Friday, July 08, 2016
The Ghost in the Shell Movie Doesn't Know Whether Its Main Character Is Japanese or Not
io9.gizmodo.com: The casting controversy surrounding Scarlett Johansson’s role as Major Motoko Kusanagi in the upcoming Ghost in the Shell movie continues to bring widespread confusion. Less than a week ago, its producer responded to the controversy by seemingly distancing the Major from her Japanese heritage. Now, things are suddenly a complicated mess again.
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3 comments:
It's just ridiculous, the lengths people would go to, the amount of money that is spent purely to avoid casting an Asian actor into an Asian role. As a fan of anime and manga for the majority of my life I find it sickening that mainstream Hollywood is digging it's claws into a once independent and pure art form and refusing to admit that the base material is inherently Asian, the characters' mannerisms written based off Asian traits and yet some director somewhere decided that a white actor could better encompass that character.
As an anime fan, I find it ridiculous that they are casting a white actress as “The Major”, the new name for Major Kusanagi Motoko. We’ve been seeing a lot of whitewashing of characters in Hollywood, and although there may be ways to get around it in the plot, even if they are casting a Japanese actress to play Kusanagi’s mother, who ironically died early on in Kusanagi’s life in the original story, it is the casting choice that matters most. Unless one of the screenwriters got up and said, “we need a white Kusanagi, and you know, let’s get rid of her full name while we’re at it,” and this is a deliberate choice that makes sense in the plot of the movie, there is no reason to cast a Japanese actress for a Japanese role. Paramount hasn’t given a reason for casting Scarlett Johansson as Kusanagi, and I’m not saying Johansson is a bad actress, because she’s not, but I hope if they do they at least make a good excuse.
Again with the whitewashing? Scarjo has become the queen of playing roles not meant for her, and being entirely uneducated and privileged about it. As an Asian-American, it was disheartening yet not surprising to see Scarjo snatch the Japanese role. But what is most concerning is the initial idea to use CGI to “make her look more asian”. Are we really still participating in yellowface? Furthermore, changing her name to just “The Major” to attempt to erase her intentional Japanese heritage is disgusting. It seems like Hollywood just keeps taking one step forwards, and two steps back when it comes to representation and diversity. Between GitS, The Great Wall with Matt Damon, Tilda in Doctor Strange, and Emma Stone in Aloha, Hollywood has made their message clear. The excuse is often made there are no actors or talent from the minority, which is simply untrue. Hollywood caters to the white cis actor.
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