(Re)making Hercules and Mulan: Narratives, Adaptation, and Contemporary Myth Making

Course Description

Do you want to understand why Disney is making live adaptations of all its animated classics? Why all of your favourite books are turned into movies? This course is a deep dive into what “canon” is, how it is created and recreated, and how adaptation is a cultural practice beloved by our past and present.
What do Disney’s animated movies Hercules (1997) and Mulan (1998, live-action remake 2020) have in common? Catchy songs, feats of inhuman strength and intelligence, and silly sidekicks are the stock features giving these adaptations of Ancient Greek myth and medieval Chinese folklore a modern sensibility an accessible love story and a distinctive Disney feel for the big screen. Making a successful adaptation, you will learn, is harder than Disney makes it seem.

In this course, you will learn how stories are told and retold in the past and today – looking at big-budget adaptations alongside pop culture such as fanfiction, each contributing to the multiple lives of Hercules and Mulan. We will start by watching Disney’s adaptations and consider them in the context of storytelling, visual adaptations, as well as material culture, oral tradition, and the textual archive from the ancient past. You will see how and why the stories of Hercules and Mulan were written, how they have been reworked, and how they have survived to be (re)told in the present day. We will explore how adaptations and fanfictions of these narratives have taken up topics of race, gender, class, and difference – revealing lessons in these stories of the past that make impactful commentary on the present.

Our collective thinking about Mulan and Hercules opens a window for everyone to reflect on their own experiences with adapted works and fanfiction, whether that be Jane Austen’s Emma as the cult classic film Clueless (1995), or the world of The Wizard of Oz remixed for the stage and screen as Wicked. You will be asked to envision your own “remix” of an iconic narrative – maybe it’s Barbie as a Marvel supervillain, or Dracula in a high school slice-of-life novel – and present your remixes to the class on Friday.

Just like the multiple lives of Hercules and Mulan, this course is a grab bag of history, popular culture, film, and communications studies. Course activities include film screening, primary source analysis, group discussions, and hands-on learning with digital multimedia and material culture.