Mushu is a fictional character in Disney's Mulan franchise, first appearing in the 1998 animated film of the same name. A small Chinese dragon, Mushu was a guardian of Mulan's family before being demoted for failing to protect an ancestor.
Although the dragon character Mushu is technically a character made up by Disney, he was loosely inspired by Hua Mulan's cousin of the same name from the 1903 Chinese play Mulan Joins the Army, hence making Mushu his Disney counterpart.
"Using it as a silly sidekick didn't play very well with the traditional Chinese audience." But perhaps the most significant reason why the new Mulan film features a phoenix instead is due to the symbolism of the mythical bird for Chinese women in particular — or at least according to Caro's vision.
Mushu was seen as trivialising the Chinese culture
USC Professor Stanley Ronsen also told The Hollywood Report that the character was seen as a trivialisation of the culture in China. “Mushu was very popular in the US, but the Chinese hated it,” he said. “This kind of miniature dragon trivialised their culture.”
It's possible the Great Stone Dragon didn't want to be a guardian and replaced himself with a statue replica of himself since he never woke up and his spirit didn't rise up when Mushu accidentally smashed his statue.
Also, the fact that Mushu is a dragon may be a nod to the fact that, while Mulan is a mighty force on her own, she requires a little bit of guidance to be whole and achieve her goals. Ultimately, this would mean that Mushu couldn't awaken the Great Stone Dragon because it was awake all along.
Mushu, at last, is restored to guardian status in the family temple. Mulan thanks him for his help in her adventurous plan, and the ancestors celebrate that the Fa family is complete again.
China blocked the release of Disney's animated “Mulan” for eight months in the late 1990s after the company backed Martin Scorsese's “Kundun,” a film seen as sympathetic to the Dalai Lama. The animated “Mulan” bombed in China as a result.
University of Southern California professor Stanley Rosen, who specializes in Chinese politics and culture, told The Hollywood Reporter that "Mushu was very popular in the U.S., but the Chinese hated it." "This kind of miniature dragon trivialized their culture," he added.
The issue was that Mulan was partially filmed in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, in close proximity to detention camps for Uighur Muslims, and Disney gave credit to “publicity department of CPC Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomy Region Committee” among other entities.
In the novel, Mulan's father was from Hebei during the Northern Wei dynasty while her mother was from the Central Plain of China. But "even a Chinese woman would prefer death by her own hand to serving a foreign ruler," as some commentators have explained this Mulan character's motive for dying by suicide.
As Hong Kong's police force has been accused of violence and brutality towards pro-democracy protesters, Yifei's actions reflected poorly on the film, and the hashtag #BoycottMulan started trending.
Scholarly consensus is that Mulan is a fictional character, probably developed in Northern China in response to the greater independence women enjoyed there, whose legend was then revised in succeeding eras to reflect the values and challenges of the times.
In the original, the general's son Li Shang trains the recruits and ultimately falls for Mulan. The team behind the new movie explained the change was down to the #MeToo movement - they felt Mulan's officer becoming her love interest felt a bit off given his position of power.
The main complication in both versions is that Mulan has to disguise herself as a man so that she can join the army and save her father from conscription. However, she is soon revealed as a female, and this causes further complications as only males can be “warriors”.
Following widespread outcry, director Niki Caro explained that the reason the scaly red sidekick was left out of the remake was a commitment to "the realism of [Mulan's] journey."
Although Mushu and the phoenix are both guardians of the ancestors, and both are stone statues brought to life for Mulan's protection, the phoenix is never a true replacement for Mushu. Mulan and the phoenix never really interact, compared with Mushu's constant involvement in the animated film.
In 1996, Disney was banned from China over Kundun, a Martin Scorsese film featuring repression in Tibet and sympathetic to the Dalai Lama. After initial resistance, then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner apologized, saying it was "a form of insult to our friends."
Unfortunately for fans of this princess, Mulan II did terribly. Critics regarded the film as a huge disrespect to the original Mulan. This discouraged Disney from pursuing her story any further, so Mulan III was shelved and Ana Ming never made it anywhere.
A clause in Eddie Murphy's contract for doing Shrek 2 (2004) forbade him from reprising the role of Mushu in this film, therefore having his other voice actor Mark Moseley (a man best known for filling in for Murphy's characters like Mushu and Donkey in their TV and Video Game appearances) fill in for this film.
Li Shang Jr., better known as Li'l Shang, is the son of Fa Mulan and Li Shang and the older brother of Lonnie. He appears in Rise of the Isle of the Lost: A Descendants Novel.
