Mulan doesn't want anyone to find out that she is a girl, or that she enlisted in her father's place, because that would bring incredible shame on her family, so she admits that it was she who stole the pendant. She also has to succumb to a strip-search with the rest of the battalion when Turtle drops a valuable jade pendant and Tiger kicks it into the lake to get back at Turtle for being such a bully Turtle being Turtle, he immediately accuses the battalion of theft. Wentai discovers that there is a woman at camp when he sees Mulan taking a bath in a hot spring, but he does not realize that he has seen her. Training is rigorous and difficult but she proves that she is skilled in combat and has tremendous courage when she defends her fellow recruits from the commanding officer's nephew, Turtle, who is a bully. She becomes friends with the battalion's sub-commander, Wentai, as well as a couple of other recruits around her age. She disguises herself as a boy and joins the army in her father's place. That does not stop her one night she sneaks out of the house, taking her father's armor and weapon with her.
Mulan would make a good soldier she is smart, quick-thinking and skilled in martial arts, but as a woman is unable to enlist. Hua Hu has already fought for his country twice and has long since retired from the military but he feels obligated to serve again, much to the chagrin of Hua Mulan, his young daughter, who feels that her father, who is ailing, should not be put through another campaign. so much so that the government issues a nationwide draft. The Rouran tribes are a constant threat to the ruling Chinese dynasty of the Northern Wei province in 450 A.D. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. He avoids the "strong female character" trope or the male gaze, thankfully.These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.
Hong Kong director Jingle Ma directs the 2009 movie without a sense of exoticism about the heroine's gender even as he explores her dilemma in keeping her gender secret in the army. Hong Kong movies are the one culture where women warriors were commonplace before any other country featured them. The earliest WuXia movies from the 1920s featured swordswomen because male martial artists refused to act in movies at the time. Movies about woman warriors are commonplace in Hong Kong cinema.
The Chinese co-opted her for their own later. She might have been a foreign woman fighting a Chinese invasion. Some historians speculate that the earliest story of Mulan, told in oral traditions before the ballad, was not even a Chinese tale. Another version ended with her committing suicide to escape becoming the emperor's concubine. Later versions from, say, the Tang Dynasty had her fall in love with a fellow soldier. She was enough of a blank slate for subsequent eras to impose different stories to the spaces in her story. She went to war disguised as a man in place of her elderly father, became a general who led the army to victory against the invaders, then returned home 12 years later and put on a dress again. The original ballad, believed to be from the 6 th Century, was fairly basic. She was probably an amalgamation of several real female soldiers of the era.