For as long as I can remember, I’ve tried to find DVDs for my daughter that featured strong female role models rather than the usual submissive princesses who wait for their dorky prince to come. You’d think by now there would be plenty of mainstream heroines for a three-year-old girl to watch, but they’ve been few and far between.
A little while back, though, I discovered Disney’s Mulan, which features a young girl turned warrior, and I was surprised I hadn’t heard of it before. According to the description, this didn’t sound like the usual crap for little girls, so I brought it home for Hannah to watch – and she loved it. For the next few weeks she kept asking to watch it again and again, and she would often zip around the house singing songs from the movie.
Now, this weekend we celebrated Hannah’s fourth birthday, and she originally wanted a (shudder) Cinderella party. But after watching Mulan a few times, she dumped that idea and announced – quite forcefully – that she wanted a Mulan party instead. Good for her!
But we quickly discovered that Mulan wasn’t the hit that Disney hoped for. We couldn’t find Mulan stuff anywhere, so I ended up using Google’s image search to find pictures from the movie that we could use for decorations. And while Cinderella birthday cakes are easy to find, we couldn’t find anyone local who made Mulan cakes. After a bit of searching we finally located someone who could take a picture of Mulan and turn it into a cake, but other bakeries refused to do so due to copyright concerns.
Anyway, the party was a hit, and it was worth the extra effort. But once she tires of Mulan, what else can I show her? I’m not raising her to wait for someone else to make her happy, and it would be nice if there were more DVDs like Mulan for her to watch.