Review Assignment: A Girl Worth Fighting For

Mulan is certainly a strong female role model.  When her father is conscripted into the army, she dresses up like a man and joins the army in his place to save him.  Initially weak, she trains until she attains enough strength and skill to pass boot camp, and then, through a combination of her newly acquired fighting skill and her superior intelligence, she manages to save the Emperor's life and defeat Shan-Yu's army single-handedly, an army that had previously defeated the Emperor's army.  She captures Shan-Yu and reveals to him that she is a woman, adding to his humiliation.

She is certainly a much stronger female role model than Snow White, Cinderella and Aurora.  Aurora, the weakest of the lot, is a true damsel in distress: she plays almost no role in her own salvation and has to be saved from the evil fairy Maleficent by Prince Philip's kiss.  Snow White does run away from her wicked stepmother, who is bent on killing her, and serves the seven dwarves as housekeeper, showing some adaptability, but she too eventually falls victim to her nemesis and must be rescued by the kiss of a prince.  Furthermore, her ambition is to marry a prince, as she explains in her song "Some day my prince will come."  Cinderella is somewhat stronger – she undertakes the risky business of going to the ball, and she does not initially dream of marrying a prince – but in the end she is rescued from her wicked stepmother and stepsisters by a prince who marries her.  In all three cases, a beautiful girl is rescued from a powerful and evil woman by a powerful man.

But Mulan is not the only strong female role model among Disney princesses.  Ariel, Belle and Jasmine too are strong female role models.  Although none of them is strong enough to defeat a whole army by themselves, they are strong enough to achieve their goals, which have to do with individual achievements rather than marrying a powerful man, although Ariel eventually does so.

Ariel wants to leave the sea and become a land-dwelling human.  Her father Triton, who could have turned her into a human, refuses to do so, and goes so far as to destroy her collection of human-made objects.  Defying him, she turns to the only person who promises to help her: Ursula the Sea Witch.  She does fall in love with Prince Eric, but that's based on his character rather than his royal blood.  Ursula's condition for remaining a human – that she must get Eric to kiss her within three days – forces her to depend upon being rescued by him, but that's hardly Ariel's fault.  She saves Eric from drowning, which is a turnabout from the man rescuing the damsel in distress.  Once her father comes to his senses and turns her into a human, she does marry Eric, but there is no indication that the relationship isn't one of equality.

Belle volunteers to replace her father, who has been captured by the Beast, and, once she has taught him some manners, she falls in love with him even though he has shown his vulnerability, turning him into a prince.  In this way she rescues him from a curse cast upon him, a turnabout from the first three princesses being rescued by a man.  And for a woman to love a vulnerable man is a new twist that should gladden the hearts of those men who don't feel comfortable with the traditional male stereotype of being always strong.

Jasmine, like Ariel, rebels against the life ordained for her by her father as well as the cultural norm forbidding her to associate unsupervised with a man who is not her husband or a family member: she sneaks out of her father's castle to go on a magic carpet ride with Aladdin and she marries him because she loves him even though her father would initially have preferred her to marry a prince.  Unlike all of the other princesses, she likes having power, and she threatens to get rid of Jafar if she becomes Queen because she thinks he has killed Aladdin.

Mulan is, of course, the strongest of the lot, with the possible exception of Elsa in Frozen, because she single-handedly defeats an army that had defeated the Emperor's army.  Furthermore, unlike all her predecessors, she is not exceptionally beautiful.  Mulan, then, represents another step forward among Disney movies in terms of breaking down traditional gender roles, but neither the first step (which was taken by The Little Mermaid) nor the last (Frozen).