Old Story, New Parlance: A Transcultural Analysis of The Liveaction Movie Mulan

Abstract

Recently Disney have rolled out the film Mulan which arouses a wide range of discussion. This research tries to find out how Disney film adapts a Chinese story in the Northern Wei period into an international film and why it is possible. Considering the deepening of the globalization and the development of modern media, to illuminate a movie targeting at global audience from a transcultural perspective is of great significance. It combines transcultural, multimodal and literature analysis. Through a transcultural lens, this paper fully refers to current research on transculturality and does both textual and image analysis to reveal the adaptation techniques of this film. It compares the Chinese version of Mulan with the film mainly from two aspects, namely, character and theme. It finally demonstrates that in spite of misinterpretation, the film Mulan is a transcultural explorative product. Through transcultural hybridization, it creates a third space in which different cultures interact with each other. This finding gives us a possibility to review the cultural products in a global context and from a transcultural perspective.