Representation matters. When Mulan appeared on the screen in 1998, she was only the third

princess of color and the first from Asia to enter the Disney canon. She's an empowered protagonist, a fighter, an iconoclast,

kind of a nerd, and a true hero. But full wokeness was not yet a twinkle in the Disney Corporation's eye in 1998, and the film

suffers from some very problematic attitudes toward other cultures that were inexcusable even considering the standards of their day.

I'm talking of course about the virulent anti-hun racism that pervades the film.

The Chinese are proud to have built a giant wall to exclude the Huns

from opportunity and prosperity. Sound familiar? And they continue to market it and profit

from it at the expense of the global reputation of the Hunish people.

Disney animators reinforced this signocentric prejudice by portraying the Huns as simultaneously subhuman and otherworldly using the most offensive

stereotypes.

Of course, the Huns did have yellow glowing eyes, but ancient accounts seem to confirm that their eyes glowed not with malice, but with wit and charm.

Did they stand 8 feet tall?

No! The tallest hunt on record was only 7 foot 9 in his tallest murder boots.

The fact is that because the Hans left no written record of their culture, other than

curses scrawled in the entrails of the vanquished, we are forced to rely

on biased descriptions of them in Chinese and European manuscripts that appealed to the xenophobic

and fundamentalist popular sentiments of their time.

Worse even is the fact that Disney animators, predominantly Asians,

were working from sketches produced largely by artists of European descent

who almost certainly had an ethnographic axe to grind

to avenge their ancestors whose spinning skulls were used to hone the blades of hunish axes.

Of course, the Huns were portrayed as murderous and merciless in those exaggerated and possibly falsified accounts,

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