"I'll Make a Man Out of You" is performed by Captain Li Shang during Mulan's training montage,[10] which has also been identified as the film's "boot camp sequence."[11] The scene explores Shang's attempt to train his newly recruited squadron of incompetent soldiers in the hopes of ultimately transforming into a skilled army.[12] Occupying a significant portion of the film's plot, Shang promises to turn his team of "rag-tag recruits" into men.[13][14] The musical number is used to "compress dramatic time or narrate" in a more compelling way than had solely dialogue been used.[15] The scene begins with Shang shooting an arrow into the top of a tall pole and challenging all of his soldiers to retrieve it, each of whom fail until Mulan eventually succeeds. According to the book Into the Closet: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Body in Children's Literature and Film by Victoria Flanagan, Mulan is successful in retrieving the arrow because she uses "an ingenuity that is based upon her ability to incorporate aspects of femininity into her masculine performance."[16] By the end of the scene, all of the soldiers have improved dramatically and the results of their practice and training are finally revealed.[17] In what Joshua and Judges author Athalya Brenner called "a humorous reversal toward the end of the movie," Mulan and her male comrades disguise themselves as concubines in order to infiltrate the palace and rescue the emperor while "I'll Make a Man Out of You" reprises in the background.[18]