Why is the movie so damn awful. They even shat all over on the best part, The Muses

Why is the movie so damn awful?

Wtf are "Huns" doing in China, and why is Mulan not a hot redheaded Turkic implied-lesbo who is "Sworn Sister" with a Chinese princess?

>Mulan is a Turk
WE WUZ WARRIOR PRINCESS N SHIET, EFFENDI

But was she a red-headed turanian though?

Fuck off. I'm Filipino for one thing.

And Mulan's source material is variegated from a Poem, to the more well known Sui-T'ang Yanyi (Romances of Sui & T'ang) by Zuo Renhuo.
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hua_Mulan#The_Sui_Tang_Romance

Zuo basically turned what was a ballad of a patriot woman into more of a Michael Bay production. This time, she was a hot, redhead Turkic girl daughter of a Khan subject to the T'ang Dynasty. The T'ang then goes to war against the Steppe Nomads and plucky Mulan volunteers as her father's son to avoid her aged father getting drafted in the T'ang War Machine.

There she meets another barbarian subject of the T'ang, a Xia princess looking for soldiers. She hires Mulan and they camp together for years. One thing led to another and she was revealed as a woman and they became "sworn sisters." But this was after said princess flirting the shit out of Mulan and Mulan being scandalized all the time. It's perfect for fucking anime.

>think of it as a gateway drug
I'd prefer to think of it as a bad introduction.

I heard that Greeks were walking out of the movie theaters shaking their heads

According to my old roommate from Corinth "At least 300 was mindlessly fun"

Originally the idea of this movie was going to be a Max Fleischer style Superman movie. You can see how they just lifted that plot and made it Hercules instead.

I'd describe this movie as style over substance. I love the look and music but the story is pretty wrote.

Mulan is good nigga

Wasn't it banned from even being in Greece in the first place?

I don't think so. It was just widely panned.

Why? It's just a children adaptation of mythology.

I thought herc was a qt3.14 as a child tbqh

Who the fuck cares? It's just a movie.

Greek people are proud of their history in a way I think most of us would have trouble comprehending.

Keep in mind no one was that angry, there wren't protests or anything. It was just considered another American bastardization of their mythology.

why are they proud of a history that frankly isn't their own?

Are you about to pull some epic turkish memes on me? Because frankly I wouldn't appreciate that.

Go back to /int/

I can respect Hercules for at least having a decent romance where the characters naturally take a liking to each other.
And I respect the shit out of for having the only Disney heroine with a body count. In the fucking thousands.

> Isn't their own?
Same reason why American can be proud about history of American revolution even when he never participated in it. Nobody really owns the history and most of proud amounts to glorified LARPing.

but they're generally descendants of those americans.
what are you going to do about it?

I'm going to remind you that /int/ memes are not accurate.

1. because "LET'S GET DOWN TO BUSINESS, TO DEFEAT, THE XIANNING" is way less catchy
2. people would think Disney was whitewashing even though it's actually accurate

Poor characterization of the protagonist. "Oh my god it sucks being so awesome!" Is not a character flaw, yet it's about the closest that the movie comes to giving him one.

Because his character doesn't arc, tension never builds in a truly meaningful way, so the pay off is limited.

The movie's redeeming qualities are the quality of the casting (particularly James Woods as Hades) and its top notch production values.

In addition, I think part of it was to appeal to the Chinese market. Who are already very racist as it is.

The foreign market is huge, HUGE. And film studios, Disney included, often bank on getting a lot of their money back there.

turks aren't white

>I'm Filipino for one thing.
see this is one of those things where I know it's true without any evidence
nobody would willingly admit to being Filipino if it wasn't true

Ha! it's funny because it's true.

nigga she had red hair, people would assume she was white

Any presentation of a foreign character who looks even a little Caucasian looking is considered "white washing". I'm aware that most of the Veeky Forums racial scientists don't consider Turks white but they sure as shit aren't Chinese.

Not to mention the girl had red hair.

>Why is the movie so damn awful?
For the same reason why Hercules was bad: poor characterization of the protagonist.

Western narratives have this habit of wanting to stop arcs at the high point, rather than carry them to their logical conclusion, so characters become one-dimensional ideals, in this case "westernizing" Mulan into a symbol of women's empowerment.

lel

I agree with this assessment. Where do you write from?

Mulan wasn't very popular in China. Just like Hercules was not very popular in Greece. Or Road to El Dorado wasn't very popular in Spain.

>Road to El Dorado wasn't very popular in Spain.
well it takes place mainly in mexico, right?

>Road to El Dorado wasn't very popular in Spain

Sadly that movie wasn't really popular anywhere. It was a pretty big disappointment financially.

Providence Rhode Island.

My understanding of the Hua Mulan myth was that she was just "one of the guys", who surprises everyone at the conclusion of the saga when she goes back to being a woman.

But Disney treated her as a heroic ideal, rather than stress the camaraderie that forms the basis for any good war epic.

>Just like Hercules was not very popular in Greece.
Says who? Ancient Greeks were hero worshippers, they considered shit about Zeus and the gods to be exoteria, the obscure corners of their faith compared to great men who become gods like Heracles and Achilles.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_hero_cult

Please user I'm obviously talking about the disney movies. Don't drink before browsing Veeky Forums.

The protagonists are spaniards though. Also I don't think it was popular in mexico either.

It was a pretty mediocre movie, to be honest.

fuck you I'll drink when I want.

Please user it's bad for you.

it was pretty great, and hip-girl was a complete qt.

Is this the worst disney movie?

it's good, and not a disney movie.

>of wanting to stop arcs at the high point, rather than carry them to their logical conclusion
So you're saying that The Hero's Journey should not end where it ends? It should continue to something else? Something that comes to mind is The Scouring of the Shire in LOTR where new challenges caused by the aftermath, lasting pain and overcoming all this is told after what would be "Return" in your image.

Is this the sort of unconventional narrative you're suggesting?

Hercules makes a poor hero by modern standards, especially in a kids movie.

He was kind of a dick, as a lot of the Homerian heros were. Just the biggest most audacious dicks around, and so much so that they got the gods attention, and defied them.

Greco-roman mythos always sends mixed messages that way. Seems both the best and the worst thing you can do is show pride to the gods. Seems the only separation between good and evil, hero and villain, is whether or not the gods were impressed with your dickhood (the villains almost always being the end result of a dick who failed.)

So why do ppl not like this movie? It not being like brutal greek mythology surely must be something you can understand since it's a kids film. So what is it apart from that?

It's great though, magnific soundtrack.

You're kidding right? This is one of the best animated movies ever made.

I hope to the gods they never watched this series then.

youtube.com/watch?v=_O1hM-k3aUY
their reaction

WE

WE

AIN'T GOIN THERE TODAY.

Fath lips =/= nigger thing. Everyone has them in the movie jews included. When will americans fucking learn?

>hurr my kids movie has to follow history to the letter at the cost of fun
get a load of this autism

Execpt the "egyptians" in the movie look black as night compared to the kikes

>o you're saying that The Hero's Journey should not end where it ends?
Of course not. I'm saying that most narratives take an extremely narrow and superficial view of the hero's journey, rotely following it without real understanding of what makes it special.

Lord of the Rings is an exceptional example, and a clear case where the author happened to be someone who knew really well what the hell he was doing.

Mulan is good but it is a joke as any kind of historical tale. That having been said, the whole story is a myth anyways.

The only thing that grates me is

>Huns
>Shanyu

Eh, they could easily be Semitic and the Jews look kinda dark skinned as well.

Prince of Egypt was real fucking good though. Made you feel real bad for the Egyptians in that [fictional] story.

>and a clear case where the author happened to be someone who knew really well what the hell he was doing.
I would agree for most of the book, but the scouring of the shire doesn't seem to fit so easily into the hero's journey formula.

Is there an example you could give where you think the hero's journey is used in a less superficial way?

It was boring as fuck as a kid but it may be good as an adult.

>Is there an example you could give where you think the hero's journey is used in a less superficial way?
There are plenty of examples but I'll pick one that contrasts to the OP's movies' problem with protagonist characterization: Aliens by James Cameron (Director's cut, of course) is considered a text-book case of the Hero's journey done right in a movie.

Ripley's initial condition is one of alienation (no pun intended) from her family due to her long hyper-sleep (waking up after her daughter grew old and died) with her flaw being her fear of the alien who murdered her crew. She decides to confront her fears by joining a team of soldiers to fight the aliens, but aside from a single notable exception, she is shown as generally being a 5th wheel among the cocky space marines

The tension of Ripley's arc ratchets up when they discover Newt, the girl whose family were murdered by the aliens. There is a major delivery moment when the aliens attack the soldiers and Ripley rises to the occasion, stepping into the position previously filled by the ineffectual officer and becoming a leader to the survivors. She is instrumental in getting their escape planned but Newt gets kidnapped by the aliens forcing a moral dilemma: Flee to safety or descend into the belly of the beast with a very small amount of time. Ripley does what any hero would do and succeeds in finding Newt, returning to the drop ship with the elixir, which is Newt as Ripley's adopted daughter, but not before having to overcome the antagonist: the alien queen who is the source of all Ripley's and Newt's nightmares brought to life. Ripley overcomes the alien queen with the chekov's gun they loaded for us in the first act, which delivers a satisfying climax because it is essentially Ripley being true to herself: the resourceful, take charge tough chick we all knew she was.

Am I the only one who liked the scouring of the shire?

this show used to play in greece all the time i watched it when i was a child i think it still runs now
nobody considers it accurate though i believe

I like it. I like the idea that even in such a grand fantasy adventure, the characters cannot get away from the fact that the whole world is always changing and that while they might have saved their home, it's not the same home they left that they find themselves in, and there are always new battles to fight.

It has fun songs which is really what i ask from Disney Movies.

It was really missing a good Hades song tho.
Villain Songs are the best

>Wtf are "Huns" doing in China

Well the story is Mongols, but I suppose Disney didn't want demonize a people who still exist. Ergo Huns

Nice post. I think what makes it impressive is how it's a sequel that manages to tell the hero's journey of an already established hero of sorts by having the hero be traumatized by the events from the first film and that plays into the journey, I like how you point that out.

I kind of fail to see how Mulan fails in its telling of the hero's journey though.
The way she feels the need to hide her identity all the while being an incompetent soldier and then learning to get better and better until she reaches the lowpoint where she goes on to transform into her true self this time and combines this with all she's learned before to ultimately defeat the bad guy and then return home to the village she started from.
Seems like a perfectly fine telling for a disney movie.

>an already established hero
It works because it wasn't a rehash of her first arc, so it tells us more about who the character is and manages to surprise the audience in the process. In the first movie, her arc was simply survival. In the second, it was recovering her lost motherhood.

>I kind of fail to see how Mulan fails in its telling of the hero's journey though.
I'll try to help
>The way she feels the need to hide her identity
That's not really a flaw. I mean its a source of tension but it falls short on two levels: It's the same thing Hercules had going, where "Oh woe is me I'm awesome and people hate me for it". The other being that it doesn't mesh particularly well with the ancient setting to equate "a woman hiding her gender to fight in a war" with a modern woman's search for a career. That's what I meant when I said they westernize it, and why it wasn't particularly popular oversees.
> being an incompetent soldier and then learning to get better and better until she reaches the lowpoint where she goes on to transform into her true self this time
This isn't treated as genuine growth, it's treated as a montage. The problem with only challenging a protagonist in a physical sense is that it only gives the audience a shallow understanding of what the protagonist is made out of, which leads to a weaker protagonist. When they're challenged in a moral/spiritual sense and given a flaw to overcome, it's essentially a more satisfying experience for the audience.
>combines this with all she's learned before to ultimately defeat the bad guy
A "big eyed" bad guy who never really challenges the heroine in a non-physical way.

>Seems like a perfectly fine telling for a disney movie.
There are a lot of Disney movies with superior scripts: Beauty and the Beast, Lion king, Tangled, etc.

Hungarian lives matter

>only challenging a protagonist in a physical sense
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head with that distinction.
I think it can kind of be argued that her being afraid to show her true gender to her fellow soldiers because she's afraid of judgement and her overcoming this by showing that she's still valuable as her "true self" can be seen as a sort of moral struggle, though even then you have to grasp at straws to justify it and it isn't told as cleanly as it should have been.

I'd like to check out the original legend of Hua Mulan one day just to compare the two.

I don't think it was Mongols bro. That's almost certainly anachronistic. IIRC Mulan was written during the Northern and Southern dynasties long before Genghis Khan had unified the people of Mongolia.

>Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head with that distinction.
Thanks. Comparative mythology is one of my favorite sub-categories of history
>I think it can kind of be argued that her being afraid to show her true gender to her fellow soldiers because she's afraid of judgement
Which in my opinion kind of crushes suspension of disbelief. She doesn't hide her gender because she's afraid of people judging her, she hides it because she's made to in order to join the army. It's not a flaw to overcome, it's an adaption to circumstance which does show resourcefulness, but doesn't stand very well on its own as a convincing flaw.

> overcoming this by showing that she's still valuable as her "true self"
Hunger Games is a well written example of a "protagonist abandons her life as a woman in order to fight in war" story to contrast against Mulan's weaknesses, especially in that Katniss's gender is downplayed by the author, but in a clever twist is way overplayed in-world by the media, and irony which is the sort of richness of character development that a story like Mulan lacks.

This has got to be the first time I've ever heard people discussing The Hero's Journey without bringing up Star Wars, King Author, or Hamlet.

...and fuck you, autocorrect.

>gimlee
>a literal dwarf
>giant

Dwarves are just highly concentrated giants.

And really, the formula is so loose that nearly any story can be made to fit it - doesn't necessarily require high fantasy. The idea is that nearly every story follows common elements, rather than just a few being extremely being formulaic about it, from the Bible to American Pie. That, on some level, we're telling the same story, over and over again.

This is why The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra is such an unique literature achievement. It doesn't follow common storytelling archetypes.

It's basically a World War I allegory
The heroes return home only to find home has changed as well

Well originally dwarves from norse mythology weren't necessarily smaller than humans.

Why is it Hercules and not Heracles? The fuck...?

I didn't use those examples for two reasons.

One is that those are really obvious, standard examples of the Hero's Journey that even filthy casuals know about

The other is that those examples reflect a different way of interpreting the Hero's Journey. Luke Skywalker, Hamlet, and Harry Potter are all different takes on the hero with a thousand faces, where the hero is supposed be transparent enough in personality to allow the audience to easily step into their shoes and experience the world as their surrogate. In the case of Hercules, he wasn't really given anything to overcome so people were less apt to walk a mile in his shoes. In the Heracles myth the entire reason he went out to do his labors was because he murders his family (ironically including the character Megara) in a fit of Hera-inspired rage and seeks atonement from the gods for this seemingly unforgivable crime. And in the case of Mulan you're talking about a female protagonist, so that changes audience expectations about the character.

Is Fate/Stay Night's interpretation of Heracles better or worse?

How they mix Graeae and Moirai.

They actually made Snow White better though, which is still their best and most important animated movie.

No I liked it and it makes perfect sense if you keep in mind why Frodo was on his journey in the first place, and the events there were what really settled in that nothing can be the same forever.

That's because the main character is actually Megara, who develops into an admirable, selfless person. Shame so much time is spent on Hercules' backstory and subsequent quest for godhood when Meg is a much more compelling character.

>arwen
Fucking Hackson

They probably picked Huns because it's easier for western audiences to grasp than Xiongnu