Archery in the new Mulan film

I just watched the trailer for Disney's live action Mulan reboot. Years ago I was forced to watch Mulan 2, which was a nightmare. Compared to that, this cannot fail, but I really hope it will be better than those other completely unnecessary live action reboots of animated Disney classics. I saw the original Disney Mulan in 1998 in the movies, and I really liked it. Shan Yu, the leader of the evil Huns was a terrifying baddie, I really feared him as a child. And the avalanche scene was awesome!

After some googling around I found out that for some reason Shan Yu is not featured in this reboot (replaced by a random witch in stupid clichéd fantasy costume). This reboot also lacks Mushu, the Cricket, and captain Li Shang (who would've made men out of you all)! Apparently (as the producer of the film stated), the moviemakers fealt that having a superior officer of Mulan felling in love with her is "inappropriate" for this age we're living. As if it would've mattered in ancient China! Seems like I don't need to go to see this movie after all. Sad.

At least the film looks cool. I really love the colours used in this movie. Why is it that ancient and medieval China get's to bee colourful (as it was) but ancient and medieval Europe doesn't (it was too)? Could we get colours back to European historical films also, please!

Costumes in this trailer looked pretty good, especially for a Disney movie! They feature actual Chinese helmet and armour designs from almost the right time period (a few hundred years too new compared to when the story of Hua Mulan was originally set, but then again it's a fantasy story not based on real characters, so it doesn't matter as much).

Archery features heavily in this trailer, and got me excited, so let's get to it!

While not delving into too much detail, let's just say these recurve bows with long siyahs (the unbending parts at the end of Asiatic composite bows) were often used in China from the Han dynasty through the Yuan dynasty (206 BCE–1368 CE).
What is also good is that the archers start their draw from a level above their heads, which is done in East Asian archery, such as Japanese kyūdō.

 Mistakes:
1. All soldiers wear leather bracers. If these are meant to be archer's bracers, then only the archers should wear them, and only in their left arm. And they should be smooth side inside the arm, not like shown here. Leather bracers were not a part of traditional Chinese armours.
2. These bows make a creeking sound when drawn. If a bow creeks, it's somehow broken. I hope not all of these bows are broken. A standard movie cliché, a mistake nonetheless.

Other good thing was that the commander shouted: "Release!" instead of "Fire!". "Fire" was never shouted before the invention and/or widespread use of firearms. Bows don't shoot fire, but arrows, so English language commands to shoot with a bow were most probably "shoot", "loose" and "release". This was really excellent to hear from this trailer.

Now I changed the language in the speech bubble to Chinese since Chinese didn't historically speak English. I don't know Chinese, so according to Cambridge Dictionary this 发射 means "release". More specifically: "Release; to fire a bomb or a missile (= flying weapon), or to allow it to fall". They have used the word "fire" there also, so I don't know if this would be correct term regarding arrows, but someone who knows Chinese can correct this.

 Mistakes:
3. Archers are shooting upwards to create a rain of arrows.

Arrow rain is often depicted in popular media, such as films, games and books, but there is insufficient historical evidence of it being done, at leat regularly. Archers did not stay stationary on battlefield and launch arrow rains after another, but instead they were an inseparable part of the armies, they moved around the battlefield, often among infantry soldiers searching for targets to shoot. The used trajectories of arrows were much flatter and the distances shot much shorter than often imagined by modern people.

4. Mulan here is shooting with a Mediterranean grip. And that is also erroneous, since she's using all four fingers, instead of the regular three. This is anyway not the style of shooting prevalent in Asia, instead she should be shooting with a Mongolian thumb grip. I hope this was just one scene, and she uses the thumb grip in the rest of the movie. Otherwise the archery coach is to blame for this.

5. We have an arrow camera stolen from TV tropes storage of clichés. But it's not a bad cliché, I like it a lot, since it's fun to look at. That's not the mistake. But the arrow flies a long distance (nothing wrong with that either) without spinning. Arrows have those fletchings at their back to give the arrow a spin in the air. This works the same way as rifling on a gun, which makes the bullet spin around it's axis. This spinning makes the projectile fly more accurately. This arrow doesn't even make half a spin during this flight. It's impossible.

Legolas did it better in the The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. His arrow spinned somewhat, while still too little, it looked more believable than Mulan's arrow in flight.

All and all the new Mulan trailer faired exceedingly well compared to many other travesties of archery I've seen during the last few years on screen. Good job!

Compare here how this reboot fairs against it's predecessor regarding archery. I think this new one did a better job in that respect (easier to do it alive than to animate, and some of the mistakes of the animation is due to the exaggerated characteristics of cartoons, not suitable for live action, so it is understandable). It seems I gave both versions of Mulan the same amount of mistake points, but I had more good to say about archery in this live action one.

Chinese archer girl (drawing) who has no idea how to hold a bow

The face of this character is obviously copied from either a photograph or another drawing (which in itself has most probably used a photo reference). The bow is certainly not copied from a life source. That is a bad thing. This is very bad. I mean very, very bad!

Mistakes:

1. This bow is horribly shaped, it does resemble a random tree branch more than a bow, an object a professional bowyer has spent days and weeks shaping into desired form.
2. Bowhand is nowhere near the middle of the bow. This is just ridiculously bad.
3. Three arrows, which are far away from the hand, impossible to shoot like this.
4. Bowstring goes over the bowhand, this is about the worst mistake you can make. You CANNOT shoot like this!
5. Very strange reverse grip of the bowstring.
6. Too big fletching and too near the end of the arrows. The stringhand shouldn't touch the fletching.
7. Where is the quiver or the rest of the arrows? If you have only three arrows, don't shoot them all at once!

A perfectly good picture of a face is ruined by the truly substandard work on everything related to archery in this drawing. How hard it would have been to just Google some pictures of real archers and use them as reference? The face is made with reference anyway. Oh, this is a Chinese drawing, maybe they don't have access to Google? Such a shame. But I still think there would be archer pictures in Baidu, aren't there?

Zhang Jingchu from Jadesoturi (Jade Warrior)

This picture (and others from the same source) widely circulate the Internet (yes I still write it with a capital I, since it's a proper noun) with a caption that says this to be an Inuit archer.

No.

This is a picture of Chinese actress  Zhang Jingchu from the filming of a (first and only)  Finnish-Chinese kung fu film Jadesoturi (Jade Warrior), from 2006.

So she's Chinese, not Inuit, an actress, not a huntress, this costume is clearly a movie costume (nobody wears a corset in traditional societies!), and the place is Finland, not the North Pole or something.

Anybody who knows archery can also tell that this woman doesn't know archery.

Mistakes are:

1. The position of the bow is wrong. She holds it a bit too high from the center which makes the bow tilt backwards. I've drawn the correct position of the bow, where it should be.
2. She holds the arrow with index finger of her bow hand. A beginners mistake, once again.

War of the arrows (Korean movie)

This is from a Korean movie I just watched with my friends. It's called "War of the arrows", or then "Arrow, the ultimate weapon", of which the first one is much better as a name, but I don't know which one is more accurate translation of Choi-jong-byeong-gi Hwal (Google translate didn't help at all).

As a movie, it's pretty good, but as an archery film, superb! Never before have I seen so much, so good and so interesting archery in a movie! This is almost like Lars Andersen coming to the big screen!

And which is also great, is that the archers are now in the main role, which rarely happens in movies. Usually it's always the swordsman who gets all the glory, while archers are just extras shooting some shower of arrows at the beginning of a battle. In reality archers were much more important than that, they continued to shoot enemies throughout the battle, and not with arrow rains, but with direct shots.

I will start with the good parts, since there are many of those in this movie:

1. Mongolian release. I have not seen very many Asian archery movies (many kung-fu movies have archers in them), so the usual one to be seen in films set in Europe is the Mediterranean release. There is probably not the single best way to draw the bow, I happen to like Mediterranean more, since it is easier and don't require excessive equipment. Mongolian release needs a thumb ring, otherwise the archers thumb will become sore very quickly. Anyway, Mongolian release is done right in almost all scenes of this movie.
2. The arrow is on the right side of the bow. It's both right and right, since it's right to keep the arrow on the right side (and not left) of the bow, while shooting in Asian style. Asian people's all seem to keep arrow on the right and use their thumb to keep it in place there. It allows faster re-shooting, as Andersen demonstrated. Europeans keep the arrow on the left side of the bow.
3. Asian side quiver. They used their arrows "on the back" yes, but not over the shoulder, where the arrows are hard to draw from. Instead their quivers were designed to keep the arrows only from their tip area, but still firmly in place, so they could be tilted to almost horizontal way.
4. Keeping an arrow in the bow hand. Usually in movies people only carry arrows in their quivers, but in this scene the main character has one more arrow in his bow hand. It's faster to shoot from there. Even faster woud be from the string hand (Andersen again...)
5. Use of special arrows. This is called "half-pounder" in the movie, and it has a chisel like tip. Broad flat blades were used in arrow tips for different purposes. This is used like a "super arrow" in the movie, which I could criticize a bit, since it seems too powerful, shattering small tree trunks! But still, it's very nice to see some special arrows in films, since we always get only the regular ones, and 'fire arrows', which were more sparsely used than movies makes you think.
6. THIS ONE! Fantastic! The main hero shoots with broken arrows! He makes an arrow guide from a bamboo stalk, and uses it to shoot half arrows. The arrow guide is tied to his thumb, so it doesn't fly when he releases the arrow. Superb!

This movie cannot escape mistakes entirely:

1. The main character shoots sideways many times. You can clearly see where his arrow string touches his clothes. It's not very good form. He also shoots the bow vertically too.
2. In this picture the main antagonist has a poor form. He uses the Mediterranean release, but with four fingers. So it's wrong for a Mediterranean, and also wrong for an Asian. Most other times he uses the Mongolian grip properly. The arrow's fletching inside this same circle is also damaged to the point that there are almost none feathers left.
3. The arrow is on the right side of the antagonists bow, but he keeps it in place with both thumb and index finger. That will hurt the index finger, if released. I admit that it is harder to keep on the right side of the bow, just with a thumb. Maybe this picture is from the early stages of filming and the actor got better over filming time?
4. Back quivers. Most characters in this film have them. Almost all soldiers carry a bow anyway. But back quivers were not used like this, not in Asia either. The protagonist has a better one.

Summa summarum:

This is a very good archery movie, and I recommend it to everyone even remotely interested in archery, history, warfare or Asian cultures in general.

Mulan (Disney's)

This archery scene is only made for fun in Disney's Mulan animation of course, but they still made some mistakes in it.


Mistakes:

1. Both Mulan and captain Shang shoot left handed in this scene, while they are otherwise right handed.
2. Mulan uses a Mediterranean grip, which is wrong in two ways. Mediterranean grip uses three fingers, Mulan uses only two. The second mistake, they didn't use that release method in China. Asians used mostly Mongolian release, which utilises the thumb holding the string. It requires a thumb ring.
3. Captain Shang shoots three arrows in this scene to show how well the Chinese soldiers must learn archery (and after a training montage Mulan and all the others have learned this trick). Shooting three arrows is possible, but hitting three flying targets and then nailing them to another target is not. Of course, but this is a fun scene, so I won't complain about it anymore. Although I really put the red ring here because there's nothing to keep those arrows holding there.
4. Shang uses four finger grip, but again, it's necessary in this three-arrow-shot. Anyway, usually using four fingers is not a good idea, since it turns the string too much and can effect the flight of the missile. But the real mistake here is the Mediterranean style instead of Mongolian.
5. Arrows don't have any space behind their fletching for fingers to grip and the fletchings do touch both Mulan's and Shang's fingers while they draw.

Good, or... at least okay I guess:

1. Recurve bow, since Asians mostly used these. Although it doesn't look much like a Chinese bow.
2. Hip quiver, again different than real Chinese quivers, but at least it isn't a standard Hollywood back quiver.
3. The arrows are on the left side of the bow here. It would be right if they were shooting with European style, and the bow would be properly on their left hand. But now it's actually not wrong either, since Chinese (as most Asians) shoot the arrow on the thumb side (right side, but in this case, when the characters are mirrored, on the left side). This is most probably a coincidence, they certainly didn't think that much while drawing this scene. It just happened to go right this once. Arrow on the wrong side of the bow is one of the most common mistakes.

And finally a photo from the beginning of the 20th Century. Manchu archers demonstrating Chinese style archery. Note the arrow on the right side, "overdraw" style of shooting, very long fletching on the arrows and typical East Asian quivers with arrows held in place only at their tip.

How not to draw an archer

This is both frustrating and alarming. Some guy has made a guide "how to draw an archer" and posted it on DeviantArt, which is notoriously infamous for promoting only lousy unoriginal plagiaristic fan "art" and softcore porn classified under "nude art photography".

This guide is unfortunately completely wrong. Someone has actually took the time to make this "guide" for other people to teach them how to draw archers wrong! Why would anyone do this if they have no idea how a bow works? What made them think that they had the expertise to make themselves an authority on the subject? That is beyond my comprehension.

This is a very bad guide, which should be removed permanently from internet. If you want to learn how to draw an archer who's anatomy is way off (proper height of an adult human would be seven and half times the height of the head, and here it is nine!) which uses a bow that doesn't bend, with a rubber band attached to it, then you can use this one. Otherwise, please use photographs of real archers instead.


Mistakes:

1. The bow doesn't bend here! It is not the string which stretches, but the bow's arc which creates the power to propel the arrow. How is this hard to see? I've drawn a box around the bow in the first picture. The bow arc should bend to the middle of that box, while the string should be at the end of the box. Arrow half way in the middle. Yes, Japanese kyudo bows, which this tries to depict are sometimes even two meters long (daikyu), and their upper limb is much longer that the lower limb, but that doesn't change the principle of bow arcing. Draw the rectangular box around the place where the drawn bow will be, then make a line in the middle. Other side draw the bent bow and other side the string. It's very easy to draw a realistic bow with this method.
2. This picture is drawn after some photographs of kyudo archers, but disappointingly the maker of this picture hasn't noticed the mistakes he made with the bow. Also he hasn't looked the arrow close enough to see that his is wrong. There are again no room for fingers to hold the arrow nock behind the fletching. There should be some 3 cm space there. This figure also has only one spare arrow and not a quiver. I don't consider it a new mistake in this case, since the maker of this picture has just copied it from the photographs he has seen, and kyudo archers do hold one spare arrow in their drawing hand like this and not always carry a quiver. This is of course sports archery, in war japanese would use quivers too, like everybody else who has any brain cells in their cranium.

Good:

Nothing. It's especially harmful to make a guide of how to do something, when you have no idea how it's properly done. Teaching erroneous things is wrong! It's also misleading to call this just a guide how to draw 'an archer'. This should be called (if made properly) "how to draw a Japanese kyudo archer". Since kyudo is a sport and has very little to do with archery in warfare. Also Japanese archery is very different from archery in anywhere else in the world because of the unusual shape and size of the bows.

Dragon Blade (Chinese movie)

These pictures are from an upcoming Chinese/Hong Kong movie Dragon Blade, which claims to be a historical action fantasy film, but has so nothing to do with actual history, that even naming the word ‘history’ anywhere near this movie is a horrid blasphemy!
The movie tells about a purely fictional story of ancient “Romans” fighting against ancient “Chinese” people over the control of the silk road, which in reality was in control of the Parthian empire which existed between Roman and Chinese empires. But this movie forgets it. It also forgets that the Chinese were the producers of silk and many other goods so they didn’t care to control the silk road. All the gear and weaponry presented in this movie are apparently designed by the director himself, who has obviously played too much World of Warcraft, so ridiculously impractical and unrealistic all the equipment are!

But now to the main topic.

Mistakes:

1. What is this this bow grip? Doesn’t seem very solid at all. Maybe the bow is too thick for this Chinese woman’s small hands. Her fingers just don’t reach around the bow’s grip properly. They shouldn’t have put so much fur and other stuff around the grip. Simple wooden grip would’ve been fine.

2. This string release method is very rarely used in history, since it’s so impractical. There’s always a possibility that it was only an artistic convention and not actually used at all. It’s much harder than any of the other release methods (this is mediterranean release, but the hand is turned upside down). Probably the moviemakers thought this looks cooler.

3. The woman has so much fur on her, that it makes shooting difficult. See in this circle how the fur gets in the way of the bow string. Not good, can effect the flight of the arrow.

4. This back quiver is so far away back that it would be quite difficult to even find the arrows with a hand backside the archers head, where she can’t see where the arrows are.

5. Sideways shooting is always bad. No one ever shot like this with a bow, or with any other weapon for that matter. See where the red arrow points, the string bends because it collides with the flank of the archer, and thus the bow cannot be drawn full length and the missile lose momentum.

6. Even though the bow is not quite fully drawn, the arrows are too long for this woman’s shortish arms. You can’t even see the tip of the arrow in this photo, so they’re definitely too long for her. The bow and arrows haven’t been measured for this actress personally. Minor error, but still.


Good:

The recurve bow and the arrows themselves look realistic and actually working weapons and not as fantastical as everything else in this movie, some swords with forked tips for example, terrible!