The Creation and Operation Strategy of Disney’s Mulan: Cultural Appropriation and Cultural Discount

Rui Chen,Yongzhong Yang,Zhiyi Chen

doi:10.3390/su13052751

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore Disney Mulan’s cultural appropriation strategy and the cultural discount phenomenon formed in the Chinese market from the perspective of users and discuss the creation and operation strategy of the film. In 2020, Disney released a new film that originated in China, Mulan, but received negative reviews from the Chinese consumer market. Taking this as an example, this paper uses NVivo and ROSTCM to conduct content-coding and text analysis on creators’ interview records and consumer comments and seeks for the differences in understanding between Chinese audiences and creative teams. The results show that cultural appropriation is an effective strategy for film creation, but cultural appropriation based on misinterpretation will lead to cultural discounts in the operation of films. Therefore, corresponding strategies during film creation and operation should be adopted to better realize the sustainable development of culture.

Highlights

Cultural appropriation has become the main way to create cultural products, and the cultural discount caused by cultural appropriation has become one of the obstacles to the operation of cultural products
This cultural appropriation is the core strategy used by Disney to develop foreign markets, and it is an important reason for the long-term sustainable development of Disney’s series of films
Based on the audience evaluation of the live-action version of Mulan, this paper makes a concrete analysis of the audience evaluation and extracts the parts related to the film creation and operation

Summary

Introduction

Cultural appropriation has become the main way to create cultural products, and the cultural discount caused by cultural appropriation has become one of the obstacles to the operation of cultural products This cultural appropriation is the core strategy used by Disney to develop foreign markets, and it is an important reason for the long-term sustainable development of Disney’s series of films. “Mulan” originated from the long narrative poem “Song of Mulan” in the Northern Dynasty of China It tells the story of a girl named Mulan who disguised herself as a man and joined the army for her father.

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