The Character Designs of 'Mulan'

Plus: news.

A still from Mulan (1998)

Welcome! This is a new Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and our plan goes like this:

• 1. On Chen-Yi Chang’s designs for Mulan.

• 2. Newsbits in animation.

With that, let’s go!

1. What Chen-Yi Chang did

Mulan is a well-designed film. It’s been said many times, but it’s worth repeating. In style, the project was possibly Disney’s most ambitious and different of the ‘90s, during its renaissance era. The artists really did something.

One of them was Hans Bacher, the production designer, whose work on the film we’ve covered before. Mulan “still was supposed to be a Disney movie,” he wrote — but one mixed with aesthetic ideas from China. In his style guides, online here and here, Bacher explained in painstaking detail what that meant.¹

But Bacher didn’t create the look by himself. Maybe even more crucial to Mulan’s style was the character designer, Chen-Yi Chang. “I could not have designed Mulan without him,” Bacher wrote. “He very patiently explained everything about China, gave me the real books and background information.”²

One of Mulan’s directors, Tony Bancroft, argued that the film’s “unique and consistent” design came from “the combination of these two strong artistic visions.” And Chang was, in many ways, the linchpin. Producer Pam Coats referred to him as a “walking library” and “our salvation on this movie.”³ By the time Bacher joined, Chang had spent roughly a year on Mulan already.

From the start, Chang studied and experimented. “I was trying to figure out what makes Chinese art look Chinese,” he said. The answers he reached, both alone and with Bacher (an artist he admired), helped to make Mulan special. Chang treasured his time on the film; he called his art for it his “best work so far.”⁴

Yet the job was challenging, too. “Mulan was a big responsibility,” Chang said. “If I hadn’t done it well … I’d have felt that I’d let down the Chinese people. The pressure was enormous.”⁵

Early Mulan concept art by Chen-Yi Chang, done in 1993

More developed Mulan design work by Chen-Yi Chang from 1995

Chen-Yi Chang wasn’t a Hollywood veteran when Mulan came along. Even so, he’d been in animation for well over a decade.

As a child in Taiwan, during the ‘70s, Chang saw an article about Disney in Reader’s Digest. It sparked a lifelong interest in animation. Around 1979, he began working at Cuckoos’ Nest in Taipei, a major outsourcing site for American cartoons.⁶

Somewhere along the line, Chang stopped caring for Disney. “[W]hen I was in my late teens and early 20s, I fell in love with those animated shorts from Eastern Europe, especially those ones from Zagreb,” he said, referring to the Zagreb School of Animation. He became an experimental animator as well — his Childhood Impressions (1985) won a major prize in Taiwan.⁷

A few years later, Chang traveled to America to learn more. As he wrote:

I went to CalArts to pursue what I’m really interested [in], experimental animation. But, in order to have a job, I also took a lot of classes at the character animation department: design, animation, layout, storyboard... anything related to animation.⁸

His talent stood out. In the early ‘90s, he got a Disney internship — and a character design job on Batman: The Animated Series, which shaped his future style. In the same period, Chang “started to love Disney again,” he said. And, when the Mulan project revved up around 1993, he got an offer to change studios.

“The likelihood that Disney would make a second movie with a Chinese theme was close to nil,” he said, “so I couldn’t pass up the chance.”

Chang, an alt artist, landed in the center of Hollywood animation. It was the start of his fight to really, genuinely put old China into a Disney feature film.

References that Chang used: a Lou Rui tomb mural and the painting Starting the Hunt by Hu Gui. Courtesy of Wutai News and the National Palace Museum Collection.

Chen-Yi Chang’s studies of the above paintings from 1993 and 1994

Right from the initial development of Mulan, Chang submerged himself in ancient Chinese art and architecture and fashion and more. He was looking at materials from a thousand (or close to two thousand) years before.

One of his research methods was to draw studies of old paintings. “I just go over it with a sense of cartooning, and kind of make those ancient paintings into cartoons,” he said, “and try to find out if there’s anything I can copy from them — or, I should say, steal from them.”

Chang pulled ideas from a mountain of reference books, many of them in Chinese. For the team, he assembled a reference bible by scanning key photos and translating the descriptions beneath. Copies were distributed throughout the studio, reported Taiwan Panorama, so that everyone could see what he was seeing.

You find that type of research in action across the film. Take Mulan’s armor, based on the intricate lamellar armor of the Tang dynasty. Chang had trouble stripping it down for animation — until he saw a mural from the Kumtura Caves, in which the same gear appears in almost symbolic form. “Oh, this is how ancient artists see it,” Chang said. “And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a really good way of doing it.’ ”

The Kumtura mural (8th or 9th century) that inspired the armor designs in Mulan

The armor solution grew out of Chang’s wider plan for the film. Visually, he wanted to adapt eras of China that were relatively near in time to the story of Hua Mulan itself. He was fighting against preconceptions of China, as he said:

I got a lot of confusion and headache at the beginning of development. Because at that time I knew I was facing two hurdles. One was Westerners who had a stereotypical idea of how ancient Chinese should look. I mean, like, long mustaches and pigtails. Totally false. And so I was wondering, “If I present the real look of ancient Chinese, they would get shocked, and they would probably think I didn’t do any research at all.”

The other audience group is Chinese, most of whom grew up, like I did, with low-budget TV and movies that used the Ming dynasty culture to represent all of the previous dynasties, which is totally wrong. If I go back to the time that Mulan is supposed to have lived, and create a more accurate representation of that era, the Chinese might be shocked, because not many of them know much about it. It will be educational for everybody.

Early design work by Chang from 1993

Chang design work from 1995

Chang settled on a blend of the medieval Tang dynasty with the earlier Han dynasty of the 200s. “The art from the Han dynasty is more primitive, and we liked that direct approach a lot,” he said.

Meanwhile, they relied heavily on the surviving Tang “sculptures, figurines and paintings,” with their “curvy motifs.” In Chang’s words, “[T]heir recurring design elements became the main resource for the style that was developed for Mulan.”

He knew that this direction could be controversial. Sure enough, even in the ‘90s, stuff like Mulan’s hanfu and white makeup drew criticism from people unfamiliar with the ancient past. Her fashion was Japanese, some argued. But, as Taiwan Panorama reported in 1999, Chang:

… can’t help taking issue with such comments. He explains, if you look at facial portraits of women from the Sui and Tang dynasties and the Five Dynasties era, you will see that in ancient times women made up their faces by first applying white powder and then applying rouge. This form of appearance was common down through the Qing dynasty. The fashions and apparel of traditional Japanese culture were originally adopted from Tang Chinese culture. Today, most people have turned cause and effect on their heads, and that is why they think Mulan has a “Japanese” flavor.

Pages of Lu Hua’s lianhuanhua illustrations (20th century)

The exploration by Chang and Hans Bacher (who joined around late ‘94) led to a design system with a set of guidelines. Mulan’s look would be old China run through cartoons — and not just American cartoons. Bacher wrote that Chang exposed him to “original Chinese comic books ... with very delicate black and white drawings.” He was stunned by the lianhuanhua artwork of Lu Hua.⁹

One rule that research brought Mulan was reduced detail. The film needed to focus on general, graphic, flattened shapes rather than “unnecessary wrinkles, folds, things like that,” Chang said. The idea was “to imply instead of to show,” as was common in traditional painting.

Similarly important was the “S-curve,” the elegant swoop visible throughout each character. It was Chang’s discovery. As he said, “It’s a graphic motif I picked up from ancient Chinese art. … [Y]ou see this flowing-, running-water-like elegance.” He took that motif and boiled it down into repeatable graphic design.

It had to be systematized. Making Mulan at Disney’s industrial scale meant training a large team “to draw like Chen-Yi,” as animator Aaron Blaise put it. Mulan’s art director, Ric Sluiter, mentioned that Chang used:

… real simple S-shapes, one line leading into another, simple, graphic, elegant shapes and so to get that, you have to design each character with a lot of rules. It’s like a schematic formula that has to be laid out and embedded into each artist.¹⁰

Horse guideline pages by Chang

A Chang drawing for Mushu from 1995

Many of the designs Chang sketched were ultimately developed by others on the crew. Still, it’s hard to miss his hand in Mulan. Some designs, like Mulan’s horse, came basically straight from his concept art.¹¹ Plus, his sense of caricature is all over the film.

Chang placed a big focus on caricature. Like director Barry Cook said, “He showed us ways to do fun caricatures that weren’t demeaning or insulting.” Floyd Norman, who worked on the film, noted that the plan wasn’t to “soft-pedal the facial features.”¹² Everyone is pushed, down to their shapes and sizes.

Mulan’s soldier friends, the so-called gang of three, are an example Chang gave. Chien-Po (“our big Buddha”) is very tall, and is all soft edges and circles. Yao is short, stocky and squared off: a “bulldog.” Meanwhile, Ling is thin, of medium height and defined by triangles. These are caricatures built out of the three basic shapes, Chang said — and the three basic sizes.

“There’s only big, medium and small,” he explained. “I know it sounds very stupid, but, trust me, a lot of artists, when they are working on characters, they tend to forget it.”

Chang put real effort into caricaturizing the background characters, too. One of his key words for Mulan was variety — he wanted a broad set of looks and personalities. He’s argued that using “just one single type of graphic element to overgeneralize,” as earlier cartoonists did “every time when they drew a Chinese,” is the mistake that causes caricature to become stereotype.

As he said:

After we finalized the main characters, I told the directors that I would like to do the secondary characters, because I’m concerned that artists here — because of their educational environment — don’t really have a good set of graphic icons to portray the individuality of Asians, and this would be my opportunity to do so. Even though they are secondary characters or background people whom the audience probably won’t single out, I still tried to make them look like individuals, people you would see if you went to Asia.

A Chang sketch lineup of the ancestors

Chang design sketches from 1993 through 1996

Chang design sketches from 1995 and 1996

Mulan was, like Chang said, a high-pressure thing. Because of his status at the studio, he had an unusually large say in this film. Which meant that his successes would show up on screen — as would his mistakes. Only he knew enough to get it right, and so he needed to get it right.

Luckily, he did. Chang’s work, coupled with Hans Bacher’s, remains one of the high points of Hollywood design over the past 30 years. And, despite some controversy inside China, Mulan enjoys a pretty good reputation even there: it has a very solid rating of 8.0 from Douban’s harsh users.¹³

Over the years, Chang often hasn’t gotten enough credit for what he did here — or for how much time he spent on his research. That’s normal with Disney. The studio’s name tends to absorb attention; the individual artists who make the films rarely become famous.

Still, Chang’s team knew what he’d pulled off. In the ‘90s, Aaron Blaise called him “just amazing” and “one of the best artists on this picture.” Hans Bacher, who isn’t easily impressed, has praised him for decades. And Tony Bancroft once said:

If it wasn’t for Chen-Yi and all his amounts of enthusiasm and research for costuming and that sort of thing, Mulan wouldn’t be nearly what it is today.

Chen-Yi Chang (right) with Hans Bacher (left) during Mulan

2. Newsbits

• We lost Tatsuo Sato (61), director of Cat Soup, and the veteran Ukrainian filmmaker Yevhen Syvokin (88).

• Guillermo del Toro says that his upcoming Buried Giant, animated by ShadowMachine in America, will be a “fascinatingly difficult stop-motion movie for adults.”

• Submissions are open for the Factual Animation Film Festival, based in Britain and Germany. Its focus is animated non-fiction, including docs.

• On that note, It Wasn’t Bourgogne is an interesting French film based on the memories of the director’s grandfather. It’s now on YouTube.

• Also on YouTube is the Japanese film In the Big Yard Inside the Teeny-Weeny Pocket (2022), a pretty mind-altering watch.

• In America next month, the Muskegon Museum of Art opens an exhibition on women in animation, including the work of Mary Blair and Lotte Reiniger. Curating it is Mindy Johnson, author of the excellent Ink & Paint.

• Also in America, a new post from Cartoon Research gets into some of UPA’s obscure latter-day work, with links to rarities we’ve never seen before.

• In Greece, the government is putting €750 million into film and television, including animation. Cineuropa calls it “the most comprehensive state-backed framework for the country’s creative industries to date.”

• The rise of original South Korean animation received long-form coverage from CNN.

• In Czechia, the Karel Zeman feature Krabat – The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1978) was restored, and just screened at the Anifilm festival.

• Last of all: we wrote about the life and work of Raoul Servais, the Belgian master.

Until next time!

1. Bacher’s quote comes from this blog post.

2. See Bacher’s book Dream Worlds, used a couple of times.

3. Quotes from Bancroft’s book Directing for Animation and the “Character Design” featurette on the Mulan Blu-ray release. The latter was used a lot today.

4. See The Art of Mulan, Chang’s 2002 lecture at California State Polytechnic University and his 2013 master class for Virtual Animators. The first two were main sources, used extensively throughout.

5. See Taiwan Panorama (July 1999), another of our major sources.

6. His time at the studio came up in this blog post, alongside Taiwan Panorama.

7. For information about Childhood Impressions, see here and here.

8. See this interview with Chang. Also, according to CalArts, he graduated in 1992.

9. Some of this came up in Bacher’s 1997 style guide for the film and his posts here and here.

10. See Cinefantastique (July 1998).

11. For the detail about the horse, Khan, see Mulan: Special Collector’s Edition. In the ‘90s, Chang said that he “had a very clear vision” for Khan from the start, and that it was the Mulan design on which he “had the most fun.”

The film’s designs in general, as is normal for Disney, were a collaborative process. But it was a process in which Chang played an outsize role. Here’s what Hans Bacher wrote on his blog:

In Mulan’s case all characters were designed by Chen-Yi Chang; we both worked very close together to make sure the film had “one” look, character- and environment-wise. The leading animators of the main characters were asked to fine-tune their characters, so they felt comfortable animating them. But after that their designs went back to Chen-Yi to be brought back to the style.

Chang also authored an overall “character styling” guide for the team, a few pages of which Tony Bancroft has shared.

12. Quotes from The News and Observer (June 17, 1998) and the Nassau edition of Newsday (February 7, 1999).

13. See the film’s Douban page here.