SyncX

The Grand Cinema on Nanking Road, as the name suggests, is the biggest in Shanghai, but few people showed up for the opening of Mulan on Tuesday afternoon.

The cavernous art deco auditorium was empty down in the stalls and up in the circle, with only a few couples nestled on the red twin-seater seats.

It was a little strange since it was raining hard outside and school holidays were not yet over. In the lobby Jackie Chan was on a TV promoting the film with kickboxing and singing one of the songs from the cartoon all about how to become a nanzi han, a hardy warrior.

Mulan is about the folk legend of Hua Mulan, a heroine who disguises herself as a man to take her father's place in the fight against the invading Huns. Naturally, there are quite a few jokes about the pros and cons of cross-dressing in the Tang Dynasty.

It is also Disney's gesture towards warming up the China market after angering Beijing by releasing Kundun - a biography of the Dalai Lama. This is the first Disney film to be released for two years, and aims to emulate previous blockbuster The Lion King.

Having been released worldwide last year, it has only just come to China, despite this being, so to speak, its home base.

'I came because it is a Disney film and [they] are great,' said 12-year-old Xiao Wang, the only girl buying a ticket.

Adults have generally been far more suspicious about Hollywood interpreting Chinese culture.

'I found it strange - only foreigners could make this kind of a film. It wasn't like watching the Chinese story of Mulan, it looked like any foreign cartoon,' said 30-year-old Li Hui.

Jiang Zemin himself called on the nation to repel the invasion of American cartoons in 1996 by launching Project 555 to produce Chinese cartoon characters drawn from Chinese history. He wrote to the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, requesting 'fine works with a healthy ideological content'.

So far little has come out to challenge Bugs and Mickey. Wu Zili, a painter, thought he knew why after seeing Mulan.

'If Chinese people were to make it, it wouldn't have been so much fun because they would have to be very careful, since everyone knows the story so well,' he said.

'Also, Chinese look down on cartoons as a second-rate artform. They think they are made for children, but Disney makes them for grown-ups.' The only reason so few people came to the cinema was that everyone had already seen Mulan on a pirated VCD, which now costs even less than the price of a cinema ticket.

With 40 million VCD machines on the mainland, China is now a potentially large market outside the control of state censors but also beyond the reach of commercial distributors.

The taste for Hollywood is now firmly established but distributing VCDs is still difficult without permission.

There have been some complaints that Mulan is not portrayed as the fearsome female warrior she was, that she is still the pretty Disney stereotyped woman. Yet the film Mulan is so close to the official line on Chinese history - the Great Wall, barbarian invasions, national unity and all - that it might as well have been written by a mainland screenwriter. One suspects that everything was done to ensure it would be politically correct inside China.

Finding the right villains to play in films made for the mainland market is especially important. Mulan had hordes of fiendish Hun horsemen while Chan's Rush Hour had a British colonial official from Hong Kong intent on stealing China's cultural heritage. Who will be next?

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