staged musical versions of the movie Mulan from Mexico to the Philippines. Baby girls adopted from China have been named Mulan by their American parents. Indeed, because of the animated Disney film, the character Mulan has become one of the most recognizable symbols of Chinese culture worldwide. The problem for the Chinese is that, since 1998, the definitive version of the story has been Disney's. The character from folktale is a daughter who disguises herself as a male soldier to take her father's place in the conscription army. Mulan is the Middle Kingdom's gender-bending heroine, its Joan of Arc. Follow is moving to take back one of its own even if it is legend.
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