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.
"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 once a guardian spirit of Mulan's family, but he has been demoted to the unappreciated position of an incense burner and gong-ringer for the deceased Fa ancestors ever since he failed to protect a family member, a soldier named Fa Deng, resulting in the soldier's demise by decapitation.
Originally, Disney rejected the idea of having a dragon as Mulan's partner, but after learning that Chinese dragons could be many different sizes, the idea came back. For better use, the animators shrunk Mushu to a smaller size.
In the original Mulan movie, Mushu is sent to wake the great stone dragon to go bring Mulan back. The dragon doesn't wake up, and Mushu eventually ends up destroying the statue in his attempts to waken it.
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.
Why did the Great Stone dragon not awaken in Mulan?
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Believed to have been written out of the film due to being "deemed culturally inaccurate and racist", some academics and culture critics defended Disney's decision to remove Mushu, describing it as their attempt "to represent Chinese culture and history in a more authentic manner".
Mulan star Liu Yifei's comments supporting Hong Kong police sparked criticism of the film, which quickly led to a call for boycotts among Hong Kong pro-democracy protestors, as well as Thai and Taiwanese activists, among others.
Unlike the animated film, the live-action story opens with Mulan's father, Hua Zhou, narrating the story of his legendary daughter. The animated film opens from the villain's perspective as he invades China through the Great Wall. The landmark isn't featured in the new Disney film.
Even though Disney bent over backwards to create a live-action “Mulan” that would appeal to China, disgruntled Chinese viewers have dubbed it “the worst 'Mulan' in history,” saying that it feels “wooden” and offensively inauthentic.
Mulan's Origins - Mulan's legend started as folksong amongst non-Han Chinese - its fictional, so there is no historical accuracy to speak of. The earliest surviving record is a relatively short story/poem of less than 400 Chinese text/characters .
The Walt Disney Company owns 43 percent of the resort; the majority 57 percent is held by Shanghai Shendi Group, a joint venture of three companies owned by the Shanghai government.
Why was Mushu not supposed to be the one to help Mulan?
That the dragon is a sign of respect, and of strength and power, and sort of using it as a silly sidekick did not play well with a traditional Chinese audience.” Let's face it: Mushu has no place in a film that seeks to honor and accurately portray Chinese culture.
If any of you watched Mulan 2, for exapmle buying it on DVD, Mushu turns evil after losing his pedastol, so he tries to tear apart Mulan and Shang, which worked.
Shan Yu was inspired by the real-life Attila the Hun. Though while Shan Yu died by the hands of fireworks, Attila died by choking on his own blood the night he was to be wed to his future wife, Ildico. Coincidently the name of the computer system that was used to animate the Hun army charge was called Attila.
