The original animated Mulan movie depicts its menacing Hun villain, Shan Yu, with black and yellow eyes, but this is never explained in the film. Based on an ancient Chinese poem, Mulan was released in 1998 as one of the last entries in the celebrated Disney Renaissance period.
Mulan deals with the title heroine’s journey as she disguises herself as a man to join the army to prevent her elderly father from being conscripted. The military conflict she subsequently becomes embroiled in is the result of an invasion of China by the Huns, led by the brutal Shan Yu. Although he has comparatively little screen time, the Hun general commands vast hoards of warriors, posing a significant threat to both the protagonists and their nation. Shan Yu is replaced by a similar character named Bori Khan in the live-action remake.
The whites of Shan Yu’s eyes are black and the irises are yellow, but an explanation for this odd coloration is not given in Mulan, nor in any official material released since. The most compelling and supported theory is that it is related to a deleted scene from the film in which Shan Yu is shown to be able to magically see through the eyes of his pet falcon, Hayabusa. Other, more realistic factors could also result in this unusual appearance, such as disease or an elective process called scleral tattooing. All of the other Huns lack this feature, however, so causes that could be cultural or communal seem less likely.
Although it is a relatively small design detail, looking at the possible explanations for Shan Yu’s eyes can illuminate how he is both distinguished from and akin to the rest of the Disney villain pantheon. From the perspective of having supernatural powers, he recalls many of the Disney Renaissance’s sinister, magical antagonists, from The Little Mermaid‘s Ursula to Aladdin‘s Jafar. However, Shan Yu is also much more physical than most of his contemporaries and is proficient in ruthless martial combat, so the more grounded, visceral explanations of tattooing or disease emphasize this unique aspect of his character.
Mulan was a different kind of Disney heroine; she remains the only official Disney Princess not to be royal in any way, and her self-directed course of action anticipated the increased agency of princesses in decades to come, like Rapunzel from Tangled and Anna and Elsa from Frozen. As such, she needed a different kind of Disney villain. Shan Yu’s intensity and militarism, as well as his complete lack of singing in a musical film, give him a air of unmistakable hostility, and while providing some background to his strangely colored eyes could have added to this, leaving his eyes unexplained may have been even more effective, creating the sense that there is simply something wrong and eldritch about him, that he is an unnatural force that ultimately only Mulan and her friends were capable of overcoming.
