Dishonor to Us All: Is Disney Really Guilty of Enabling Human Rights Abuses with the Live-Action Mulan Remake?
by
Matthew Anscher
In 1998, the year Disney released its 36th animated feature, Mulan, my father and I went to Washington, DC One of the things we visited was the Holocaust Memorial; it was one of the most chilling experiences of my life. As a Jewish person, seeing my people being targeted for genocide made me sick and angry. Recently having come out as gay doubled the anger because gays were also among the many groups Nazis targeted for extermination. When we Jews say the phrase “never again,” we mean it.
Fast forward to the year 2020. Michael Eisner is no longer the head of The Walt Disney Company, and even his replacement, Bob Iger, has stepped down from the CEO position. Sanctimony has replaced imagination, and politics has replaced storytelling while remakes have overshadowed new ideas. And what’s the remake du jour? Mulan. No songs, no dragon, no drag queens, no love story, no gay- or bisexual-coded characters, no comedy. All seriousness this time because that’s what supposedly makes a film “adult.” But even before its release, the studio’s new take on the old Chinese legend became a lightning magnet for controversy.
First, when pro-freedom protesters demonstrated in Hong Kong and faced police attacks, Liu Yifei, the film’s star, sided with the police. Specifically, she said on Weibo:
“I support the Hong Kong police. You can all attack me now. What a shame for Hong Kong.”
Such a statement sounds especially tone deaf in light of recent American protests against police violence. But Disney shrugged it off. After all, they have parks in both Shanghai and Hong Kong so they can ill afford to take sides. There is no position they could take that would not hurt someone’s feelings, but one takes such risks all the time simply by existing. However, the other risks they took have proven not to be worth taking.
Even before its intended release, there was already a backlash brewing. #BoycottMulan started trending on Twitter after Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong called for one. The film might have financially weathered such attacks had the COVID-19 pandemic not closed most of the world’s movie theaters. Between this and the parks closing for the same reason, Disney lost two of its major sources of cash flow. With the 116-minute film costing $200 million, there was more riding on it than the 1998 original, which runs a taut 88 minutes and was made for only $90 million. They had to do something with it, so they put it on Disney+, where the disastrously received film Artemis Fowl landed with a thud, as an exclusive and charged a premium of $30 for access to it … even for subscribers who already paid the monthly fee! Subscribers who canceled their subscriptions would not even keep access to it. Did The Disney Channel make you pay extra for original movies when they were a pay-cable channel? Equal parts desperation and greed, the strategy didn’t seem to work, and the movie quickly moved to other platforms for purchase. Meanwhile, Trolls 2 cost only $20 on digital and has apparently sold more copies.
While the 1998 version was a box office hit that has aged beautifully, it was not exceptionally well-received in Mainland China, where its release was conditional at best and still fraught with controversy despite their best attempts to side-step it. The Chinese government took issue with Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, a Hollywood Pictures release about the Dalai Lama, for being too sympathetic to him at the expense of China. They threatened to ban all Disney films from the country. Though the film got good reviews in the US, Disney capitulated; Michael Eisner denounced the film, while Bob Iger called it a “mistake.” Nevertheless, Kino Lorber saw fit to release it on Blu-ray recently.
The new version of Mulan has been carefully crafted so as not to offend any Chinese people. Anything perceived as being inauthentic to the culture has been scrubbed away. Or so they say. But even under those circumstances, they still got a lot of things wrong in ways the 1998 film did not. And in deference to #MeToo, any hint of romance between Shang and Mulan is gone, along with Shang himself! Even with the more government-friendly changes to the story, Chinese audiences still didn’t take kindly to a second Disney version of their homegrown female warrior, especially when they had their own locally produced movie versions to choose from, most notably a 2009 film called Mulan: Rise of a Warrior. There’s even a Chinese animated version, Kung Fu Mulan, making this new Disney version even more superfluous.
But the worst was yet to come…
Those who sat through the whole film to the end of the closing credits saw a “special thanks” credit for the Turpan Public Security Bureau, an organization in southern Xinjiang that manages concentration camps designed to hold over a million Uighur Muslims. Seriously, in 2020! A major American movie studio, one that made pro-Allied propaganda films such as Der Fuhrer’s Face and Victory Thru Air Power during World War II, and one that won an Oscar for Bedknobs and Broomsticks in 1971 and two Oscars for Aladdin in 1992, was now collaborating with mass murderers in a Communist country! They actually gave special thanks to multiple bureaus responsible for such horrific atrocities as forced sterilization, forced labor, and re-education, while many prisoners have even died because of the conditions of the camps. This is the same studio known for opening every movie with “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are”? They proved once and for all they don’t really mean that. Even their excuses don’t wash. A company representative told Vanity Fair that this was necessary for “authenticity” and to get permission to even shoot in China at all even though most of the movie was shot elsewhere, particularly New Zealand. If so little of the Turpan footage made it into the film, and there’s nothing there they couldn’t get elsewhere, then why bother shooting there at all?
Much criticism of Walt Disney revolves around the fact that he was a “friendly witness” for the House Unamerican Activities Committee regarding Communism in the 1940s when there was still a USSR and when Mao Tse Tung took over China. But in light of what the studio that bears his name has done, can you still actually read his remarks and come to the conclusion that he was wrong?
“I believe [Communism] is an un-American thing. The thing that I resent the most is that they are able to get into these unions, take them over, and represent to the world that a group of people that are in my plant, that I know are good, one-hundred-percent Americans, are trapped by this group, and they are represented to the world as supporting all of those ideologies, and it is not so, and I feel that they really ought to be smoked out and shown up for what they are, so that all of the good, free causes in this country, all the liberalisms that really are American, can go out without the taint of communism. That is my sincere feeling on it.”
The idea that Walt was a vicious anti-semite was, and still is, a hoax that many former Disney employees have refuted. His anti-Communism was used as evidence of that, but Jewish studio head Louis B. Mayer, co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was just as fervently opposed to it. It’s not very hard to see why. To see Walt’s magic kingdom actively collaborate with a country that relocated an entire group of people to concentration camps is beyond horrific. It is a major betrayal of trust, not to mention a publicity embarrassment the studio was sheepishly forced to acknowledge while, as usual, trying to play the Glad Game in doing so. Much like the issue of John Boyega’s differing level of prominence on the Chinese and American Star Wars posters, it is only more proof of Disney’s hypocrisy on human rights issues. Things like this show how insincere the Disney company is when they talk of racial and cultural sensitivity. It’s also why their reasons for not letting Song of the South out of the vault, not to mention their reasons for wanting the characters out of Splash Mountain, ring hollow. Not only has Disney collaborated with Communists, it is complicit in their violations of human rights. If China is punished for this, then Disney should be, too.
Compare and contrast this with how the company behaves in the United States. Despite a burgeoning film and television production industry in Atlanta, Georgia, which has been home to such acclaimed and popular movies as Game Night, Love Simon, and I Tonya, as well as being the home of Tyler Perry Studios, and despite the fact that Marvel had already shot Black Panther and Avengers: Endgame there, Disney announced that they would no longer film there if the governor signed a controversial anti-abortion bill into law. The law would have made abortion illegal at the point where one could hear the beating heart of an unborn baby, which is usually six weeks in most cases. Disney opposed the law because they believed its female employees would not want to work under these conditions. They claim to care about reproductive rights here, but those claims don’t hold up to scrutiny when one considers the fact that among the atrocities at the Xinjiang camps is forced sterilization!
Mulan pays lip service to the concept of honor, but in reality, the current Disney management has brought dishonor to the company in ways no previous administration had. The star of the new film has not helped matters. Imagine if a white American actress openly supported police brutality against anti-racism protesters in the US. She probably wouldn’t have a career for very long. And imagine if Walt Disney Productions during WWII had shot the live-action portions of The Reluctant Dragon in or around Japanese-American internment camps, a shameful practice the US later apologized for. We would never hear the end of it even if the movie went down the same memory hole in which they’re trying to bury Br’er Rabbit. In reality, that movie grew out of the strike of 1940 that changed Walt Disney, his studio, and the animation industry as a whole. His upbringing was actually quite left-wing; his father Elias was a Christian Socialist who wrote a leftist newsletter. The company changed before, they can change again. Now, they have no choice but to make some adjustments. But they have to be good ones. Change for change’s sake is a waste of time and money, and in the end it makes no one happy.
This is one of many reasons why it has been a critical mistake for Disney to rely so heavily on attempts to literally recreate their past glory days. Even when Ron Miller was running things, they could still make films that were at least nominally different from their Walt-era predecessors. If a lack of imagination was the biggest crime they had committed here, that would be one thing. But this is a much greater crime than systemically throwing out new ideas for endless retreads of the tried-and-true. This is literal crime we are talking about. The International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands is specifically devoted to prosecuting crimes of this magnitude. It has never prosecuted a major corporation before, but that doesn’t mean that individual people who made the call to collaborate with the camps on the making of the film can’t be held liable for their actions. That would require them to prosecute the Chinese government first. Even in the absence of prosecution, there’s no way Disney can spin this public relations nightmare to their advantage, try as they might. When will their reflection show who they are inside?
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