Anais Gutierrez
Chinese actress Liu Yifei is set to be Mulan in the warrior princess’ upcoming live-action film. The news broke earlier this week, following controversy over whitewashing roles in movies.
Disney live-action remakes have been quite a success. This year’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ starring Emma Watson and Dan Stevens, which became the highest-grossing film of 2017 so far.
Go, girl!
After a year-long search, Disney announced the casting of Chinese actress Liu Yifei as Mulan.
Yifei will star as the titular female warrior in Disney’s live-action adaptation of the classic Chinese epic, Mulan.
The decision to cast a Chinese actress was widely praised on social media after a series of controversies over whitewashing. It also follows Beyoncé’s casting in the upcoming ‘Lion King’ remake.
The search for the new Mulan was hard. A team of casting directors traveled across five continents and cast over 1,000 women for the demanding role. The role requires mastery of martial arts and ability to speak English. Also, the ineffable charisma to partake the role of a Disney protagonist.
And Yafai fit the role perfectly, she’s a prominent star in China’s entertainment industry and has also appeared alongside Jacki Chan in a series of movies.
The original animated version in 1998 earned $304.3 million as well as Golden Globe and Oscar nominations.
In the film a Chinese young woman to play Hua Mulan, who impersonates herself as a man to take her ailing father’s place in the battlefield in the fifth-century,
The film will be helmed by Niki Caro and set for a release in 2019.
It keeps getting better
The director of the upcoming ‘Mulan’ live-action remake, Niki Caro criticised Hollywood film industry on gender imbalances, calling it “shameful”.
In an interview to the Huffington Post, ‘”The Zookeeper’s Wife’ director highlighted the abysmal number of female directors in the field.
“My gender should have absolutely nothing to do with it, at least in discussing the quality of my work, in which case I’m very proud to be working in a feminine way,” she started.
“But now that (The Zookeeper’s Wife) is out, I look at the statistics on female directors, and now it’s time for me to speak up.”
“I’ve been silent for personal reasons, but now I’m very happy to say publicly that it’s a shameful statistic. Just the sheer ignoring of 50 percent of the available skill and talent and vision and tenacity and ambition appalls me,” concluded Caro.
Earlier this year, a report showed that only seven percent of all directors were women who worked on the 250 highest-grossing films in the year 2016.
Source: The Guardian
