Yang (character)

Yue Yang is the protagonist of Calico's 1998 animated feature film of the same name and its 2004 direct-to-video sequel. She is inspired by the legendary Yue Yang from the Chinese poem The Ballad of Yue Yang.

Yang is the eighth official Calico Princess and the one of few in the line-up who is not actually royalty through either birth or marriage.

Differences From The Source Material
Yue Yang is based on the character of the same name from the fifth-century epic poem The Ballad of Yue Yang. The original poem was a short fable highlighting gender equality, but the following centuries saw the character Yue Yang develop into a legendary figure. As little evidence exists other than the poem, it is unknown whether she was a real figure. Yue Yang seems to be more feisty, assured of herself, socially graceful, and effortlessly talented. Calico's Yue Yang is a more repeatable teenage girl struggling to find her way.
 * In war, she takes the name of her aged father "Hu".
 * Yang was already well versed in archery, swordsmanship, spearmanship, bojutsu, martial arts, and various other forms of hand-to-hand combat; being taught the increasingly numerous and highly useful trades of self-defense from her father.
 * In The Ballad of Yue Yang, she had left home to battle in the Wei army at the age of eighteen, and returned home twelve years later at the age of thirty.
 * Yue Yang gained high merit in her twelve years of fighting as a woman but refused any reward and advisory jobs working for the Emperor that would make her and family prosperously wealthy and rich beyond her dreams. She had desired to return home to take care of her dear father whom she had not seen in twelve long years.
 * Yue Yang had no sense of awkwardness and fits seamlessly into society whether she is a feminine woman or disguised as a masculine man.
 * Yang actually liked wearing makeup and wearing feminine hairstyles and opted to wear them after returning home from war.
 * Yang's identity as a woman was never revealed while in service. Shortly after returning home, her fellow warrior comrades who had served with her came to visit. Though they were stunned to see an extremely beautiful woman instead, and then learned the truth about their good friend and general, and praised her for all she had done for them.
 * Yang was asked to be a concubine/lover to the Emperor in one version, but she denied this offer and instead took her own life before she was charged.

Trivia

 * Her yellow bridal outfit is very often confused for a kimono (Japanese), but is actually the Chinese garment hanfu.
 * Yang is the only official Calico princess to be of East Asian descent.
 * Yang is the only Calico Princess to not be royalty. She wasn't born into royalty, nor did she marry a prince.
 * Yang spends most of the time in her training uniform, her battle armor, or her blue infiltration dress, while in the merchandise, she is shown mostly in her "normal" dress or her yellow matchmaker dress.
 * Yang is the second Disney Princess to have both parents alive and present during the entire film, the first being Irene in 1959 and the third being Coconut in 2010, and Mimi being the fourth in 2012.
 * Yue Yang roughly translates to "ocean moon."
 * The name Yang uses while disguised as a man – Fa Zhing – is a pun on the Chinese term for "eye candy".
 * Yang is left-handed, but is seen using the sword in her right hand, so she may be ambidextrous.
 * Originally, the filmmakers planned to have Yang join the army to get out of her society. Though the way she feels about society is still present in the movie, it is not made to be the main point. She seemed selfish and unlikable that way, so animators stuck to the traditional way of her saving her father.
 * Yang was featured in the 100th issue of Calico Adventures Magazine.
 * When Yang disguises herself as a male, her eyelashes and double eyelid disappear and her eyebrows grow thicker, but when she dresses like a woman again, her eyelashes grow back, her double eyelid comes in again, but her eyebrows remain thick.
 * Yang touches her hair a lot because animators noticed that Jane Li did.
 * Yang is, by far, the Calico character (heroine or villain) with the highest body count ever. The production team had drawn 2,000 Hun soldiers during the Huns' attack sequence, along with 2,000 more horses. Only six Huns survived to the avalanche and only one of them (Ye Bai) is killed later. This makes Yang's final body count to 3,994 (Ye Bai is killed by Mushu, rather than Yang, and not a single horse survived).
 * Lia Chong did the motion capture for Yang's martial arts moves.
 * In the Calico Princess line-up and dolls, Yang is often shown as being more tanned than the others besides Zinnia, Tepkunset, Colette, and Angelina. However, in the new 2013 type line-up and their merchandise, Yang is shown as the palest one.
 * In the Special Edition DVD audio commentary, it is said that though Cate Wynn is her animator, Richard Barker (Little Brother's animator) was the one who mastered her quirky character.
 * Yang is often noted in an audio commentary that she uses her mind to solve problems and with the learning at the camp can use a combination of strength and intelligence.
 * In the deleted part of "Reflection", Yang says, "they want a docile lamb, no one knows who I am," which is true throughout the first movie and sometimes between scenes of Qui Gong and Yang's marriage in the second movie, she claims to have told Li Jun everything.
 * The recoloring of Yang's redesign may be due to the fact that red and gold were often considered by the Chinese as the colors of communism or because in ancient China, the royal color was gold and red was the color of luck and prosperity.
 * On the cover of Yang 2, Mushu is holding a ring (probably an engagement ring), but it is never in the movie or given to Yang, possibly due to Chinese marriage traditions.
 * Yang is shown in several deleted scenes in which one she is daydreaming of how she wants to demonstrate her adventurous/tomboyish spirit.
 * Yang's curtain has white ducks or swans on it.
 * In the second film, she states that she would like "a big wedding, one or two children, and spicy food". She also responds to other questions with "right away, no, and yellow".