Tear Jerker / Mulan

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Disney movie:

Being torn between family and honor is not easy to deal with.

• The Matchmaker publicly chewing out Mulan after their disastrous engagement courtesy of Cri-Kee getting loose during their meeting.
  Matchmaker: You are a DISGRACE! (Smashes teapot) You may look like a bride, but you will NEVER bring your family honor!
  • Mulan's forlorn expression as she takes this ruling in, with her mother and grandmother doing what little they can to comfort her.
• Just after the disaster with the matchmaker, Mulan returns home. Her father comes out to greet her, and she is so ashamed of her failures, she hides her face behind Khan so he can't look at her. His face falls when he sees this, not liking seeing his daughter upset.
• "Reflection". That horrible, horrible sense of being a disappointment, of feeling false and wrong and ill-fitted to what roles your family desperately needs you to fill? Uh, yeah, it hasn't gotten less familiar over time. Made even worse by this line in the movie: "Now I see that if I were truly to be myself, I would break my family's heart". For many people, they feel they wouldn't have much problem with society knowing their secrets; it's allowing their family to see them for who they truly are that terrifies them. The fact that your family are the people who you should feel most comfortable with just makes this line heartbreaking.
  • The lines, I will never pass for a perfect bride, or a perfect daughter... Who is that girl I see, staring straight back at me? / Why is my reflection someone I don't know?
  • The last lines, When will may reflection show who I am inside? It can hit hard if you are struggling with accepting your body image.
• The very real, if concealed, anguish in Fa Zhou's voice when he responds to Mulan begging for him to be spared the conscription order. Though she's doing it from a place of love, she IS basically saying to all the world "My war hero of a father is too old and decrepit to fight." To an honourable and proud man, that must sting.
  Fa Zhou: Mulan, you dishonour me.
  • The worst part is, she's right! He IS too old to fight, and would likely not only get himself killed, but likely a comrade or two as well if they had to try and protect him. And that's if he managed to get through training at all.
• Mulan watching her father practice with his sword. For a few seconds, he looks like a total badass, until he collapses to the floor as an old war injury acts up, betraying him. Right then and there, both Mulan and the audience know that honor is going to send this brave and decent man to certain death...
• The dinner scene early in the movie. When Mulan is trying to tell her father he'll be killed if he goes to war, and he, frustrated, shouts at her to learn her place, causing her to run outside and cry privately. What makes this even sadder is that, normally, Fa Zhou seems really kind and caring towards his daughter, so it was very jarring to see him shout at her. Also, when you think about it, that was the last thing he said to Mulan before she ran away, so on top of worrying whether she'd die, there's also quite a lot of guilt.
  Fa Zhou: It is an honor to protect my country and my family.
  Mulan: So you'll die for honor?
  Fa Zhou: I will die doing what's right.
  Mulan: But if you just...
  Fa Zhou: I know my place! It is time you learned yours!
  • Whether you think he's being a good parent at this point is a bit YMMV. Mulan just embarrassed a war hero in front of someone who reports directly to the Emperor. Sometimes, tough love is the way to go, especially if the family's honor or very lives are at stake.
• After the argument at the dinner table, Mulan runs outside and sobs, sinking to her knees as the storm clouds (both metaphorical and literal) approach. It's sinking in for her that her father, the man who has faith in her when she didn't have any in herself, is going to die... and there's nothing she can do about it.
• Before Mulan leaves, she can see the silhouettes of her parents in the window. They're clearly arguing, too - either about how Fa Zhou raised his voice to Mulan or her begging him not to go. It ends with Fa Li pulling away from her husband — no words but an illustration of how much she is despairing.
• When Mulan's family wakes to find that Mulan has run away, her father dashes out into the rain and slips, looking up to see her dropped decorative comb lying forlornly on the ground and, a little further away, the open gate — which confirms his fear of what his daughter has done. Mulan's mother runs to him, saying they should go after her or else she could be killed. The father's reply: "If I reveal her... she will be." Their look of parental despair is heart-rending.
  • Grandma Fa in the same scene. Though she had plenty of disdain towards the ancestors earlier in the movie, now that her granddaughter is in danger, she prays solemnly and earnestly for help. This time, the ancestors respond…
    • Her concern is probably the most understated. Even before her granddaughter goes off to risk her life, she has to worry about her son going off to fight in a war again. And even though she is Fa Zhou's mother, Grandmother Fa can do nothing except be resigned to the patriarchal customs of society at the time, which means that she doesn't raise any protest against her son going.
  • There's also the terror in her voice when she bursts into the parents' room to say "Mulan is gone!"
• During the training montage, everyone is doing a hike carrying sandbags or something on poles across their shoulders. Mulan, unable to keep pace, collapses. Shang picks up her burden and adds it to his own, with a look of contempt that screams that he isn't doing this to be nice, but to drive home how weak she is. Her look of utter humiliation and shame is hard to watch.
  • What makes this especially bad is that it drives home a fundamental problem - Mulan is weaker than her male counterparts. Not in spirit or drive or anything, but physically; her raw strength and stamina just don't measure up to the male soldiers'. It's only by embracing her own strengths that she can get around this.
  • And it even works with her disguise, too—for all Shang and the others know, "Ping" is a teenager with a lot of heart and trying to do his best, but he's too small and skinny to handle the training for grown men.
• The destroyed village scene. Everybody's dead, the houses are in ruins, they find the remains of Shang's father's army, lying dead in the snow. Even Chi Fu has the sense to act appropriately horrified.
  • Special mention for the moment when Chien-Po brings Shang's father's helmet to Shang; Shang goes off by himself and, in a wordless moment, creates a memorial to his father with the helmet and the sword that his father gifted him, bowing to it in respect and grief.
  • This falls into Nightmare Fuel as well. Shang's father doesn't get much screen time, but he's implied to be a badass Reasonable Authority Figure who's also the Chinese equivalent of a Four-Star Badass. And, judging from the way things look, the clash could've been anything from a pitched battle that Shan-Yu won ^note As noted on the Awesome page, generals of this era regularly went to battle with tens, even hundreds of thousands of solders. When Shang and company face Shan-Yu's army on the mountain later, they number at around a few thousand. to an utter rout.
  • There's a moment of quiet bonding between Mulan and Shang here that isn't openly acknowledged or spoken of. Mulan admits that the biggest part of her motivation to join the army wasn't merely to save her father, but rather to bring honor to her family as more than being a mere "proper" woman. Shang himself clearly sought to honor his father's decision to promote him to captain by becoming a great leader of a strong brigade. Both of these people were seeking honor but this scene shows the two realize that the stakes are now far higher than one person or family's honor...
  • Also, when Mulan takes the little girl's doll, places it next to Shang's father's sword, and says a silent prayer. There were little kids in this village.
  • And all of this for what? So Shan-Yu could show his "power" and prove that the Great Wall couldn't protect China (which it was never supposed to do, its true purpose was the warning beacons) and that the Emperor should just let the Huns ravage the countryside with impunity rather than attract their full rage. All those innocent people, gone...
  • The timeline of this scene makes the destroyed village all the more tragic and horrifying.
    • "A Girl Worth Fighting For" was a song to boost morale. It successfully got them believing; the war will be won easily, they will impress the girls of their dreams, and they will return home with the highest honors. This scene showed the reality of war and it hit them like a brick. As soon as they saw the ruins, the song screeches to a halt and the illusion is shattered, they now know what's at stake if they don't take this seriously.
    • In addition to this, there are very few words spoken in this scene, no uplifting speeches, or any declarations. There's just a silent, unanimous declaration that the Huns need to be stopped before they hurt anyone else. There's no joke to break the tension or any reminders that this is, ultimately, a Disney film, just a near-quiet moment where the characters realize the actual weight of war and why they had to be conscripted.
    • The little girl's doll is also a subtle end to the song; they're not fighting to impress the girls at home, they are fighting for the ones who can't protect themselves. While Mulan is holding the doll, she's resisting the urge to cry and the audience has found her answer to what's worth fighting for, it's for the girl who didn't make it.
• The look on Shang's face when he finds out his father was killed in battle and not only him the leader, it was that every single soldier and innocent civilian in that village had been killed along with him. You realize that all of those dead men lying down there were someone's husband, someone's brother, someone's father/son/cousin/uncle/nephew, and now they're never going home, which was why Mulan stole her father's war things and took his place to begin with, so she didn't lose him like that. Mulan finding the abandoned doll amongst the burned wreckage — it only drives the point home even harder: Shan-Yu and the Huns are merciless, bloodthirsty, and evil, and must be stopped.
  Shang: The Huns are moving quickly! We'll make better time to the Imperial City through the Tung-Shao Pass. (voice breaking) We're the only hope for the emperor now. Move out!
  • Not only has Shang just stumbled upon the remains of his father, his father's battalion, and the village they were meant to be guarding, but he's there because of Mushu's fake letter. Unless Mushu told him the truth offscreen after Mulan II, he believes that his father sent to him for help and he's arrived too late.
• When Mulan is revealed as a woman and Shang has to make the decision to kill her, or let one of his best friends, who also saved his life, go free. Made worse when Mulan tells him she did it to save her father's life; Shang just lost his own father to the war and knows exactly how she feels.
  • The looks on Ling, Chien-Po, and Yao's faces while this is all going on. The moment Shang pulls out his sword they don't hesitate to rush to Mulan's defense.
• The scene following Mulan's reveal. Her small band of misfits ^note  Mushu, Crickey and Khan are all she has left after Shang and his army left her to her shame. Mulan then reflects that perhaps the real reason she did everything she did was because she wanted to prove that she could be more than a worthless woman.
  Mulan: ...So when I looked in the mirror, I'd see someone worthwhile. But I was wrong: I see NOTHING.
• After her monologue about reflections, Mushu tries to shine her helmet in an attempt to cheer her up. He then wilts and looks into his own reflection... then admits to her that he too is a fraud. A brilliant use of the movie's Arc Symbol to highlight the similarities between Mushu and Mulan.
  Mushu: The truth is we're both frauds. Your ancestors never sent me. They don't even like me. I mean, you risked your life to help people you love. I risked your life to help myself. At least you had good intentions.
• Shortly before Mulan catches up with Shang at the palace, he and the remaining men are walking past the people as "heroes of China". Shang hasn't the heart to even try presenting a positive face to the cheering crowd, and his expression remains sad throughout; without words, it's clear that he's still thinking of all the people lost to the Huns - innocents from the village, soldiers in his/his father's army - and how this doesn't feel like a victory at all.
• The final scene when Mulan returns to her father. She gives him two of China's greatest treasures as an apology for disobeying him. His response? Cast them aside like trash and hold his daughter as tightly as he can, because he is a dad, and she is all he wants.
  Fa Zhou: The greatest gift and honor... is having you for a daughter.

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