Ghost in the Shell focuses on a unit of the Japanese National Public Safety Commission that fights technological crime, and its squad leader, Major Motoko Kusanagi. A fierce cyborg, she is detached from the world, struggling with the line between her humanity and artificiality — whether she has a real human history, or just a mix of synthetic memories.
2 comments:
I really enjoyed reading this article because it reflects many opinions I have also felt while trying to understand the reasonings behind whitewashing in Hollywood. Take, for example, one of my favorite animated series, Avatar: The Last Airbender. There are explicit references (regarding naming, culture and language/calligraphy) to the animation's Chinese heritage, yet director M. Night Shyamalan decided to cast white actors as two of the main characters, Katara and Sokka. There are many, many other problems with this movie I won't begin to discuss; everyone who saw the movie knew it was a flop from start to finish. And even as a thirteen year old I knew there was something wrong in the casting process, that integral parts of the Chinese history in the show had been erased because, apparently, white people sell movies better than ethnically accurate Asian actors. It stuns me that Hollywood is still making these racially insensitive decisions when there are so many actors and actresses of color who are as reputable and as talented as Scarlett Johansson. The article even cites Rinko Kikuchi, a newly famous Japanese actress who I recently saw and heavily admired in Pacific Rim. These animated stories deserve to be respected for whatever ethnic background they portray; movies are supposed to portray some semblance of real life, or imagination -- why are we whitewashing our movies when our global population is increasingly dominated by people of color?
This kind of blatant whitewashing makes me upset on a visceral level, simply because the only excuse Hollywood gives for the issue, which was pointed out in the article, was this idea that the film will never be able to be financed properly unless there is some sense of innate mass appeal usually brought on by the leading performer in the film. The problem that I see with that then, is that if you can’t properly represent the culture you’re setting the story in, then don’t make the film. It doesn’t make sense, for one, and on a moral level the idea is ridiculous. How can a white actress, unaware of what the Japanese experience is truly like because she will never have lived through it, be able to bring that kind of mentality to her overall performance and general understanding of the lifestyle background behind the character she is playing.
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