Despite an all-Asian cast, the live action Mulan production crew is all-White

The argument

The complaint is not about who appears on screen but about who was making the decisions behind it. The director, the screenwriters and the costume designer of the remake were not of Chinese descent, leading audiences to express their frustration on social media where someone noted that “you cannot just plop Asian actors in front of a camera & call it a day!" The force of that remark, for this argument, is that casting is the most visible form of representation and the least demanding one: it can be satisfied without altering who holds authorship, budget, or final cut. These frustrations from the Asian community are understandable given the lack of parity in the industry. Opportunities behind the camera are scarce, and a production of this scale and visibility is exactly the kind that could have redistributed them. It is bound to feel disappointing that even a movie which is supposed to represent your people does not provide Asian crew and creatives with the platform to showcase their talents and bring with them cultural authenticity — the film draws its appeal from the culture while the professional benefit of telling that story goes elsewhere. Proponents argue the consequences are visible in the work itself, not only in the credits. Comments made by the creative team also show the lack of genuine representation. The costume designer, Bina Daigeler, said in an interview that her research for the job consisted of going to Europe and visiting “all the museums that had a Chinese department and then I traveled to China for three weeks.” Described that way, the culture is approached as a subject to be studied — beginning with how European institutions collected and displayed it — rather than as one already known from the inside, which is precisely the knowledge that hiring Chinese creatives would have brought to the film.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Perfect representation is really hard to achieve and the issue of behind the scenes individuals is a greater Hollywood issue than one specifically with this movie particularly when you take into consideration all the valuable representation for young girls of Asian descent who rarely if ever, see relatable characters who look like them.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The composition of the crew is a real criticism of hiring practice, but the premise moves from it to a boycott without the connecting step, and those a boycott would harm include the cast whose absence from screens the argument treats as the underlying wrong. The counter also notes this is an industry-wide pattern rather than something specific to this production. [Rejecting P2] A quoted description of one designer's research is thin evidence for a claim about a whole creative team, and museum study followed by three weeks in the country concerned is an ordinary account of preparation rather than proof that it was inadequate. Nothing offered shows that the resulting film misrepresents anything, which is the step the premise would need to reach its conclusion.

Framing

Insufficient diligence was shown to the cultural sensitivities of the movie.