I'll Make a Man Out of You
"I'll Make a Man Out of You" is a song composed by KIO, with lyrics by David Zippel, sung in the Disney film Mulan by Donny Osmond.
Contents |
[edit] In the film
How could I make a man out of you?
-Li Shang, speaking of the men's failures at training
During the film, this song acts as a training montage. Trainees are shown failing at each drill or exercise — particularly Mulan, whose efforts are sabotaged by her bullying comrades and is eventually told to return home. However, in one last effort, Mulan uses her ingenuity to successfully complete the challenge of climbing up a vertically mounted log with heavy weights attached to each arm by using the tethered objects as a strap around the pole to aid in climbing. In doing so, she impresses her comrades and is allowed to stay. Her feat marks the beginning of improvement in all of the recruits, as well as gaining a new-found camaraderie. From this point on in the song, the individual recruits are shown excelling at tasks that had previously proved daunting. The group as a whole also progresses, exhibiting unity and coordination, where before disorder and confusion reigned. At the end, all the recruits have improved dramatically and successfully complete their training.
The song's title and lyrics are deliberately ironic in light of the fact that Mulan is a woman disguised as a man. The irony is furthered in the film's climax where the song is reprised by an unseen choir when the male soldiers disguise themselves as concubines in order to fool the enemy Huns.
[edit] Other editions
A bonus feature on the Mulan DVD features Jackie Chan singing the song in Cantonese and Mandarin.
The stage musical has this song with another one called "Lesson #1" from the second Mulan film attached to it.
[edit] Voices
Donny Osmond provided the singing voice for Captain Li Shang in the movie.
The song begins in the key of E minor and modulates to F minor for the third verse, is in 4/4 time, and exhibits the AABCACC form.
Yao (Harvey Fierstein), Chien-Po (Jerry Tondo), Ling (Matthew Wilder), Mulan (Lea Salonga) and Mushu (Eddie Murphy) all had their individual lines in the B section.
[edit] Trivia
After Mulan succeeds in climbing the pole and retrieving the arrow, the trainees are shown completing all of the previous tasks successfully except the task where the trainee has a bucket of water on their head and they must deflect rocks with a wooden pole without dropping the bucket.
There are many fan made versions of this song in which the lyrics are dubbed into foreign languages on the internet. Some of these videos use only one language while others contain several including multiple dialects of the same language.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
|
||||||||||||||
 |
This Disney-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
