For one thing, I have gone through three copies of the film. I saw it in theaters, and I loved it so much that the VHS made my Christmas list that year. I purchased the DVD early in my college career, because the platinum edition came out.
Nowadays, since The Princess & The Frog just came out, I'm rounding out my Disney Princess collection before I see it. So, when I passed a sale display at Target the other day, I snatched up a third copy. Or rather, what I thought was a third copy. When I pulled the sleeve off, I discovered....this!
Not what I wanted. I've always been Tinker Bell fan, but Mulan was a big part of my childhood.
A little while before I purchased the aforementioned second copy of Mulan, I even wrote a paper on her.
I wrote many a melodramatic sentence as a college freshman.But I do believe it. The movie came out when I was in middle school. I remember watching it in theaters with my younger siblings. I remember feeling the inner heroine swell within me when Mulan started the avalanche and won the battle. And I remember, a year later, in a seventh-grade math class full of only girls, when someone started humming one of the songs ("I'll Make a Man Out of You"), another girl across the room began singing along, and every girl in the class admitted to a secret love for Mulan.
And since then, every girl my age who saw it when it first came out has always had a soft spot for Mulan.
I have a theory about it. Middle School is a tough time. It's when you start to recognize how hard it is to be a girl. You begin to think about your body in terms of its attractiveness. You start to think about boys and sometimes try to change yourself to suit them. Maybe you had dreams in elementary school, but in middle school, you're old enough to start to really chase them. You just need the courage to try.
That's when you need to meet heroines the most - when you learn who you're aspiring to become.
I want to make every girl protagonist I ever create just as awesome, vulnerable, hardworking, smart, and kick-butt as Mulan.
