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Thread: yellow face/white washing.

  1. #16
    Greetings,

    Just don't let things get to this point: (in 6 parts)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUDDP...9gB17lAqxTYSr9



    mickey

  2. #17
    We will know Hollywood racism is dead when they are willing to cast a REAL Cimmerian as Conan and a REAL Vulcan as Spock!

  3. #18
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    #HowIMetYourRacism

    How I Met Your Mother
    Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment In Slapmarra


    'How I Met Your Mother' Creators Respond to Kung Fu Controversy
    4:11 PM PST 1/15/2014 by Michael O'Connell

    Two days after an episode in which stars Josh Radnor, Cobie Smulders and Alyson Hannigan appeared in Asian garb and spoke in stereotypical accents, the showrunners take to Twitter to apologize.


    "How I Met Your Mother"

    How I Met Your Mother's final season is not without its share of controversy. The CBS sitcom aired an episode on Monday night that depicted Jason Segel's character, Marshall, traveling to China (and Cleveland) to meet with three characters out of a kung fu movie -- who happened to be played by Caucasian co-stars Josh Radnor, Cobie Smulders and Alyson Hannigan.

    The trio's outfits, accents and makeup -- the term "yellowface" has been used -- prompted suggestions of racist overtones and drew the ire of many a viewer on Twitter. Co-creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas responded on Wednesday afternoon, even adopting the controversy's chosen hashtag: #HowIMetYourRacism.

    "Hey guys, sorry this took so long. [Craig Thomas] and I want to say a few words about ‪#HowIMetYourRacism‬," Bays wrote from his account. "With Monday's episode, we set out to make a silly and unabashedly immature homage to Kung Fu movies, a genre we’ve always loved. But along the way we offended people. We're deeply sorry, and we’re grateful to everyone who spoke up to make us aware of it. We try to make a show that's universal, that anyone can watch and enjoy. We fell short of that this week, and feel terrible about it. To everyone we offended, I hope we can regain your friendship, and end this series on a note of goodwill. Thanks."

    The episode, "Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra," brought the pseudo conclusion to the long-running gag of Marshall owing Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) five slaps to the face. With eight episodes remaining until the Mar. 31 series finale, one slap remains.

    CBS is still streaming the episode on the show's website.
    I like Neil Patrick Harris but I've never been a fan of this show.
    Gene Ching
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  4. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by GeneChing View Post
    How I Met Your Mother
    Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment In Slapmarra



    I like Neil Patrick Harris but I've never been a fan of this show.
    That wasn't QUITE a "sorry you were offended" apology. But it was a pretty much a "sorry, but aren't we awesome" apology, which is nearly as bad.
    Simon McNeil
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    Be on the lookout for the Black Trillium, a post-apocalyptic wuxia novel released by Brain Lag Publishing available in all major online booksellers now.
    Visit me at Simon McNeil - the Blog for thoughts on books and stuff.

  5. #20
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    I've never seen the show before. Watched the episode in question. Wasn't entertained but apparently never found the "racist" part. I don't get it.
    "I'm a highly ranked officer of his tong. HE is the Dragon Head. our BOSS. our LEADER. the Mountain Lord." - hskwarrior

  6. #21
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    Still not worse than the new lone ranger movie.

    I mean, Geez hollywood, wtf is wrong with you?
    Kung Fu is good for you.

  7. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by David Jamieson View Post
    Still not worse than the new lone ranger movie.
    Was anything worse than the new Lone Ranger movie? Honestly? I think the plague was probably better.
    Simon McNeil
    ___________________________________________

    Be on the lookout for the Black Trillium, a post-apocalyptic wuxia novel released by Brain Lag Publishing available in all major online booksellers now.
    Visit me at Simon McNeil - the Blog for thoughts on books and stuff.

  8. #23
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    Melissa McCarthy's SNL 2/1/14 monologue

    Gene Ching
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  9. #24
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    Yellowface

    Time to start a thread devoted to this topic here. I'm merging both the SNL and HIMYM threads into this one (now above) and will post similar topics here from now on as they appear.

    3:00 pm
    Feb 3, 2014
    TV
    ‘SNL,’ Diversity and Punchlines

    Commentary By Jeff Yang


    A scene from last weekend’s ‘Saturday Night Live’
    NBC

    Dear SNL:

    You’ve had better days, I know. Critics and viewers have beaten you up this season, as you’ve done your best to fill the gaping holes left by the departures of multifaceted stalwarts like Fred Armisen, Bill Hader and Jason Sudeikis, and before them, breakout stars like Kristen Wiig and Andy Samberg. One of the gripes they’ve had has been about who you’ve filled the holes with: People who, well, look a lot like the fine comic talent that just left. Which is to say, not obviously black, Asian American or Hispanic.

    (Yes, I know Fred Armisen is a quarter Japanese and a quarter Venezuelan. And one of newbie Noel Wells’s grandparents is Mexican. But I might be one of the only people who knows that, given how they’ve been represented on the show.)

    In early January, you took a step — a big step — to address your lack of diversity by bringing aboard new castmember Sasheer Zamata, the first African American woman player for nearly six seasons, and two African American female writers, too: LaKendra Tookes and Leslie Jones. But last Saturday was a reminder that this big step is only the first one.

    That’s because, in a show being hosted by the awesome Melissa McCarthy, you turned her opening monologue into a skit about her feud with castmember Bobby Moynihan — a feud that erupted into a high-flying, wire-swinging martial arts duel between the duo. Now, let’s set aside the fact that the humorous context of their fisticuffs seems to have been anchored in the comic sight of a pair of lovably large people pirouetting through the air; they were game and graceful, and I tip my hat to the midair somersault McCarthy managed to pull off.

    But it was almost as if you knew there weren’t enough yuks in just having McCarthy and Moynihan punching it out, Shaw Brothers style (and you were right). So to underscore the joke, you put a little yellow icing on the cake, bringing in a squinting, eyebrow-quirking Taran Killam in a Nehru jacket to play the fight’s narrator, complete with stilted accent and gong. (Taran Killam — Cobie Smulders’s husband. You know, the actress on CBS’s “How I Met Your Mother” who was just slammed for doing yellowface two weeks ago?)

    Whoa, SNL. That wasn’t cool, and it wasn’t particularly funny, either. It looked like a desperate move to save a skit that was going nowhere. It was embarrassing. And even Killam himself seemed to look vaguely uncomfortable, as if he was saying in his head, “I’m only doing this because I’m the closest thing this show has to an actual Asian dude.”

    “SNL” and NBC declined to comment.

    And assuming that’s what was knocking around his subconscious, well, it’s only because that’s true. There aren’t any Asian Americans on SNL now. There’s never been an Asian American featured player on SNL ever, at least not one who could conceivably have done a less cringeworthy job of playing Killam’s “random Chinese dude” than he did. (Rob Schneider’s quarter-Filipino heritage had even less of a role in the characters he took on during his SNL run than Armisen’s quarter-Japanese heritage. Armisen did play a spit-take Japanese schoolgirl on the retired sketch “J-Pop America Fun Time Now” — the ultra-kawaii love interest of none other than…Taran Killam.)

    Why does diversity even matter? Well, a good example of why was in the biggest spotlight on Earth last night. You caught the Super Bowl, right, SNL? Okay, maybe not: Competing network. But if you had, you’d have seen what happens when you put a diverse team on the field — drawing talent from the best of a range of communities. It wasn’t always like that. Until 1952, most of the teams in the NFL had never signed a black player. After that year, every team but one integrated their lineups. The lone holdout? The Washington Redskins. Surprise, surprise, right? Team owner George Preston Marshall was quoted as saying “We’ll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites. It took a threat of eviction before they finally brought on Bobby Mitchell. (It might take the same to get the team to change its defiantly objectionable name.)

    NFL is a better game for its diversity. Heck, it’s the most profitable sport in the world because of it. A hundred million people in the U.S. watched the Seahawks crush the Broncos last night (so much for the Year of the Horse), and the winning team was led by African American quarterback Russell Wilson, with the final touchdown scored by proudly quarter-Filipino wide receiver Doug Baldwin; the Hawks’ airtight pass defense was coordinated by Japanese American coach Rocky Seto, and the Bowl’s halftime show was headlined by half-Filipino crooner Bruno Mars. (And I should add, it was one of the best in recent history, at least until those half-naked senior citizens dodged security and bum-rushed the stage.)

    Look, I know sports isn’t the same thing as comedy. (Although the Broncos were slapstick gold last night. Rimshot!) But the principle is the same. David Henry Hwang — a longtime advocate of diversity in entertainment, whose latest play, a dramatized version of Bruce Lee’s life called “Kung Fu,” opens at the Signature Theater tomorrow — says it best: “In failing to become more diverse, SNL and the entertainment industry in general are following a bad business model, because they’re pulling their performers and audiences from an increasingly shrinking demographic,” he says. “Do you really want to risk having an audience of just old white people?”

    Inclusion opens up a greater pool of talent, which means a better product on the stage. It also means more eyeballs and more dollars from a broader segment of the population — a population whose fastest-growing groups, Hispanics and Asian Americans, are also the ones that you’ve historically done the worst job of representing, SNL.

    And it means that you can tackle topics and situations from a wider array of contexts without slapping bad makeup or a terrible accent on an actor who’s going to be skewered after the fact for his or her “raceface” performance. As cliché as it sounds, it really is more okay for someone to satirize their own group. (And if you’re going to mock another one, it’s always a good idea to remember the guideline to punch up rather than punch down: “When we see blackface or yellowface, it’s almost always the more powerful lampooning the less powerful, because white people overwhelmingly dominate positions of power and access in American media,” notes Hwang.)

    So inclusion doesn’t just mean better talent and bigger audiences: It means you can be harder, edgier, more relevant, because you’ll be able to address events on a global and multicultural basis without shame or regret.

    You play an important — maybe unique — role, SNL. It’s not just the number of people who watch you that matters; it’s your ability to turn obscure comics into comedy stars, and comedy stars into cultural icons. That outsized role brings with it greater responsibility. It takes effort to find talent that looks like America, but it’s very possible. Hey, just look at the primetime series on your own network, which launched or accelerated the careers of Asian American comic standouts like Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari, Danny Pudi and Ken Jeong. You can make it happen.

    I’ll be rooting for you, SNL. And if it makes you feel any better, I was rooting for the Seahawks, too.

    Yours,

    Jeff Yang
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
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  10. #25
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    a petition

    DreamWorks: Stop Whitewashing Asian Characters!



    author: Julie Rodriguez
    target: DreamWorks Studios
    signatures: 28,629

    28,629
    29,000

    we've got 28,629 signatures, help us get to 29,000

    overview | petition

    Fans of the iconic 1995 animated Japanese sci-fi film Ghost in the Shell have been anticipating a live-action remake for years -- but now, instead of casting an Asian actress, Dreamworks has selected Scarlett Johansson for the lead role! The film revolves around Major Motoko Kusanagi, a member of a futuristic security force tasked with tracking a mysterious hacker.

    The original film is set in Japan, and the major cast members are Japanese. So why would the American remake star a white actress? The industry is already unfriendly to Asian actors without roles in major films being changed to exclude them. One recent survey found that in 2013, Asian characters made up only 4.4% of speaking roles in top-grossing Hollywood films.

    Dreamworks could be using this film to help provide opportunities for Asian-American actors in a market with few opportunities for them to shine -- please sign the petition asking them to reconsider casting Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell and select actors who are truer to the cast of the original film!
    you have the power to create change.

    Start sharing and watch your impact grow

    I'm now really curious if the opposite has ever happened - like is there an Asian-washing where Chinese actors were cast to play Charlie Brown or something? That must exist, right?
    Gene Ching
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  11. #26
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    echoes of #oscarssowhite?

    There's been plenty of backlash for sure. Here's just a taste for posterity's sake.

    I don't really know the character very well so the white vs. Asian doesn't bum me out as much as the lack of martial arts background.

    Marvel Commits To White Iron Fist Despite Racist Roots
    We could've had it all, Marvel.
    BY DONNA ****ENS @MILDLYAMUSED | THURSDAY, FEB 25, 2016 5:09 PM

    Here we go again. Entertainment Weekly just announced that Marvel and Netflix have found their Iron Fist. Finn Jones (Game of Thrones) has been tapped to play Danny Rand in the upcoming series Iron Fist. I enjoy Jones’ take on Loras Tyrell but I’d be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed by this choice.
    Disappointed, but not surprised.
    Marvel has made a stab at diversified casting when it comes to black characters — including changing Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Heimdall (Idris Elba), and Baron Mordo’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) race, adding Falcon to the line-up and the introduction of Luke Cage. They’ve even made attempts to include Latino culture with Luis (Michael Peńa) and Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson). But for some reason, they keep fumbling at the one-yard line when it comes to representation of Asian cultures. We have Skye (Chloe Bennet), Agent May (Ming-Na Wen) and Madame Gao (Wai Ching Ho). But there have been several opportunities for Marvel to not only cast an Asian actor in a major role but to do so in a way that begins to repair some of the racist damage caused by the source materials 1960s and 1970s Yellow Peril.
    I’ve talked at length before about how casting Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One in Doctor Strange was the easy way out for Marvel. Casting an Asian actor in that role would mean having to find a way write the character without crossing over into a racist stereotype. Now the same thing has been done again by casting a white actor as Iron Fist. Yes, Iron Fist has always been a white character. But looking back at both his origin and history through a modern lens, Danny Rand becomes a poster child for appropriation.
    Created in 1974, Iron Fist first appeared in MARVEL PREMIERE #15. Co-creator Roy Thomas even attributed watching Bruce Lee movies as inspiration for Iron Fist’s inception. So straight out of the gate, you have a white character standing on the shoulders of a person of color. Then in his origin story, Danny Rand is the son of a wealthy American named Wendell Rand and Rand’s socialite wife, Heather Duncan. During a vacation when Danny is a child, shenanigans happened, and Danny was left orphaned in the Himalayas. The mystical K’un-Lun found and trained Danny, eventually bestowing upon him the title of the Iron Fist. Danny was 66th Iron Fist…and the first white person to claim the title. To recap: an ostensibly Asian — and alien — culture gifts a white boy with power. That’s the Mighty Whitey trope all over. Other than the standard operating procedure of defaulting stories to being about straight white men, there is no reason for Danny Rand to be white. But lots of reasons for him NOT to be.
    You could dedicate whole articles to dissecting Marvel’s Asian-Land amalgamation from the mid-20th century, and the racism underlying many Asian comic book characters and settings. The source material definitely puts Marvel in a tough spot. Cast an Asian actor and risk being seen as racist…or cast a white actor and risk being seen as racist.
    One would hope Marvel would err on the side of progress and find a way to simply write Asian characters that aren’t inherently racist. This was the idea behind #AsianAmericanIronFist movement on social media. Yes, Danny Rand has always been a white character, so casting Finn Jones’ isn’t whitewashing. But it IS a missed opportunity. I’ve been helping beat the drum to cast an Asian character as Iron Fist, not because the character is a martial artist, but because the character is steeped in Asian culture.
    From Daredevil to Shatterstar, Marvel has a history of white martial artists. Which is fine. But imagine how much more layered Iron Fist would be had, say, Alex Wong, had been cast. He could still be the son of a wealthy American. Exploring the dissonance between a 2nd or 3rd generation Asian-American and their cultural ancestry would’ve added both a narrative angle and finally given Marvel an Asian superhero. And it’s not like Disney hasn’t dabbled in this plot structure before. Just take American Dragon: Jake Long and turn it into an adult show. Boom! Iron Fist. But no. Instead, we get another white guy.
    Boring.


    DONNA ****ENS
    Mom. Wife. Geek. Gamer. Feminist. Writer. Sarcastic. Succinct. Donna has been writing snark for the Internet in one form or another for almost a decade. She has a lot of opinions, mostly on science-fiction, fantasy, feminism, and Sailor Moon. Follow her on Twitter (@MildlyAmused) for more of all these things.
    Gene Ching
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  12. #27
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    Interesting piece on THR.

    APRIL 15, 2016 3:57pm PT by Rebecca Sun, Graeme McMillan
    Why Did 'Doctor Strange' and 'Ghost in the Shell' Whitewash Their Asian Characters?


    Marvel's 'Doctor Strange'; Paramount and DreamWorks' 'Ghost in the Shell' Courtesy of Film Frame; Paramount Pictures

    This week in cultural appropriation: Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton and a conversation between two THR writers.

    This week, Marvel dropped the first teaser trailer for Doctor Strange, based on its comic series about a critically injured neurosurgeon who travels to the Himalayas to learn mystic arts from a powerful sorcerer known as the Ancient One. Two days later, Paramount and DreamWorks released the first image from Ghost in the Shell, their live-action adaptation of the Japanese manga about an anti-cyberterror task force set in mid-21st century Japan and led by cyborg Major Motoko Kusanagi.

    On paper, it reads like a great week for Asian representation in Hollywood — but the Ancient One and the Major are played, respectively, by Tilda Swinton and Scarlett Johansson. And so these two projects — long-awaited by many fans of their source material — instead join Gods of Egypt, Aloha and Pan as recent inductees to Hollywood's Whitewashing Hall of Shame.

    Below, The Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision blogger Graeme McMillan and senior reporter Rebecca Sun discuss the similar circumstances greeting the films so far.

    Rebecca Sun: We braced ourselves when the castings were announced, but (just like that Nina trailer) the visual evidence still stung.

    In flipping both race and gender to cast Swinton as a character who in the original comics is a Tibetan-born man, Marvel admirably went out of the box to correct one aspect of underrepresentation in its cinematic universe, but did so at the expense of another. Like its fellow Marvel franchise Iron Fist, it is steeped in cultural appropriation and centers around what Graeme previously noted as the "white man finds enlightenment in Asia" trope.

    Give Hollywood partial credit for continuously trying to cleverly sidestep the Fu Manchu stereotype of characters like DC's Ra's al Ghul and Marvel's The Mandarin — but why is the solution consistently to reimagine those characters with white actors (Liam Neeson in Christopher Nolan's Batman films and Guy Pearce in Iron Man 3, respectively)? The Doctor Strange movie doesn't need its Ancient One to look like Lo Pan in Big Trouble in Little China, but there are creative ways to interpret the character without yet again erasing an Asian person from an inherently Asian narrative.

    Graeme McMillan: The casting of Strange is a very frustrating thing; it's not just the Ancient One that's racebent — Baron Mordo, a white man in the comics, is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor in the movie; you see him for an instant in the teaser — but it all seems to be done with little thought about the implications of the changes. While I'm happy to see a "white role" played by a black man in the movie, Ejiofor's casting reinforces the implications of Thor, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the Iron Man movies that every white hero gets a black sidekick in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (see also Zoe Saldana in Guardians of the Galaxy, but there, she's painted green, because space).

    Switching the Ancient One to Tilda Swinton feels similarly well-intentioned, but thoughtless. On the one hand, yes, you're trying to sidestep the stereotype present in the source material, but in the most lazy way short of making the character a white man. Wouldn't a younger Asian actor have offered enough of a play on the trope — not to mention a play on the character's name — while also avoiding the utter tone-deafness of having Strange head to Tibet in order to learn about enlightenment from another white English person.

    Sun: Too many stories, from Lawrence of Arabia to Avatar, relegate natives of a culture to background players and, at best, mentor, antagonist, love interest or sidekick. In Doctor Strange, Swinton fills the mentor role, Mads Mikkelsen is the villain and Rachel McAdams seems to be the damsel, leaving British actor Benedict Wong to play Dr. Strange's personal valet.

    Of the four, he's the only one not glimpsed in the two-minute trailer, which mostly features Benedict Cumberbatch's Dr. Strange wandering through streets in Nepal and Hong Kong and learning magical martial arts from Swinton in a temple beautifully appointed with traditional Asian architectural features. In other words, Doctor Strange is a movie that looks very Oriental, except for the people part.

    McMillan: To make matters worse — or, at least, more frustrating — there's the fact that, in the casting of Cumberbatch, Marvel managed to sidestep the possibility of offering up a nonwhite, non-male lead in one of its movies for the first time. Unlike, say, Iron Man or Captain America, there's nothing inherently gendered or racially-specific in the lead character's main concept — while it's unlikely that anyone other than a white man would be chosen to be the figurehead for the U.S. Army in WWII, or the head of a multinational arms manufacturer built up by his genius father, all that's really required of Dr. Strange is that they're a successful surgeon who suffers a terrible accident that sets them on a new path afterward. That role, literally, could have gone to anyone.

    That train of thought points me toward a theory put forward by comic writer Kurt Busiek on social media recently — namely, that Dr. Strange as a character is an early example of the comic book industry whitewashing itself. The idea, as Busiek lays it out, is that artist and co-creator Steve Ditko "conceived Doc Strange as a stock 'mysterious Asian mystic' type", and later actually changed his look after writer Stan Lee wrote an origin in which he was Caucasian.

    It's a weird coincidence that offers a worrying excuse to those supporting Marvel's decision to whitewash the Ancient One for the movie: It has historical precedent! Perhaps Doctor Strange, for all its positioning as a project that opens up horizons to new realities and new possibilities, has an accidental metatextual purpose of demonstrating how tied to the safer, cowardly white "norms" entertainment can be.
    continued next post
    Gene Ching
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  13. #28
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    Continued from previous post

    Sun: Which brings us to Ghost in the Shell and that first-look image of Scarlett Johansson this week. Ghost in the Shell (at least all previous iterations of it) also is set in Asia, albeit a very different one from that of Doctor Strange. There is no indication that the name of Johansson's protagonist has changed from the source material — IMDb still lists the character as "Kusanagi," although the press copy released alongside Thursday's image refers to her simply by her police rank, "the Major." That photo continues to send an ambiguous message — Johansson appears in a short black bob and darkened eyebrows, hewing closely to how Kusanagi is depicted in the comics.

    Traditionally, this is a fan's greatest hope — an adaptation as faithful to the source material as possible. But in this case, Paramount/DreamWorks seem to have retained all the markers of Kusanagi's Japanese identity — her name, her basic physical appearance — except for the actual ethnicity of her portrayer. Perhaps the whitewashing controversy wouldn't have gone quite as viral had the producers cleanly erased all traces of the material's origins, as Edge of Tomorrow did in adapting the Japanese novel All You Need Is Kill and anglicizing protagonist Keiji Kiriya into William Cage, played by Tom Cruise.

    McMillan: The comparison to the (lack of) outrage met with Edge of Tomorrow is an interesting one, but perhaps a more appropriate one is the response to the multiple attempts to make a live-action Akira with non-Asian actors — which is to say, any of the numerous American attempts to make a live-action Akira. Both Akira and Ghost in the Shell are better-known properties than All You Need Is Kill — which started life as a prose novel, which arguably also allowed for more visual/racial deviation as a result — and so any attempt to move away from the (to fans) iconic elements of the original are likely to be met with, at the very best, apathy or dismay. Add in the implied racism of casting only Caucasian actors, and you have something that seems utterly guaranteed to upset almost everyone.

    By far the strongest response I've seen to the Ghost in the Shell casting comes from indie comic writer Jon Tsuei on Twitter, where he argued that the story is "inherently a Japanese story, not a universal one" because of the context in which it was created, specifically the cultural relationship the country had with technology, and how that feeds into the characters' relationships with tech in the story.

    I'm not entirely sold on that line of thinking, I admit — in part because I think that the relationship with technology has become a universal thing in the decades since the original manga was published 27 years ago — but it touches on the degree to which the story is interconnected with the culture in which it first appeared. Watching filmmakers misunderstand that to such a degree as they appear to have in casting alone doesn't really offer much hope that they'll manage to handle the themes of the story with any greater sensitivity.

    Sun: The reaction to Johansson's Ghost in the Shell look reminds me of the backlash when the Nina Simone biopic starring Zoe Saldana was released last month. In both cases, the filmmakers went to some lengths to alter the appearance of their leading ladies, rather than cast actresses who more naturally matched the subjects. What makes these two examples different from the countless instances of actors transforming themselves for a role — Steve Carell in Foxcatcher, Nicole Kidman in The Hours — is that Asian women and dark-skinned black women rarely get to be the leads in Hollywood movies. So whitewashing any Asian character is unfortunate, but keeping the character Asian-ish (but not actually Asian) is salt on the wound.

    Many online commenters have trumpeted Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi as the ideal live-action Kusanagi — no one has come closer than her to doing it already, as robot pilot Mako Mori in Pacific Rim. Many other actresses of Asian descent have been mentioned as well, but the harsh truth is that their combined star wattage doesn't even come close to touching Johansson's.

    And therein lies the problem: A Kikuchi (who is four years older than Johansson) — or a similar Asian-American actress — couldn't have debuted as the daughter of John Ritter and Sean Connery, as Johansson did in her early films. She likely wouldn't have gotten her big break as an equestrian-loving teen in Montana opposite Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer. (She might have made a good Rebecca in Ghost World.) She couldn't have effectively played an outsider in Tokyo in Lost in Transition, which catapulted her to stardom, or a Dutch painter's muse in Girl With a Pearl Earring, or Woody Allen's muse in Match Point, Scoop or Vicky Cristina Barcelona. She couldn't have played a London magician's assistant in The Prestige or Mary Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl. And most of all, she never, ever would have been cast as the Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

    So how does an Asian actor become famous enough to play an Asian character? Judging by Speed Racer (starring Emile Hirsch), Dragonball Evolution (starring Shameless' Justin Chatwin), Ghost in the Shell and the upcoming Death Note (starring Nat Wolff), Hollywood has yet to answer the question.
    You'd think with the trend towards China, getting some Asian actors in the cast would be good global marketing.
    Gene Ching
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  14. #29
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    Don't even get me started on this...


    It's a catch-22. There are no Asian (especially Asian-American) actors in Hollywood with any real star power, because they haven't been cast as leading characters in any 'important' movies; yet they haven't been cast as leading characters in 'important movies because they're Asian. You have no chance at winning a game you aren't allowed to play.

    I really wouldn't mind it if Hollywood made a totally different movie based on Ghost in the Shell, changed to 'Euro-Americanized' names, places, etc. But to give white actors/actresses the names of Japanese characters from iconic Japanese cinema while actively excluding Japanese talent is a direct insult. It's certainly neither respectful nor a tribute to the original. In fact, it's such blatant disrespect any reasonable person has to wonder why, in this day and age of almost overwhelming political correctness and "inclusion", where EACH and EVERY group, subgroup and sub-subgroup (including LGBT) is actively recruited and cast, why East Asian actors are the only group actively and blatantly marginalized/excluded. The only Asians who are ubiquitously cast and actually allowed to play 'real human' characters in Hollywood are East Indians.

    As far as global marketing for China, I'll bet that in general, even Chinese audiences watching American movies probably prefer seeing "American" (read white) actors in them over any Asian-American actors.

  15. #30
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    Kodansha's take on this

    Ghost in the Shell Publisher 'Never Imagined' a Japanese Actress in the Lead Role
    Brian Ashcraft
    Today 8:00am


    Ghost in the Shell Publisher 'Never Imagined' a Japanese Actress in the Lead Role
    [Image: Paramount/Dreamworks]

    While Scarlett Johansson’s casting as Japanese cyborg Motoko Kusanagi has been controversial in the West, the original Tokyo-based publisher of the Ghost in the Shell manga seems totally cool with it.

    Kodansha, one of Japan’s largest publishers, first put out the manga in 1989, and as AnimeNewsNetwork reports, began reprinting the manga after Production I.G successfully pitched the project to Hollywood on its behalf.

    [Full disclosure: The now-defunct Kodansha International previously published two of my books.]

    “Looking at her career so far, I think Scarlett Johansson is well-cast,” Sam Yoshiba, director of the international business division at Kodansha’s headquarters in Tokyo, told The Hollywood Reporter (via AnimeNewsNetwork and RocketNews). “She has the cyberpunk feel. And we never imagined it would be a Japanese actress in the first place.”

    “This is a chance for a Japanese property to be seen around the world,” said Yoshiba.

    According to The Hollywood Reporter, this comes after Yoshiba recently came back from the movie’s New Zealand set and said, as The Hollywood Reporter writes, “he was impressed by the respect being shown for the source material.”

    Well, save for the bit about the main character being white and all.

    While the manga’s publisher might have never imagined a Japanese actress, there was a recent report that stated the filmmakers ran tests to see if Johansson could look Asian through CG.

    In Japan, however, many people online don’t seem too upset or even surprised about the casting. Some said they didn’t care because they had no plans to see the film anyway.

    Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.
    Never mind the publisher's take. They sold the rights. What about the author?
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