By Travis Johnson
Disney’s live action version of their 1998 animated hit, Mulan, will hit cinemas on November 2, 2018.
Based on the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan, the story sees a young girl (voiced by Ming-na Wen in the original) swipe her father’s armour and disguise herself as a man to go off and fight the invading Hun. There are songs and Eddie Murphy plays a dragon.
In truth, Mulan is one of the cornerstone stories of Chinese folklore, and has been adapted plenty of times – the last Chinese-language live action feature was in 2009, and there was a TV series in 2013. But it’s the Disney one that counts, right? It’s coming at an interesting time, with the rise in importance of the Chinese box office and the increasingly fractious state of identity politics and representation (go put in a Google alert for “Mulan casting” right now) so this is one project we’ll be watching fairly closely.
