that's it? No epic avalanche? No blowing people up with fireworks? No seducing the bad guys before smashing their heads in with fruit? OK, maybe all that Disney magic set my expectations a little too high, but I expected a little more than one sentence to describe Mulan's adventures in butt-whooping. Mulan's battle experience is summed up pretty quickly with the sentence, "Mulan rode ten thousand miles to fight a hundred battles." First of all, what is she feeding that horse? And second of all. Unfortunately, that was probably a bit too much detail to include in a single poem. Even if they weren't Shan Yu's band of gray-skinned, greasy-haired minions, I still wanted to hear about how my girl was destroying them with her sword and rockets and martial art skills. I was so pumped to see the OG Chinese heroine slay bodies. She spends a few lines of the poem being homesick and thinking she hears her parents' voices in the sounds of the river and neighing horses. Like the Disneyfied version, the original Mulan remained a family woman even during her time learning to become a badass. and this time, she didn't have a lucky cricket to help her out. Mulan likely wasn't worried about one group of invaders, but many. During the time The Ballad of Mulan was written, northern China was under pretty steady attack from foreign tribes during a time when the nation was going through countless troubles, including civil war. In fact, the army Mulan helps fight against isn't specified, but historically speaking, it definitely wasn't the Huns. The terrifying Shan Yu isn't a part of this story. Surely a movie about a woman who saves China couldn't be based on anything too terrible, right? From the moment she appears on the screen, it's clear that she's there to kick ass and chew gum, and she runs out of gum pretty quickly. Many Disney princess stories had a bit of a "damsel in distress" thing going on, so it would make sense that their original stories contained a bit of tragedy. Even as an adult, I have an intense love for this movie thanks to its awesome musical numbers, beautiful animation, and of course, its inspiring eponymous character. Still, I couldn't help but be curious as to the story behind my favorite Disney movie, Mulan. Essentially, it's a bad idea to read the books that inspired Disney movies if you want to escape with untarnished childhood memories. The Brothers Grimm story of Cinderella read more like a horror tale than a children's tale, and let's just say that Hans Christian Andersen's "Little Mermaid" doesn't have the happy ending that Ariel was lucky enough to experience. But what a lot of people don't know is that many of our favorite childhood movies have some pretty gruesome origins. It's not exactly a secret that a lot of classic Disney movies were inspired by books.
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