With Mulan, Disney opened a number of controversies about questions of masculinity and gender roles. Why is the main character a woman who is cross-dressing to be a man in order to save her father from the troubles of war? Why is she taking a role of a soldier? How is her behavior depicted? The codirector of the movie stated: “What I like about Mulan is not that she changes herself but it's really that she changes society and their way of seeing her. That's what allows her to be accepted in the end. She ends up being accepted for who she is which is a pretty universal want for a lot of different people.“ (Ward, 2002, 95) Like in Hercules and Tarzan, obviously the main theme is finding the true self. However, in order to be accepted by the society, the protagonist must go through some changes, of course, to reach the acctualization. In the …show more content…
The lyrics of a comic song which Mulan sings in the end say: “The he-hare's feet go hop and skip,/ The she-hare's eyes are muddled and fuddled./ The two hares running side by side close to the ground,/ How can I tell if I am he or she?“ Thus the confusion among gender conventions is clearly present and Disney questions the traditional fulfilment of the gender roles, the existance of the same conventions are never negated and refuted. The message with can be received by the audience is “even though the film seems to celebrate Mulan's liminality and the agency she gains because of her boundary crossing, Disney in fact contains the truly progressive significance of her actions in order to instill its own message of traditional gender roles“. (Limbach, 2013,