From "Mulan" To "Hua Mulan": A Case Analysis Of Transculturation And The Game Of Capital Culture

Disney introduced its 36th cartoon film "Mulan" In 1998.This cartoon film which based on famous Chinese legend introduced the heroine"hua mulan"to all over the world and received nearly three hundred million dollars in box office receipts finally. The legend of"Mulan"was very famous in Chinese history; Disney found the exchange value in this legend and made the transculturation in their own way. The cartoon film was sold all over the world, which was a successful case of transculturation.In November 2009, Chinese film"Mulan"detected by ma chucheng was released. This film didn't imitate the way how Disney told the legend, but the innovation didn't mean success. Its box office was 13.5 million dollars. This so called war and epic film didn't received harvest of box office and reputation.China has plenty cultural resources, but it doesn't transfer cultural resources into capital culture effectively. The reason is that there is no effective and careful capitalized operation on cultural resources. So the advantage in cultural resource doesn't mean the advantage in capital culture. The key in capitalized operation on cultural resources is how to transfer the cultural resources into the cultural goods which have the meaning of exchange. So, if we want to compete with other country in capital culture, we must clearly realize which factors are transferable in our national culture and which factors in our national culture are shouldn't be transferred.Based on the comparative Analysis on the remake of the legend of"Mulan", we can conclude that not all the cultural resource can be transferred into transferable capital culture. The significant feature of popular cultural factors is not ideology preaching but"corresponding to humanistic self appeal". So the cultural goods which have the factor of"corresponding to the humanistic self appeal"will be dominant in cultural commodity markets. So even if a story with a significant national culture factors, it can be recognized by other culture. Therefore, the factors"not corresponding to the humanistic self appeal"in national culture should be weaken or removed in cross-cultural communication. In a word, the game of cultural capital is essentially the game of culture. So when we export our culture goods, we should examine our cultural essence and remove the declined ideology, transfer the positive factors in our culture into capital culture to participate the game of capital culture worldwide. There is four parts in my papers. The first part is the introduction which includes the significance of topics, literature review and the explanation of key concept. Then in the first chapter, I specifically analyze the two ways of transculturation in the cartoon film"Mulan"by Disney: anti-essence-summing-trend and disney-trend. According to this, I conclude that the key of the capitalization of cultural resources is transculturation. In the second chapter, I analyze the Chinese film"Mulan"as a case of reversal transculturation. After the comparison of theme in two films, I summarize the dilemma of transculturation in our country. In the third chapter, I start with adaptation of the legend of"mulan", and then demonstrate that the game of cultural capital is essentially the game of culture. At last, I proposed some measures in the capitalization of cultural resources when we participate in the global competition of culture industry...