While I totally 100% get the anger about all this and sort of agree that it's a symptom of a larger racial divide in Hollywood...
If the movie turns out to be good, and ScarJo turns out to be a good Motoko Kusanagi I'm going to have a hard time staying outraged.
That's the thing though. I don't hate ScarJo. I love her, actually. She's great. I even, dare I say, want this movie to be good! Because I want more Hollywood adaptations of these things! But they also announced an American version of Death Note? White guys. American Evangelion? White guys. American Akira? White guys. It's a little old. Especially like as been stated and restated, the stories were made through the lens of a specific culture. Removing that social lense, the impact can be lessened or worse, they end up outright misunderstanding the point of the movie...
If you watched Akira, or DBZ, or GitS, etc and thought those guys were all white dudes... I am at a loss. I knew at a young age I was watching foreign cartoons. People for their arms chopped off, blown up and cut in half. Giant robots were metaphors for war crimes and guerrilla warfare. At a certain point you have to be forcing the ignorance. I knew Pokemon and Digimon were foreign when they ate those riceballs and said they were "donuts".
Eh, whatever. I don't think I am gonna convince you if you can't see the point I am making. Trying to look at art in a vacuum without realizing the context and themes of the film, it sounds ignorant. People are just tired of bland Hollywood movies.
Unrelated, but I am stoked they are bringing back Mirror's Edge. Not just because it's a great game, but it also has a cool, female, Asian lead. It should say something that the first game I will buy in months is that one.
To whit.
Portraying Kaneda, Tetsuo, Light et al with Asian American actors does nothing to preserve the cultural lense through which any of those stories are told. It may tell it through a different cultural lense than is typical for Hollywood, it may be a good idea for reasons of diversity of representation but the original cultural context it is not.
Really? Really?! You can't see how a movie that starts with a nuclear weapon on Japan, kicking off WWIII? Are you joking? Like, for real?
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
No, but I mean more how the story was told than the inherent plot itself. The style is very specifically evoking Japanese art, and also representing a cultural shift to a more technological nation from once being occupied by an outside company. The Ghosts and the Shells are meant to be a metaphor, and it's one of the essential themes to understanding why they frame things they way they do.
For a specific example, they have to include the intro title for the movie. It is an extended "birthing" sequence where Makoto is being uploaded into the Ghost, and then being placed in the Shell, and then manufactured, and then finally activated. She wakes up in a room that is pitck black. She opens the blinds, and it casts her in a silhouette against the city. She is born again, after being a human, but she has no emotional connection to her room. It is an empty room with no lights, and only a bed.
This is important in two ways:
-It establishes that Makoto isn't fully human right away, and the disconnect from body and mind being so real, she questions if she has a soul or emotions. The whole theme of the movie is, are you still a person when someone made you?
-Every time they show a show of a character, usually with little dialogue, it's always backdropped by the city. These people's identity are defined by the world they live in. We don't know if Hong Kong somehow assimilated Tokyo, or vice-versa. We just see two things; the people, juxtaposed against the city.
The two situations mirror one another; the city has a conflicted identity, torn between old and new, status quo and progress. So instead of staying the same, out of necessity they change, sometimes for the worse. As Makoto struggles to find her real self and her soul, the city is also struggling with similar problems.
Even granting this for the sake of argument, I don't know what you think the implication is.
Actually, lots of adaptations that alter source material on a fundamental level often miss the point of the original art.
Oldboy's remake lost all of the meaning, the original was an allegory for the Greek tradegy but they fiddled with it until was a generic action film with Josh Brolin.
Dragon Ball: Evolution took a marital arts master named Goku, based on a Japanese character who was in turn based off a Chinese folk legend, and made him played by a white dude named Justin, had him go to American high school instead of fighting in martial arts tournaments and missed the point of Dragon Ball altogether.
Avatar The Last Airbender is entirely based on the conflict between Asian nations and then they took the tribe based on the friggin' Eskimos and made them white (a move so blindly hamfisted I nearly vomitted on sight), but y'know, Eskimos get plenty of representation in American films... Oh wait, no they don't, not at all.
In Pan, the recently Peter LAN prequel, they recast Tiger Lily. One of the only explicitly not-white people in the story, as written in the original as a Native American, she suddenly is a white girl with crazy rainbow hair and eccentric eye make-up. The whole point of Tiger Lily's character is to show that the island is multi-cultural, but they managed to squash that one. Native Americans in particular feel the whitewashing is fuckes up, as not only were they nearly geneocided by white men, but now even the bit parts for them in movies are handed to white folks.
GitS is specifically a Japanese story, the setting is basically Neo Tokyo if you have actually seen the film. In fact it is such a Japanese story they couldn't fiddle with the setting or the character names because they are important... But apparently portraying the character as actually Japanese would be silly.
The context for these characters isn't confusing. You can translate a work to another culture and still do it justice. But if they feel the key to telling the story the right way is to make everything and everyone white, it is missing the point of that character already. It's a fair criticism.
Yes, lots of adaptions miss the point, or make it worse, that doesn't demonstrate anything about the connection to the race of the characters or make the point that there is some connection between race and a movie being good or not that isn't going to be a pretty radical principle to maintain.
I have seen Ghost in the Shell and none of it strikes me as indelibly Japanese, and the important parts in particular seem entirely less so. That said, I am hardly a huge fan so I am open to correction if you could point some such things out?
Well, the tweets posted the last page surmise why it is 'indeliby Japanese'
The tweets are an assertion, not an argument - they explain GitS IS Japanese but do not explain WHY. The closest they come is mentioning the Japan tech boom of the 80s - which is gloriously anachronistic, given the economic woes of the last two decades and that position being supplanted by other Asian manufacturing economies.
The video also doesn't create an argument why GitS is Japanese, focusing on the 3 min aspect-to-aspect interlude.
A particular filming style does not mean the setting is tied to the same cultural backdrop. Even if it were, evoking the imagery of Hong Kong, a city that most Japanese are as familiar with as New York, does not make the setting inherently Japanese. Besides, aspect-to-aspect style is not ubiquitous to Japan - Sergio Leone made copious use of the technique in The Man With No Name trilogy (most notably, A Fistful of Dollars is an adaptation of Yojimbo without necessitating the feudal Japanese setting).
So no, a show like that is very obviously Japanese, and I think it would require some serious retooling if they made them all white American females. The result probably wouldn't do justice to the show, much like the coming Power Ranger film won't capture why we loved the shows as a kid.
The irony being that Power Rangers is an excellent example of Hollywood ejecting the Japanese setting of Super Sentai and creating a massive western cultural icon in the process.
Like, you don't have to agree with me, but you can't see how some stories would benefit from being shot with the original material in mind? Like, if for Justice League, they just recast Batman as Asian, people would flip the fuck out. The idea isn't crazy, if you tell a story the right way the first time, don't stick your fingers in until you've bent it into something completely different... You might be surprised at how many good movies might see. Instead we end up with dozens of uninspired movies loosely based on the properties and often miss why fans love them in the first place. Like, nobody is saying they can't make adaptations with a white cast good. But it seems to us fans, it would easier to tell the story as it was originally told to avoid pulling a Dragon Ball Evolution and being a colossal waste of time, money, and Chow Yun Fat.
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miscellaneousinsanitygrass grows, birds fly, sun shines,and brother, i hurt peopleRegistered Userregular
I linked these tweets from jon tsuei in the movie thread before, rather than posting like ten tweets i'll just transcribe them
I've been seeing a lot of defenses for the ScarJo casting that seem to lack a nuanced understanding of a Ghost In The Shell as a story.
The manga came out in 1989, the first film 1995. An era when Japan was considered the world leader in technology. Everything hot in that era came out of Japan. Cars, video games, walkmans, all of that. Japan was setting a standard. This is a country that went from poised to conquer to the Pacific to forcibly disarmed. They poured their resources into their economy. And as a country that was unable to defend themselves, but was a world leader in tech, it created a relationship to tech that is unique.
Ghost In The Shell plays off all of these themes. It is inherently a Japanese story, not a universal one.
This casting is not only the erasure of Asian faces but a removal of the story from its core themes. You can "Westernize" the story if you want, but at that point it is no longer Ghost In The Shell because the story is simply not Western. Understand that media from Asia holds a dear place in the hearts of many Asians in the west, simply because western media doesn't show us. Ghost In The Shell, while just one film, is a pillar in Asian media. It's not simply a scifi thriller. Not to me, not to many others. Respect the work for what it is and don't bastardize it into what you want it to be.
I find it doubtful that the filmmakers considered the story through this lens, but more than anything what this casting does is telegraph to me that this probably isn't gonna be a good movie? Like they flubbed this part this badly already, how am I supposed to expect them to handle the actual meaty, cerebral bits of the story with any sort of care or understanding? The IMDb page has the Laughing Man listed, but are they actually going to incorporate the salient themes of Stand Alone Complex or are they just using the name as a shortcut, because it's recognizable, etc?
My expectations at this point are that it's gonna be a generic scifi action movie dressed up in GitS trappings and I haven't really seen anything to suggest otherwise
Here.
And the video I posted above is really definitively best watched, because it shows footage and music from the film to emphasise its points.
To boil it down, it's that the story unfolds in an undeniably Japanese way. They have long, lingering shots to mimic the manga artform, they show consecutive world building shots to emphasise what kind of place this Future Japan looks like. "Aspect-toAspect" transitions are used to abandon time in favor of exploring the space and world around them. It's to create a tangible atmosphere.
The themes of city and the people who occupy it are a mirror to the themes of Ghosts and their Shells, and wondering about the relationship between them. The city is based off of Japan, and also Hong Kong; these stories reflect the conflict they felt after being under rule by a foreign nation. He speaks about how Hong Kong was long under British rule, and in that way embodies the identity problems a cyborg would have; how do they shape identity when you were made by someone who came before? Are you who you are by free will, when you know you are also a manufactured machine? The same questions we have of religion and existence itself... cyborgs would feel the same- but in a more definitive; they only exist as they are now by the actions of others.
Every shot in this movie is meticulously placed and for a reason. The shots of the decrepit and overgrown city, it is one of the best themes in cyberpunk: it shows the mix of technology and culture can mirror the mix of technology and mankind. We make the spaces we live, but they also shape ourselves. The dynamic of ourselves and the spaces we occupy, are one and the same...
Really, just watch it.
The tweets and subsequent argument about the inherent Japaneseness would argue that the movie ought not be made at all. Questions of representation don't even apply. Or rather, if made it should be set in Japan and played by Japanese actors and be presented in Japanese.
I find it hard to argue for the importance of East Asian representation in entertainment on a forum that's banned anime discussion
So I'll stick with the prevailing Asian notion of you do you own thing, we'll do ours. Make another Star Wars out of Hidden Fortress or Lion King out of Kimba the White Lion or The Departed out of Infernal Affairs; appropriating while masking the source seems to do well. Just directly copying seems like a waste of everyone's time.
...
you guys are aware that asian-americans exist, right? that there are audiences of asian people in the west and not only in asia?
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
I linked these tweets from jon tsuei in the movie thread before, rather than posting like ten tweets i'll just transcribe them
I've been seeing a lot of defenses for the ScarJo casting that seem to lack a nuanced understanding of a Ghost In The Shell as a story.
The manga came out in 1989, the first film 1995. An era when Japan was considered the world leader in technology. Everything hot in that era came out of Japan. Cars, video games, walkmans, all of that. Japan was setting a standard. This is a country that went from poised to conquer to the Pacific to forcibly disarmed. They poured their resources into their economy. And as a country that was unable to defend themselves, but was a world leader in tech, it created a relationship to tech that is unique.
Ghost In The Shell plays off all of these themes. It is inherently a Japanese story, not a universal one.
This casting is not only the erasure of Asian faces but a removal of the story from its core themes. You can "Westernize" the story if you want, but at that point it is no longer Ghost In The Shell because the story is simply not Western. Understand that media from Asia holds a dear place in the hearts of many Asians in the west, simply because western media doesn't show us. Ghost In The Shell, while just one film, is a pillar in Asian media. It's not simply a scifi thriller. Not to me, not to many others. Respect the work for what it is and don't bastardize it into what you want it to be.
I find it doubtful that the filmmakers considered the story through this lens, but more than anything what this casting does is telegraph to me that this probably isn't gonna be a good movie? Like they flubbed this part this badly already, how am I supposed to expect them to handle the actual meaty, cerebral bits of the story with any sort of care or understanding? The IMDb page has the Laughing Man listed, but are they actually going to incorporate the salient themes of Stand Alone Complex or are they just using the name as a shortcut, because it's recognizable, etc?
My expectations at this point are that it's gonna be a generic scifi action movie dressed up in GitS trappings and I haven't really seen anything to suggest otherwise
Here.
And the video I posted above is really definitively best watched, because it shows footage and music from the film to emphasise its points.
To boil it down, it's that the story unfolds in an undeniably Japanese way. They have long, lingering shots to mimic the manga artform, they show consecutive world building shots to emphasise what kind of place this Future Japan looks like. "Aspect-toAspect" transitions are used to abandon time in favor of exploring the space and world around them. It's to create a tangible atmosphere.
The themes of city and the people who occupy it are a mirror to the themes of Ghosts and their Shells, and wondering about the relationship between them. The city is based off of Japan, and also Hong Kong; these stories reflect the conflict they felt after being under rule by a foreign nation. He speaks about how Hong Kong was long under British rule, and in that way embodies the identity problems a cyborg would have; how do they shape identity when you were made by someone who came before? Are you who you are by free will, when you know you are also a manufactured machine? The same questions we have of religion and existence itself... cyborgs would feel the same- but in a more definitive; they only exist as they are now by the actions of others.
Every shot in this movie is meticulously placed and for a reason. The shots of the decrepit and overgrown city, it is one of the best themes in cyberpunk: it shows the mix of technology and culture can mirror the mix of technology and mankind. We make the spaces we live, but they also shape ourselves. The dynamic of ourselves and the spaces we occupy, are one and the same...
Really, just watch it.
The tweets and subsequent argument about the inherent Japaneseness would argue that the movie ought not be made at all. Questions of representation don't even apply. Or rather, if made it should be set in Japan and played by Japanese actors and be presented in Japanese.
I find it hard to argue for the importance of East Asian representation in entertainment on a forum that's banned anime discussion
So I'll stick with the prevailing Asian notion of you do you own thing, we'll do ours. Make another Star Wars out of Hidden Fortress or Lion King out of Kimba the White Lion or The Departed out of Infernal Affairs; appropriating while masking the source seems to do well. Just directly copying seems like a waste of everyone's time.
...
you guys are aware that asian-americans exist, right? that there are audiences of asian people in the west and not only in asia?
How do you think my argument that diversity of casting and the Japaneseness - the cultural lense et al to which Local H Jay refers - are separate concerns is affected by this fact? Or specifically, how do you think I am ignoring it?
While I totally 100% get the anger about all this and sort of agree that it's a symptom of a larger racial divide in Hollywood...
If the movie turns out to be good, and ScarJo turns out to be a good Motoko Kusanagi I'm going to have a hard time staying outraged.
That's the thing though. I don't hate ScarJo. I love her, actually. She's great. I even, dare I say, want this movie to be good! Because I want more Hollywood adaptations of these things! But they also announced an American version of Death Note? White guys. American Evangelion? White guys. American Akira? White guys. It's a little old. Especially like as been stated and restated, the stories were made through the lens of a specific culture. Removing that social lense, the impact can be lessened or worse, they end up outright misunderstanding the point of the movie...
If you watched Akira, or DBZ, or GitS, etc and thought those guys were all white dudes... I am at a loss. I knew at a young age I was watching foreign cartoons. People for their arms chopped off, blown up and cut in half. Giant robots were metaphors for war crimes and guerrilla warfare. At a certain point you have to be forcing the ignorance. I knew Pokemon and Digimon were foreign when they ate those riceballs and said they were "donuts".
Eh, whatever. I don't think I am gonna convince you if you can't see the point I am making. Trying to look at art in a vacuum without realizing the context and themes of the film, it sounds ignorant. People are just tired of bland Hollywood movies.
Unrelated, but I am stoked they are bringing back Mirror's Edge. Not just because it's a great game, but it also has a cool, female, Asian lead. It should say something that the first game I will buy in months is that one.
To whit.
Portraying Kaneda, Tetsuo, Light et al with Asian American actors does nothing to preserve the cultural lense through which any of those stories are told. It may tell it through a different cultural lense than is typical for Hollywood, it may be a good idea for reasons of diversity of representation but the original cultural context it is not.
Really? Really?! You can't see how a movie that starts with a nuclear weapon on Japan, kicking off WWIII? Are you joking? Like, for real?
I think we have radically miscommunicated here. I don't know what your question is, but certainly I don't deny that anything is set in Japan or that the setting can and does affect stories uniquely.
What I am saying is that anything made by Hollywood, with Western conventions and in English is already going to be entirely removed from the cultural lense to which you refer, whether the movie stars Asian Americans or not. If your prime concern is maintaining Japaneseness (or, for that matter any particular cultural lense) then it is an argument for a particular kind of cultural isolationism and not an argument for a diversity of racial representation within a Hollywood blockbuster.
For the record, your posts about how the story is told don't convince me that the salient points are inseparable from their Japaneseness, the primary concern and certainly the most interesting part is the question of personal identity is universal, the question of government authority and illegal operations against its own citizens seems particularly apropos in light of the currentbsmerucan political climate.
One of the things that impressed me about the movie "Up" is how they made the sidekick an Asian kid who just happened to be Asian, without letting it define his character or story. They didn't have to, but they did it just because.
On Broadway's Matilda, three of Matilda's eight classmates were Asian. That's particularly impressive because you're dealing with child actors. Why?
Because when you're dealing with adult actors, it's a buyers market. There's no real shortage of talented actors of any race, so you can really just pick and choose the actors who fit your ideal (And if your ideal is a white guy, then that's who you end up casting).
But on a show like Matilda, you need the triple threat, at a very young age range, with a very demanding schedule. Oh, and it's live theater -- so you don't get to make mistakes. In this case, the casting agents really do have to go with the best raw talent, generally regardless of their preconceptions. In some cases, they brought in actors from the British cast into the American cast because of the shortage. And it turns out that a large proportion of the talent was made up of Asian actors.
So if Asian actors can provide this level of talent at child hood, what's stopping them from providing this level of talent in adult hood? And I think it really just boils down to cultural bias. Directors assume that Asian actors are less capable for roles, which discourages Asian actors from pursuing the career seriously.
Does anyone else remember back when Jackie Chan and Jet Li did an adaptation of "Journey to the West", and the main hero of the movie was this guy:
That many western insertions into Asian stories are laughably awful does not mean that ALL are bad. This page has given multiple examples of cultural milestones where this has been wildly successful, often without people realizing the source.
Besides, Asia is perfectly capable of making terrible monkey king movies of their own.
While I totally 100% get the anger about all this and sort of agree that it's a symptom of a larger racial divide in Hollywood...
If the movie turns out to be good, and ScarJo turns out to be a good Motoko Kusanagi I'm going to have a hard time staying outraged.
That's the thing though. I don't hate ScarJo. I love her, actually. She's great. I even, dare I say, want this movie to be good! Because I want more Hollywood adaptations of these things! But they also announced an American version of Death Note? White guys. American Evangelion? White guys. American Akira? White guys. It's a little old. Especially like as been stated and restated, the stories were made through the lens of a specific culture. Removing that social lense, the impact can be lessened or worse, they end up outright misunderstanding the point of the movie...
If you watched Akira, or DBZ, or GitS, etc and thought those guys were all white dudes... I am at a loss. I knew at a young age I was watching foreign cartoons. People for their arms chopped off, blown up and cut in half. Giant robots were metaphors for war crimes and guerrilla warfare. At a certain point you have to be forcing the ignorance. I knew Pokemon and Digimon were foreign when they ate those riceballs and said they were "donuts".
Eh, whatever. I don't think I am gonna convince you if you can't see the point I am making. Trying to look at art in a vacuum without realizing the context and themes of the film, it sounds ignorant. People are just tired of bland Hollywood movies.
Unrelated, but I am stoked they are bringing back Mirror's Edge. Not just because it's a great game, but it also has a cool, female, Asian lead. It should say something that the first game I will buy in months is that one.
To whit.
Portraying Kaneda, Tetsuo, Light et al with Asian American actors does nothing to preserve the cultural lense through which any of those stories are told. It may tell it through a different cultural lense than is typical for Hollywood, it may be a good idea for reasons of diversity of representation but the original cultural context it is not.
Really? Really?! You can't see how a movie that starts with a nuclear weapon on Japan, kicking off WWIII? Are you joking? Like, for real?
I think we have radically miscommunicated here. I don't know what your question is, but certainly I don't deny that anything is set in Japan or that the setting can and does affect stories uniquely.
What I am saying is that anything made by Hollywood, with Western conventions and in English is already going to be entirely removed from the cultural lense to which you refer, whether the movie stars Asian Americans or not. If your prime concern is maintaining Japaneseness (or, for that matter any particular cultural lense) then it is an argument for a particular kind of cultural isolationism and not an argument for a diversity of racial representation within a Hollywood blockbuster.
For the record, your posts about how the story is told don't convince me that the salient points are inseparable from their Japaneseness, the primary concern and certainly the most interesting part is the question of personal identity is universal, the question of government authority and illegal operations against its own citizens seems particularly apropos in light of the currentbsmerucan political climate.
I am sorry, it is definitely my opinion in regards to the film and themes, and you don't have to agree. But, I am merely framing why whitewashing is problematic to the tone, theme, and understanding of these stories. People get nervous when they see Scarjo because there is a history, not just of badly adapted movies, but also racially driven motivated reasons for messing with the presentation.
People make movies about foreign events all the time. That's the issue, they never quite get it right. The Last Samurai tries to make a good effort to cast actual Japanese actors in the film, and have them speak Japanese. Of course, the film loses credibility for suggesting the last samurai living was a white man, when that isn't remotely true or a good plot device. Even when they treat the settings of the movie with respect, they can miss the point. So, I am not saying all adaptations with white actors are inherently bad, nor am I saying I want all these adaptations with all Japanese casts and speaking in Japanese.
But putting in the bare minimum of effort, to actually cast people who would actively benefit from being cast as a strong lead in movie would be a progressive move. Cast someone other than an already rich, successful, white actor. Or in the case of Goku, a relatively small name actor whose part as Goku hurt the film more than it helped.
Even if you don't see how GitS, or Akira, are Japanese works of art, you gotta have some understanding of the themes present and why they have such a huge influence in the Cyberpunk genre... Living in a post-war nation, technology-over-military based society, consciousness inside of computers, what it means to have an identity, these themes all dovetail and have risen from Eastern attitudes. It's so in your face and prevalent throughout the film. That's why it's silly when they change small details, like the rumor that the American Akira would take place in New York City. That alone speaks to the ignorance of the property they are handling, and by fucking with it, changing the tone in irredeemable ways.
You can do a good adaptation, either way. But Hollywood chooses to make them the harder way, by casting predominantly white people, and missing the context that makes the art enjoyable to so many.
It's like, the greatest whitewash in history is of Jesus himself, but nobody batted an eye at the extremely white Jesus in Passion of the Christ. You think reading The Bible and watching that movie are the same experience if you don't have insight to what the world was like back then? Context changes everything.
I linked these tweets from jon tsuei in the movie thread before, rather than posting like ten tweets i'll just transcribe them
I've been seeing a lot of defenses for the ScarJo casting that seem to lack a nuanced understanding of a Ghost In The Shell as a story.
The manga came out in 1989, the first film 1995. An era when Japan was considered the world leader in technology. Everything hot in that era came out of Japan. Cars, video games, walkmans, all of that. Japan was setting a standard. This is a country that went from poised to conquer to the Pacific to forcibly disarmed. They poured their resources into their economy. And as a country that was unable to defend themselves, but was a world leader in tech, it created a relationship to tech that is unique.
Ghost In The Shell plays off all of these themes. It is inherently a Japanese story, not a universal one.
This casting is not only the erasure of Asian faces but a removal of the story from its core themes. You can "Westernize" the story if you want, but at that point it is no longer Ghost In The Shell because the story is simply not Western. Understand that media from Asia holds a dear place in the hearts of many Asians in the west, simply because western media doesn't show us. Ghost In The Shell, while just one film, is a pillar in Asian media. It's not simply a scifi thriller. Not to me, not to many others. Respect the work for what it is and don't bastardize it into what you want it to be.
I find it doubtful that the filmmakers considered the story through this lens, but more than anything what this casting does is telegraph to me that this probably isn't gonna be a good movie? Like they flubbed this part this badly already, how am I supposed to expect them to handle the actual meaty, cerebral bits of the story with any sort of care or understanding? The IMDb page has the Laughing Man listed, but are they actually going to incorporate the salient themes of Stand Alone Complex or are they just using the name as a shortcut, because it's recognizable, etc?
My expectations at this point are that it's gonna be a generic scifi action movie dressed up in GitS trappings and I haven't really seen anything to suggest otherwise
Here.
And the video I posted above is really definitively best watched, because it shows footage and music from the film to emphasise its points.
To boil it down, it's that the story unfolds in an undeniably Japanese way. They have long, lingering shots to mimic the manga artform, they show consecutive world building shots to emphasise what kind of place this Future Japan looks like. "Aspect-toAspect" transitions are used to abandon time in favor of exploring the space and world around them. It's to create a tangible atmosphere.
The themes of city and the people who occupy it are a mirror to the themes of Ghosts and their Shells, and wondering about the relationship between them. The city is based off of Japan, and also Hong Kong; these stories reflect the conflict they felt after being under rule by a foreign nation. He speaks about how Hong Kong was long under British rule, and in that way embodies the identity problems a cyborg would have; how do they shape identity when you were made by someone who came before? Are you who you are by free will, when you know you are also a manufactured machine? The same questions we have of religion and existence itself... cyborgs would feel the same- but in a more definitive; they only exist as they are now by the actions of others.
Every shot in this movie is meticulously placed and for a reason. The shots of the decrepit and overgrown city, it is one of the best themes in cyberpunk: it shows the mix of technology and culture can mirror the mix of technology and mankind. We make the spaces we live, but they also shape ourselves. The dynamic of ourselves and the spaces we occupy, are one and the same...
Really, just watch it.
The tweets and subsequent argument about the inherent Japaneseness would argue that the movie ought not be made at all. Questions of representation don't even apply. Or rather, if made it should be set in Japan and played by Japanese actors and be presented in Japanese.
I find it hard to argue for the importance of East Asian representation in entertainment on a forum that's banned anime discussion
So I'll stick with the prevailing Asian notion of you do you own thing, we'll do ours. Make another Star Wars out of Hidden Fortress or Lion King out of Kimba the White Lion or The Departed out of Infernal Affairs; appropriating while masking the source seems to do well. Just directly copying seems like a waste of everyone's time.
...
you guys are aware that asian-americans exist, right? that there are audiences of asian people in the west and not only in asia?
How do you think my argument that diversity of casting and the Japaneseness - the cultural lense et al to which Local H Jay refers - are separate concerns is affected by this fact? Or specifically, how do you think I am ignoring it?
Well, I would hope we wouldn't be having this argument at all, because East Asian-Americans are not concerned about the authenticity of the adaptation when stripped of its original Japanese context. In fact, I'd wager most of the concerned individuals haven't even seen Ghost in the Shell. This discussion of the authorial intent of a specific work and its viewing through different cultural prisms itself feels like a whitewashing of a discussion on whitewashing. It's a highfalutin' argument over how one really understands art and how an artist's intent and an audience's experiences come together to generate a perception of said art. While this is of primary import to those who are seeking to extract value out of the art of other cultures, but these are - and perhaps I should not speak on behalf of so many, but... - not the concerns of those who are whitewashed.
But putting in the bare minimum of effort, to actually cast people who would actively benefit from being cast as a strong lead in movie would be a progressive move. Cast someone other than an already rich, successful, white actor.
This is not why people are cast in blockbuster movies, or at least, not often. Is it reasonable to ask studios to hang 300 million quid on an unknown for the sake of progressiveness when they can as near as guarantee a return on their investment by casting ScarJo? Hollywood likes casting people who are already famous and successful because they've proved that people like to go and see them in movies.
Sometimes you can have a relative unknown in a huge movie, and maybe this was an opportunity for that, but I don't think Ghost in the Shell is a big enough property to carry hype on its own outside of a small audience. You can sell Star Wars on the name alone and cast who you like (the new Star Wars trio are brilliant), but with Ghost in the Shell I can see backers getting antsy for a big name to help push the movie.
Is the new GitS movie actually going to be set in Japan? The cast list has Japanese character names, but doesn't mention the setting that I can see.
Even if you don't see how GitS, or Akira, are Japanese works of art, you gotta have some understanding of the themes present and why they have such a huge influence in the Cyberpunk genre... Living in a post-war nation, technology-over-military based society, consciousness inside of computers, what it means to have an identity, these themes all dovetail and have risen from Eastern attitudes. It's so in your face and prevalent throughout the film.
With Akira I can absolutely see how it ties into specifically Japanese history. It's even more pronounced in the manga, but picking up the story and dropping it in, say, New York, would definitely dislocate elements of the story. I don't really see it in the same way with GitS.
AI intelligence and 'what it means to have an identity' are hardly peculiar to Japanese art and fiction, neither is living in a post-war society. The latter doesn't, from what I remember, play much of a part in GitS, though it's definitely a theme in Akira.
Don't mistake me for speaking for Asian Americans, it is just how I feel personally and why the stories resonate with *some people* can be linked to unique setting and themes. Dissecting art is a classic past time, and one person's interpretation can be vastly different from the next guy's... And that is fine. But where it gets iffy for me is when people start sitting down and splitting hairs about race of cartoon characters and wether that qualifies as whitewashing if the character is also a robot or an alien.
But on the topic of whitewashing it becomes touchy to lots of people because some people affected by it don't see it as inherently bad. When you have Max Landis defending the movie industry saying and admitting the whole "Scarjo is best choice because otherwise movie would never be made" and then suddenly we turn around in another 5 years and wonder why we have no Asian leads still. If you never give them a chance, they never become AAA movie stars like Scarjo. And even when presented with a chance to cast an unknown for say, Goku, it's a unknown white actor because of reasons. Reasons = money, bit if they want a successful movie, better sticking to the source material makes for better movie. Like the Marvel Cinematic Universe that fans love, because it respects the source material and people flock to them. Again, I posted earlier about a Japanese actress recently nominated for an Academy Award and that was in Pacific Rim that also audition for the role. And she was snubbed so some guy could waste a day CGI an Asian Scarjo before realizing what an appalling idea that is.
The Marvel universe has an easier time of sticking to the source material in terms of the ethnicity of the superheroes, because almost all of them are white men. When they've moved away from the source material to cast people of colour they've caught flack, even when it's a supporting character and it doesn't matter and the objections are irrelevant because they're space aliens and not actually Norse gods.
I don't think their success can be attributed to "respecting the source material", as most people watching the movies aren't familiar with the source material. The movies do, and it's great and it helps the movies because the source material is strong, but "respecting the source material" isn't necessarily a box office plus. Falcon's origin in Winter Soldier, for instance, is totally different, which is a good thing because Falcon's comics origin is terrible.
But putting in the bare minimum of effort, to actually cast people who would actively benefit from being cast as a strong lead in movie would be a progressive move. Cast someone other than an already rich, successful, white actor.
This is not why people are cast in blockbuster movies, or at least, not often. Is it reasonable to ask studios to hang 300 million quid on an unknown for the sake of progressiveness when they can as near as guarantee a return on their investment by casting ScarJo? Hollywood likes casting people who are already famous and successful because they've proved that people like to go and see them in movies.
Sometimes you can have a relative unknown in a huge movie, and maybe this was an opportunity for that, but I don't think Ghost in the Shell is a big enough property to carry hype on its own outside of a small audience. You can sell Star Wars on the name alone and cast who you like (the new Star Wars trio are brilliant), but with Ghost in the Shell I can see backers getting antsy for a big name to help push the movie.
Is the new GitS movie actually going to be set in Japan? The cast list has Japanese character names, but doesn't mention the setting that I can see.
Yeah. I think the discussion so far has been focusing too much on one particular casting choice. I don't think the casting of ScarJo in GitS is particularly egregious, but rather a symptom of a bigger problem, which is the general lack of Asian representation in movies. There aren't really any Asian actresses with the kind of name recognition and box office pull that they could safely cast as the lead of a new, very expensive sci-fi movie/franchise. Maybe they could have gone with Lucy Liu if they had made this movie ten years ago, in the Kill Bill, Charlie's Angels era. So the problem is structural, and complicated, and arglebargling at the makers of GitS can only indirectly help fix it by increasing awareness of the problem.
As for GitS being uniquely Japanese, I agree with Apothe0sis that that ship sailed the moment Hollywood decided to pick up this title. They will replace the original Japanese cultural trauma with something closer to Western culture. Let's hope they do it well.
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miscellaneousinsanitygrass grows, birds fly, sun shines,and brother, i hurt peopleRegistered Userregular
Is it reasonable to ask studios to hang 300 million quid on an unknown for the sake of progressiveness when they can as near as guarantee a return on their investment by casting ScarJo? Hollywood likes casting people who are already famous and successful because they've proved that people like to go and see them in movies.
is that such a sure thing, though? just look at how Gods of Egypt fared.
But they’re wrong. If minorities are box office risks, what accounts for the success of the “Fast and Furious” franchise, which presented a broadly diverse team, behind and in front of the camera? Over seven movies it has grossed nearly $4 billion worldwide. In fact, a recent study by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that films with diverse leads not only resulted in higher box office numbers but also higher returns of investment for studios and producers.
And Hollywood’s argument is circular: If Asian-Americans — and other minority actors more broadly — are not even allowed to be in a movie, how can they build the necessary box office clout in the first place?
Aside from the damage to its corporate soul, what if for every extra dollar casting Johansson pulls in at the box office, the studio loses two or three from all the negative publicity surrounding her casting? This is, after all, pretty much what happened to the JM Barrie prequel Pan, which is estimated to have lost Warner Bros $150m last year, and Gods of Egypt, which proved 2016’s first major box office turkey in February. Other examples of the disastrous financial effects of whitewashing include Cameron Crowe’s ill-fated Aloha, which failed to recoup its budget after casting Emma Stone as an ethnically mixed Hawaiian, and The Lone Ranger, which reportedly saw Disney write off $190m in 2013 after the studio decided Johnny Depp would make a great Tonto. On this evidence, the whole pro-whitewashing Hollywood template begins to look like pretty dumb as a financial model.
It's definitely not a sure thing, but I'm guessing they looked at Lucy's returns and thought hmmm OK that seems to work let's do that again. And yeah, it's a vicious circle that the lack of asian actors allowed to take a starring role means none build up box office power enough to star in a big movie. I would have loved them to cast an actress of the 'right' ethnicity for Kusanagi. I can understand (though not enthusiastically support) why they didn't, though.
I'm certainly not arguing for casting choices like those in Gods of Egypt. That was ridiculous. I'm not sure that the terrible performance of the movie was just down to the casting, however, as that movie looked like it sucked on every level.
Adapting a property and putting a different cultural spin on it is different from remaking something and just filing off the cultural identity. Edge of Tomorrow caught almost no flak for changing Keiji to Cage and casting Tom Cruise, because the story was about saving Earth from aliens; not about saving Japan from outside commercial and cultural interests.
EoT caught more flak for not using the manga's title, but it was the right choice... Would you suggest that For a Fistful of Dollars should've been titled Yojimbo instead?
I do think that one can lift a story from a cultural work and adapt it to another culture, but you gotta put in the effort. You gotta replace that context with something the audience can identify with. You just lift something like GitS and make it about Americans, it's probably either going to be pointless spectacle or a confusing mess (or both).
Maybe we Americans should stick to Ex Machina sequels for the time being, until we sort out our issues with misogyny, ego, and being overshadowed by our own creations.
We don't actually know how they're going to adapt Ghost in the Shell right now. Do we even know what country it's going to be set in?
I don't think they have said, yet, but they have cast SOME Japanese actors.
I've never completely discounted ScarJo as the Major, or rather the Major's shell, because of just how rich the GitS universe's lore is; I just have very little faith in Hollywood to not fuck it up with focus groups, executive meddling, and an almost unreal ability to understand trends. They see that Lucy did very well with ScarJo as a magical science girl, so they figure that she'll do super well with as a magical science girl from a highly-regarded-but-foreign franchise... Ignoring WHY the franchise is so well-regarded.
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
This idea that we should just ignore the opinions of actual Japanese people seems insane to me.
If the general consensus in the country of Japan is that this is fine and good that should probably carry some weight. Otherwise you're just talking over the very people you're trying to defend. And even among Westerners I have yet to see an actual Japanese-American, or a Japanese person from whatever country, come out against it.
I would also like to know how faithful the GitS film is with the themes of the original comic. Cross-cultural adaptation is a real thing and the Japanese do it all the time with Western stuff. I do think that if they want to cast Scarjo they probably should have changed the name of the character, and the thing about using CGI to make her look more Asian is, if not a bullshit rumour, clearly pretty dumb.
Do you mean Japanese people living in Japan, or Japanese-Americans, or both?
Because most Japanese people would be, "Who cares?" because it's an American movie which isn't really going to be high on their cultural zeitgeist and Japan itself is extremely ethnically monolithic.
Japanese-Americans and other Asian-Americans care a whole fucking lot more.
So this got glossed over earlier, but I actually think it deserves a little more focus.
To whom should the film-makers pay respect? The Japanese, who created Ghost in the Shell, or the Japanese-Americans, who may watch this version of it?
If Africans were to put on the plays of Shakespeare, should they seek out Venetian actors and actresses for The Merchant? If Bollywood recreated The Great Escape, how should they cast it?
To whom should the film-makers pay respect? The Japanese, who created Ghost in the Shell, or the Japanese-Americans, who may watch this version of it?
The latter. I mean, they shouldn't outright disrespect the original creators, but the US has a sizable Japanese-American population that is under-represented. Chances to cast one should be seized, nor whitewashed.
If Africans were to put on the plays of Shakespeare, should they seek out Venetian actors and actresses for The Merchant? If Bollywood recreated The Great Escape, how should they cast it?
Those countries generally don't have significant populations of those minorities, and would almost certainly adapt them to their own culture. Kinda disingenuous, because bollywood remakes western stuff all the time, and almost always spins it with local flavor (also singing & dancing).
Just to be that guy, there are ~1,304,286 Japanese/Japanese-Americans in the US. Or about 0.4% of the total population.
At any rate, as a couple of people have said, we don't even know how they are going to play this. It could end up having almost zero to do with the source material a la Doom.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
I don't know that we're in a place yet to say that whitewashing is the primary cause of a project's failure (I mean, go read any review for Gods of Egypt or Pan or Aloha, the race-bending is not even at the top of the list of those film's failings), but I think at the very least we can say that choosing to cast A-list white talent over lesser-known actors who may be more ethnically appropriate hasn't shown itself to be any marker of security for a film's financial prospects.
I mean, Hollywood race-bends all the time without people getting up in arms about it. Oscar Isaac for example, of Cuban-Guatemalan ethnicity, has played everything from Hispanic to Polish to Welsh to Egyptian to the goddamn king of England. Rashida Jones, who is Black, almost always plays characters of implied caucasian ethnicity because of her light skin tone and small features; the role that was her big break, Karen Filippelli on The Office, cast her as Italian.
The difference here is at least two-fold; for one, actors from ethnic minorities have a huge disadvantage in Hollywood getting leading parts, so someone like Rashida Jones playing a caucasian role doesn't have the same scale of opportunity loss as, say, Cameron Diaz playing the same role. Pretty white girls are gonna find work. Second, Jones, et al, can convincingly play certain caucasian ethnicities without asking the audience to suspend their disbelief--the same cannot be said if Scarlett Johansson or Emma Stone is playing an Asian character--so it seems far less like pandering to market demands when that happens.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Something to think about in relation to this is how essential race is to the story. If the character must look a certain way or be of a certain ethnicity for purposes of storytelling then that should absolutely be preserved, if not then there is some room for flexibility. The Shakespeare argument resonates to me a good bit here. His plays are such excellent versions of certain universal tropes and cultural stories that they can be applied to any setting. You can do Romeo and Juliet on the streets of LA with gang violence or in high Italian society. Either way it works.
Some stories, such as those specifically examining race relationships or intercultural relationships, become absolutely horrible when liberties are taken with the ethnicity of the characters. The King and I is one of those classic examples where this is a very real problem. The entire point of the story is the cultural shock between the Siamese king and the Victorian colonialist. Making either into a different race, and especially casting both from the same race, cheapens the story entirely. Another example of note are things like Wuthering Heights where while Heathcliff is depicted as ambiguously foreign, he is definitely not western european and casting him as such is a problem.
Anime characters fit in a middle ground here. Is the fact that Goku is a white guy the reason the Dragonball movie was bad? No. It was a bad movie. His casting was terrible anyway, but there is a perfectly acceptable version of that movie that could have told that story with Goku and the other sayains as the only white guys (Hell, look at Nappa. He's practically straight from a US trucker rally). There is room for interpretation. Ghost in the Shell is probably a good example of where casting the lead as a white woman IS a major problem, since GitS is mostly examining the implications of the evolution of technology specifically in a Japanese context. You can't easily take that story and move it elsewhere in the world and keep the same messaging, morals, or conflicts. So much of it is tied to where it comes from that you would have a very different story and context if it were taking place in the US (look at Person of Interest, I, Robot, and Minority Report for versions of the sameish story that could only be from an American/western perspective).
That said, just because many stories can be fluid in how you tell them doesn't mean there isn't a whitewashing problem that is absolutely rampant. There is, and it is 100% a hollywood engine problem. The same problem that keeps any minorities from the Academy Awards or from main casting roles without it being a "targeted demographic" movie, all of which are terrible and need to end. America has a massive number of highly impressive and capable actors and actresses from nearly everywhere in the world, availability is not the problem here.
If Africans were to put on the plays of Shakespeare, should they seek out Venetian actors and actresses for The Merchant? If Bollywood recreated The Great Escape, how should they cast it?
Because this sort of thing keeps getting brought up, it's worth pointing out again that these are two entirely different issues.
An all-African adaptation of Shakespeare isn't a problem because there's not hundreds of years of history of African's subjugating the English and attempting to simultaneously destroy and appropriate their culture. A Bollywood adaptation of The Great Escape is fine because India never conquered Europe and spent centuries extracting resources for its own benefit.
People in this thread keep talking about whitewashing as this abstract artistic choice, as if it wasn't tied to a long history of white cultural imperialism. There's a context here, a history of white people taking what they want from minorities while also keeping those minorities out of cultural industries. Of stealing songs and stories and making them white, without giving anything back to the people who actually made those songs and stories.
This doesn't mean that it's always clear what counts as appropriation; people in this thread have already raised lots of examples (like A Fistful of Dollars, or The Hidden Fortress/Star Wars) where the adaptation is so substantial that the line gets kind of blurry. But in a case where a white actress is cast in an Asian role? Where Hollywood has essentially said "you people aren't fit to portray yourselves in your own stories"? Then yeah, that's pretty clearly wrong.
AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
I feel like I need to point out that the questions of "is ethnicity important to characterization?" and "is it morally acceptable if ______ plays [ethnicity]?" are two different areas of conversation, the former being mostly academic with regards to narrative structure, and the latter being a question of modern socio-political context.
For example, maybe Scarlett Johansson would make an excellent Shell Ghost Lady or whatever (I don't know anything about that property, so bear with me), but it doesn't absolve or even really address the issue of her appropriateness in the role in today's climate of harmful racial exclusivity.
GitS is mostly examining the implications of the evolution of technology specifically in a Japanese context.
I don't really see how GitS examines the evolution of technology specifically in a Japanese context. Themes of identity, artificial intelligence, cybernetic replacement of a body, memories, etc. All these things have been looked at by artists in other countries and are universal themes.
If Africans were to put on the plays of Shakespeare, should they seek out Venetian actors and actresses for The Merchant? If Bollywood recreated The Great Escape, how should they cast it?
Because this sort of thing keeps getting brought up, it's worth pointing out again that these are two entirely different issues.
An all-African adaptation of Shakespeare isn't a problem because there's not hundreds of years of history of African's subjugating the English and attempting to simultaneously destroy and appropriate their culture. A Bollywood adaptation of The Great Escape is fine because India never conquered Europe and spent centuries extracting resources for its own benefit.
People in this thread keep talking about whitewashing as this abstract artistic choice, as if it wasn't tied to a long history of white cultural imperialism. There's a context here, a history of white people taking what they want from minorities while also keeping those minorities out of cultural industries. Of stealing songs and stories and making them white, without giving anything back to the people who actually made those songs and stories.
This doesn't mean that it's always clear what counts as appropriation; people in this thread have already raised lots of examples (like A Fistful of Dollars, or The Hidden Fortress/Star Wars) where the adaptation is so substantial that the line gets kind of blurry. But in a case where a white actress is cast in an Asian role? Where Hollywood has essentially said "you people aren't fit to portray yourselves in your own stories"? Then yeah, that's pretty clearly wrong.
Appropriation has less to do with some these problems than the narrative of their stories, though. Shakespeare is telling stories that are pretty universal across cultures. The Great Escape would actually be pretty problematic depending on how it was depicted, the same way that portraying British people as Germans is problematic (but convenient) in US war films.
Casting an all-white version of Mulan is clearly problematic on a ton of levels, but perhaps casting an all-Chinese version of Robin Hood could be considered less problematic due to history, though in all likelihood the same problems would be apparent (with cultural interpretation tropes outweighing cultural accuracy). Historical context can't be ignored, but colonialization isn't applicable to a lot of tales we consider "western" because they are just western depictions of universal stories that exist in every culture. Shakespeare didn't write new stories, he just made the best versions of those in English within his time and got them widely read.
I don't think directors assume asian actors are less capable, I think they assume white audiences will show up in greater numbers for white actors
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Not a lot of Shakespeare strives to be historically accurate, and most of it is entirely fictional. Some, like Macbeth and Hamlet, are specific to a regional setting, but I don't really see why changing that would be a problem--in fact, many adaptations have, and done so successfully.
Nothing about Hamlet is dependent on its Danish location; it's a tale about severe family dysfunction.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Not a lot of Shakespeare strives to be historically accurate, and most of it is entirely fictional. Some, like Macbeth and Hamlet, are specific to a regional setting, but I don't really see why changing that would be a problem--in fact, many adaptations have, and done so successfully.
Nothing about Hamlet is dependent on its Danish location; it's a tale about severe family dysfunction.
Exactly, these are universal tales. You can find them anywhere in any culture, just with different names. Especially Hamlet which adds the step-parent and heir problems which are found in every society with some kind of feudalism or monarchy.
While something like Mulan or Robin Hood are about addressing specific cultural problems within a society. Divorce them from their culture, you lose a lot of the actual point of those stories. Sure, you can apply a Mulan-ish tale to a western setting, but given the lack of translation between Confucian values and Catholicism, it's not the same story of conflicts as Joan of Arc beyond both having strong female heroines in a time where there weren't many or any of those. The context and threats to Mulan can't be replicated beyond the society that created it, nor those that faced Joan of Arc. You can take the "bandits attack a evil authority" take and apply it anywhere, but Robin Hood is more about the breakdown of English cultural law and the impact of the crusades on the British Isles than just about robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. In some stories context does matter!
GitS is mostly examining the implications of the evolution of technology specifically in a Japanese context.
I don't really see how GitS examines the evolution of technology specifically in a Japanese context. Themes of identity, artificial intelligence, cybernetic replacement of a body, memories, etc. All these things have been looked at by artists in other countries and are universal themes.
The actual substance of the original GitS movie and the later SAC series (season 1, I don't remember if I saw season2) is very firmly rooted in Japanese culture and history.
I believe the best example to throw out here is Seven Samurai vs The Magnificent Seven.
On the surface, they are both movies about small villages under attack by bandits, and the villagers need to enlist the aid of professional fighters to save themselves. There are similar character personalities, and the story plays out most of the same beats in the core narrative. Dig below the surface, though, and the differences begin to arise. At it's heart, Seven Samurai is a movie about the rigidity of social roles in 1500s Japan, about the inner conflict of being who and how society deems one should be, and how adherence to those social norms is what separates the civilized killers, the Samurai, from the uncivilized killers, the bandits. (I am sooooo oversimplifying here. I know.) On the flip, though, Magnificent Seven is about... badass outlaw cowboys being heroes, self-made men walking the path they choose and choosing to be heroes by not behaving as society dictates they should.
And they're both pretty good movies!
The point is, if Hollywood wants to make a movie about identity, AI, and cybernetics, by all means. Make that movie. But GitS already exists, so if you're not going to bring the heart over with it, don't call it GitS. Make it your own.
Which is a tangent to the whitewashing argument, but it's pretty tangled up with it. If you define GitS as just a collection of ideas, then it's easy to argue that you can remix those ideas and cast who you wish without consequence, but I propose we do not define it as such. It's a very specific story with very specific emotional and cultural themes beyond the surface-level sci-fi explorations. If you want to remake that story, then you need to keep the core of it true, which means you need the setting and the people and the culture it was born from. If you want to adapt and remix elements of that story, fine, but don't call it GitS, because it's not.
Just to be that guy, there are ~1,304,286 Japanese/Japanese-Americans in the US. Or about 0.4% of the total population.
At any rate, as a couple of people have said, we don't even know how they are going to play this. It could end up having almost zero to do with the source material a la Doom.
So? Just using "there aren't many of those guys so it doesn't matter" is goofy. Acting like you have to actively be the race in question to find ignoring cultural context a bit offensive is a silly idea.
GitS is mostly examining the implications of the evolution of technology specifically in a Japanese context.
I don't really see how GitS examines the evolution of technology specifically in a Japanese context. Themes of identity, artificial intelligence, cybernetic replacement of a body, memories, etc. All these things have been looked at by artists in other countries and are universal themes.
Because specifically in Asian territories in the shadow of China, Japan and Korea were under subjugation from outside countries. In Korea, Hong Kong endured 100 years under British rule to protect them from China. Japan had two nuclear bombs dropped on it, had it's existing government replaced with a Westernized one, but couldn't focus on military. So, both countries entered a technological boom as the time when GitS was conceived and released (1989/1995 specifically) born of not a desire to reform, but being forced to. Both countries have indentity issues of being the way they are today because of being molded and modeled after Western values for some time. The same identity issues that arise from this period of an almost forced technological renaissance, helped invent the cyberpunk genre. There's a reason GitS and Akira are held up as embodying some of the most strongly recognized themes and ideas pushed forth from cyberpunk.
Listen to director of SAC season 1&2, Kenji Kamiyama:
"You might remember the Glico-Morinaga Case (*) and political corruption scandals of the 1980s. I wanted to get to the bottom of them.
As a vulnerable kid back then, I couldn't relate to the fact that politicians committed crime. It had been two or three decades, and I felt a strong desire to retrace these incidents, and solve them (in my stories, at least). And I guess I did realize my dream.
For the second series, when I discussed the theme with Oshii-san, we decided that we couldn't avoid the issue of "war". In other words, we simply couldn't ignore the way society had evolved since the events of 9-11. That was the approach we decided to take, and I tried to illustrate a 21st century (near-future) war. But to tell you the truth, I couldn't avoid feeding back into modern reality.
I had a wish, at least in the anime, to end the war and I kept on asking my staff to find a way to do that. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the solution. This was the hardest part.
When I was working on one episode about a refugee ghetto, incidents occurred one after another, such as the slaying of a Japanese traveler in Iraq and a Chinese submarine appearing near Okinawa.
I was totally carried away. The series shows how I committed myself to these issues, and you can see what may appear like remnants of a war. I put a lot into it. The process wasn't easy, but I can still feel the enthusiasm that I had back then. So the second series turned out to be one of my favorites."
That case is definitely an influence on The Laughing Man, a character being used in the movie:
"(*) The Glico-Morinaga Case - On March 18, 1984, two masked men with a cap on carrying a gun and a rifle stormed into the house of Katsuhisa Ezaki, president of the giant food maker Glico Corporation. The two men held Ezaki for ransom of 1 billion yen. Ezaki escaped three days later, but this was only the beginning. In May, blackmailing started with letters sent to the newspapers telling that they had laced some Glico products in the Nagoya-Okayama region with potassium cyanide. The letter was signed by "The Monster With 21 Faces", after the villain in Edogawa Ranpo's popular detective novels. Glico products disappeared from the stores, with a loss of more than 5 billion yen. In June, Japanese newspapers received a new letter from the group: "We forgive Glico." But then The Monster With 21 Faces shifted the target from Glico to other food companies, Marudai Ham, Morinaga and House. However, after one last message, dated February 27, 1985, nobody heard from The Monster With 21 Faces ever again. The identikit of the "fox-eyed man" as the police called the prime suspect of the Glico-Morinaga Case, was on all papers and TV channels, becoming one of Japanese crime history icons. In March 1994, the statute of limitation ran out for the abduction of Ezaki, leaving the case unsolved and without explanation. The Glico-Morinaga Case, or Case 114 as it is officially designated, has been the highest on the Japanese Police priority list for 10 years."
i feel like the "it's only for economic reasons, honest" argument would hold more water if the casting decisions didn't extend to a bunch of the major roles
like, I get that you want Scarlett Johannsen in your movie, but did you really need the sweet, sweet star power that is Pilou Asbaek to play another asian role (Batou, specifically)? Is that going to help?
Michael Pitt I at least recognize, but I don't think he exactly puts butts in seats either
and he definitely doesn't look like a Hideo Kuze
like at some point it's pretty hard to see any kind of rationale except racism
It's also very much about the death of the gunslinger as a figure in the old West, their loneliness and their transient nature in society, compared to the farmers who hire them, their own codes of honour, etc.
Houn, I honestly appreciate the post but an argument made using a different movie entirely isn't very compelling. Are the firmly Japanese roots of GitS that are inextricably linked to the story supposed to be so obvious that my not seeing them is unbelievable? I'm not being sarcastic, but everything people have said is specifically Japanese in Ghost in the Shell doesn't seem specifically Japanese, and the setting of a fictional future Japanese city has never struck me as particularly vital to the story in either the manga or the first movie. I haven't seen SAC, so I dunno about that.
Compare it to Akira, where the Japanese setting is very much a part of the story and Japanese history obviously front and centre.
Like, if you simply don't see how the socetial issues that arise from being shaped by a foreign nation and then struggling to come to terms with that identity can affect and even inform the art made by those then... You are looking too narrowly. Yes, the themes can be translated to other ethnicites and cultures, but the ideas and problems proposed by them are specifically through the lens of years of subjugation and forced self-reinvention.
They take themes from JD Salinger, such as from the short story "The Lauging Man" and also Catcher in the Rye. They also borrow heavily the format of The Lauging Man, in that it is a story within a story. That's why the villain in SAC is named after this story, and they are using The Laughing Man as the antagonist in the GitS movie.
"Every day, after the troop has completed its activities, The Chief gathers the boys for the next episode in an ongoing story about the eponymous Laughing Man. In the format of a serial adventure novel, The Chief’s story describes the Laughing Man as the child of missionaries who was kidnapped by bandits in China, who deformed his face by compressing it in a vise; he was obliged to wear a mask, but compensated by being profoundly athletic and possessed of a great Robin Hood-like charm and the ability to speak with animals.
The narrator summarizes the Chief’s ever more fantastic installments of the Laughing Man’s escapades, presenting him as a sort of comic book hero crossing “the Chinese-Paris border” to commit acts of heroic larceny and tweaking his nose at his archenemy “Marcel Dufarge, the internationally famous detective and witty consumptive”.
Eventually, The Chief takes up with a young woman, Mary Hudson. As the Chief’s relationship with Mary waxes and wanes, so too do the fortunes of The Laughing Man. One day, the Chief presents an instalment where the Laughing Man is taken prisoner by his arch-rival, bound to a tree, and in mortal danger; then he ends the episode on a cliffhanger. Immediately afterward, the Chief brings his troop to a baseball diamond, where Mary Hudson arrives. The Chief and Mary have a conversation out of earshot from the boys, and then both return, together yet distraught.
In the final installment of the story, the Chief kills off the Laughing Man, much to the Comanches’ dismay."
They very deliberately put those themes and frame them within the view of Asia's tech boom. An again, they take all these outside view points of dualism and what it means to be conscious, and puts these themes through that same lense:
"The concept of the ghost was borrowed by Masamune Shirow from an essay on structuralism, The Ghost in the Machine, by Arthur Koestler. The title itself was originally used by an English philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, to mock the paradox of conventional Cartesian dualism and dualism in general. Koestler, like Ryle, denies Cartesian dualism and locates the origin of human mind in the physical condition of the brain. He argues that the human brain has grown and built upon earlier, more primitive brain structures, the "ghost in the machine", which at times overpower higher logical functions, and are responsible for hate, anger and other such destructive impulses. Shirow denies dualism similarly in his work, but defines the "ghost" more broadly, not only as a physical trait, but as a phase or phenomenon that appears in a system at a certain level of complexity. The brain itself is only part of the whole neural network; if, for example, an organ is removed from a body, the autonomic nerve of the organ and consequently its "ghost" will vanish unless the stimulus of the existence of the organ is perfectly re-produced by a mechanical substitution. This can be compared, by analogy, to a person born with innate deafness being unable to understand the concept of "hearing" unless taught."
The ideas and themes proposed aren't inherently Japanese. But knowing the social and socetial reasons for the Japanese to get interested in these topics, and then make reflective art about the nature of the soul and indentity, are inherent to understanding how the story comes together at all.
Not a lot of Shakespeare strives to be historically accurate, and most of it is entirely fictional. Some, like Macbeth and Hamlet, are specific to a regional setting, but I don't really see why changing that would be a problem--in fact, many adaptations have, and done so successfully.
Nothing about Hamlet is dependent on its Danish location; it's a tale about severe family dysfunction.
Exactly, these are universal tales. You can find them anywhere in any culture, just with different names. Especially Hamlet which adds the step-parent and heir problems which are found in every society with some kind of feudalism or monarchy.
While something like Mulan or Robin Hood are about addressing specific cultural problems within a society. Divorce them from their culture, you lose a lot of the actual point of those stories. Sure, you can apply a Mulan-ish tale to a western setting, but given the lack of translation between Confucian values and Catholicism, it's not the same story of conflicts as Joan of Arc beyond both having strong female heroines in a time where there weren't many or any of those. The context and threats to Mulan can't be replicated beyond the society that created it, nor those that faced Joan of Arc. You can take the "bandits attack a evil authority" take and apply it anywhere, but Robin Hood is more about the breakdown of English cultural law and the impact of the crusades on the British Isles than just about robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. In some stories context does matter!
Oh, I definitely agree. The context of the story is important. We've just had five pages arguing about the cultural context of GitS, after all. What I was trying to get at with my previous post is that story context isn't sufficient when trying to figure if something is appropriation. Who gets to tell a story, which story becomes the official version, these are issues of power dynamics. So it's important to consider the history of the cultures involved when considering adaptations.
I would personally argue that the cultural context is more important than the story context for these things. Story context is a tool you can play with; Hamilton casts all the founding fathers as people of colour because it emphasizes the role of immigrants in creating the nation, and because it reframes the story of "the powerless seizing their rights" in an explicitly racial context. It doesn't accurately replicate the societal context of the Revolutionary Era and it doesn't try to. It's using that story to do something fundamentally different.
Whereas, realistically, there's not anything a single movie or play can do to change the cultural context it exists in. Hamilton passes the power dynamics test, but an all-white adaptation of The Color Purple doesn't. No matter how hard that hypothetical adaptation tries to change the context of the story, it's always going to exist in a culture with hundreds of years of history of white people appropriating and exploiting black work. Story context matters, but cultural context matters too.
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Really? Really?! You can't see how a movie that starts with a nuclear weapon on Japan, kicking off WWIII? Are you joking? Like, for real?
The video also doesn't create an argument why GitS is Japanese, focusing on the 3 min aspect-to-aspect interlude.
A particular filming style does not mean the setting is tied to the same cultural backdrop. Even if it were, evoking the imagery of Hong Kong, a city that most Japanese are as familiar with as New York, does not make the setting inherently Japanese. Besides, aspect-to-aspect style is not ubiquitous to Japan - Sergio Leone made copious use of the technique in The Man With No Name trilogy (most notably, A Fistful of Dollars is an adaptation of Yojimbo without necessitating the feudal Japanese setting).
The irony being that Power Rangers is an excellent example of Hollywood ejecting the Japanese setting of Super Sentai and creating a massive western cultural icon in the process.
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you guys are aware that asian-americans exist, right? that there are audiences of asian people in the west and not only in asia?
How do you think my argument that diversity of casting and the Japaneseness - the cultural lense et al to which Local H Jay refers - are separate concerns is affected by this fact? Or specifically, how do you think I am ignoring it?
I think we have radically miscommunicated here. I don't know what your question is, but certainly I don't deny that anything is set in Japan or that the setting can and does affect stories uniquely.
What I am saying is that anything made by Hollywood, with Western conventions and in English is already going to be entirely removed from the cultural lense to which you refer, whether the movie stars Asian Americans or not. If your prime concern is maintaining Japaneseness (or, for that matter any particular cultural lense) then it is an argument for a particular kind of cultural isolationism and not an argument for a diversity of racial representation within a Hollywood blockbuster.
For the record, your posts about how the story is told don't convince me that the salient points are inseparable from their Japaneseness, the primary concern and certainly the most interesting part is the question of personal identity is universal, the question of government authority and illegal operations against its own citizens seems particularly apropos in light of the currentbsmerucan political climate.
On Broadway's Matilda, three of Matilda's eight classmates were Asian. That's particularly impressive because you're dealing with child actors. Why?
Because when you're dealing with adult actors, it's a buyers market. There's no real shortage of talented actors of any race, so you can really just pick and choose the actors who fit your ideal (And if your ideal is a white guy, then that's who you end up casting).
But on a show like Matilda, you need the triple threat, at a very young age range, with a very demanding schedule. Oh, and it's live theater -- so you don't get to make mistakes. In this case, the casting agents really do have to go with the best raw talent, generally regardless of their preconceptions. In some cases, they brought in actors from the British cast into the American cast because of the shortage. And it turns out that a large proportion of the talent was made up of Asian actors.
So if Asian actors can provide this level of talent at child hood, what's stopping them from providing this level of talent in adult hood? And I think it really just boils down to cultural bias. Directors assume that Asian actors are less capable for roles, which discourages Asian actors from pursuing the career seriously.
Besides, Asia is perfectly capable of making terrible monkey king movies of their own.
People make movies about foreign events all the time. That's the issue, they never quite get it right. The Last Samurai tries to make a good effort to cast actual Japanese actors in the film, and have them speak Japanese. Of course, the film loses credibility for suggesting the last samurai living was a white man, when that isn't remotely true or a good plot device. Even when they treat the settings of the movie with respect, they can miss the point. So, I am not saying all adaptations with white actors are inherently bad, nor am I saying I want all these adaptations with all Japanese casts and speaking in Japanese.
But putting in the bare minimum of effort, to actually cast people who would actively benefit from being cast as a strong lead in movie would be a progressive move. Cast someone other than an already rich, successful, white actor. Or in the case of Goku, a relatively small name actor whose part as Goku hurt the film more than it helped.
Even if you don't see how GitS, or Akira, are Japanese works of art, you gotta have some understanding of the themes present and why they have such a huge influence in the Cyberpunk genre... Living in a post-war nation, technology-over-military based society, consciousness inside of computers, what it means to have an identity, these themes all dovetail and have risen from Eastern attitudes. It's so in your face and prevalent throughout the film. That's why it's silly when they change small details, like the rumor that the American Akira would take place in New York City. That alone speaks to the ignorance of the property they are handling, and by fucking with it, changing the tone in irredeemable ways.
You can do a good adaptation, either way. But Hollywood chooses to make them the harder way, by casting predominantly white people, and missing the context that makes the art enjoyable to so many.
It's like, the greatest whitewash in history is of Jesus himself, but nobody batted an eye at the extremely white Jesus in Passion of the Christ. You think reading The Bible and watching that movie are the same experience if you don't have insight to what the world was like back then? Context changes everything.
Well, I would hope we wouldn't be having this argument at all, because East Asian-Americans are not concerned about the authenticity of the adaptation when stripped of its original Japanese context. In fact, I'd wager most of the concerned individuals haven't even seen Ghost in the Shell. This discussion of the authorial intent of a specific work and its viewing through different cultural prisms itself feels like a whitewashing of a discussion on whitewashing. It's a highfalutin' argument over how one really understands art and how an artist's intent and an audience's experiences come together to generate a perception of said art. While this is of primary import to those who are seeking to extract value out of the art of other cultures, but these are - and perhaps I should not speak on behalf of so many, but... - not the concerns of those who are whitewashed.
This is not why people are cast in blockbuster movies, or at least, not often. Is it reasonable to ask studios to hang 300 million quid on an unknown for the sake of progressiveness when they can as near as guarantee a return on their investment by casting ScarJo? Hollywood likes casting people who are already famous and successful because they've proved that people like to go and see them in movies.
Sometimes you can have a relative unknown in a huge movie, and maybe this was an opportunity for that, but I don't think Ghost in the Shell is a big enough property to carry hype on its own outside of a small audience. You can sell Star Wars on the name alone and cast who you like (the new Star Wars trio are brilliant), but with Ghost in the Shell I can see backers getting antsy for a big name to help push the movie.
Is the new GitS movie actually going to be set in Japan? The cast list has Japanese character names, but doesn't mention the setting that I can see.
With Akira I can absolutely see how it ties into specifically Japanese history. It's even more pronounced in the manga, but picking up the story and dropping it in, say, New York, would definitely dislocate elements of the story. I don't really see it in the same way with GitS.
AI intelligence and 'what it means to have an identity' are hardly peculiar to Japanese art and fiction, neither is living in a post-war society. The latter doesn't, from what I remember, play much of a part in GitS, though it's definitely a theme in Akira.
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But on the topic of whitewashing it becomes touchy to lots of people because some people affected by it don't see it as inherently bad. When you have Max Landis defending the movie industry saying and admitting the whole "Scarjo is best choice because otherwise movie would never be made" and then suddenly we turn around in another 5 years and wonder why we have no Asian leads still. If you never give them a chance, they never become AAA movie stars like Scarjo. And even when presented with a chance to cast an unknown for say, Goku, it's a unknown white actor because of reasons. Reasons = money, bit if they want a successful movie, better sticking to the source material makes for better movie. Like the Marvel Cinematic Universe that fans love, because it respects the source material and people flock to them. Again, I posted earlier about a Japanese actress recently nominated for an Academy Award and that was in Pacific Rim that also audition for the role. And she was snubbed so some guy could waste a day CGI an Asian Scarjo before realizing what an appalling idea that is.
I don't think their success can be attributed to "respecting the source material", as most people watching the movies aren't familiar with the source material. The movies do, and it's great and it helps the movies because the source material is strong, but "respecting the source material" isn't necessarily a box office plus. Falcon's origin in Winter Soldier, for instance, is totally different, which is a good thing because Falcon's comics origin is terrible.
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Yeah. I think the discussion so far has been focusing too much on one particular casting choice. I don't think the casting of ScarJo in GitS is particularly egregious, but rather a symptom of a bigger problem, which is the general lack of Asian representation in movies. There aren't really any Asian actresses with the kind of name recognition and box office pull that they could safely cast as the lead of a new, very expensive sci-fi movie/franchise. Maybe they could have gone with Lucy Liu if they had made this movie ten years ago, in the Kill Bill, Charlie's Angels era. So the problem is structural, and complicated, and arglebargling at the makers of GitS can only indirectly help fix it by increasing awareness of the problem.
As for GitS being uniquely Japanese, I agree with Apothe0sis that that ship sailed the moment Hollywood decided to pick up this title. They will replace the original Japanese cultural trauma with something closer to Western culture. Let's hope they do it well.
is that such a sure thing, though? just look at how Gods of Egypt fared.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/23/opinion/why-wont-hollywood-cast-asian-actors.html
(disclaimer: i've got no beef with the power rangers movie)
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/18/scarlett-johansson-ghost-in-the-shell-max-landis
I'm certainly not arguing for casting choices like those in Gods of Egypt. That was ridiculous. I'm not sure that the terrible performance of the movie was just down to the casting, however, as that movie looked like it sucked on every level.
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EoT caught more flak for not using the manga's title, but it was the right choice... Would you suggest that For a Fistful of Dollars should've been titled Yojimbo instead?
I do think that one can lift a story from a cultural work and adapt it to another culture, but you gotta put in the effort. You gotta replace that context with something the audience can identify with. You just lift something like GitS and make it about Americans, it's probably either going to be pointless spectacle or a confusing mess (or both).
Maybe we Americans should stick to Ex Machina sequels for the time being, until we sort out our issues with misogyny, ego, and being overshadowed by our own creations.
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I don't think they have said, yet, but they have cast SOME Japanese actors.
I've never completely discounted ScarJo as the Major, or rather the Major's shell, because of just how rich the GitS universe's lore is; I just have very little faith in Hollywood to not fuck it up with focus groups, executive meddling, and an almost unreal ability to understand trends. They see that Lucy did very well with ScarJo as a magical science girl, so they figure that she'll do super well with as a magical science girl from a highly-regarded-but-foreign franchise... Ignoring WHY the franchise is so well-regarded.
To whom should the film-makers pay respect? The Japanese, who created Ghost in the Shell, or the Japanese-Americans, who may watch this version of it?
If Africans were to put on the plays of Shakespeare, should they seek out Venetian actors and actresses for The Merchant? If Bollywood recreated The Great Escape, how should they cast it?
The latter. I mean, they shouldn't outright disrespect the original creators, but the US has a sizable Japanese-American population that is under-represented. Chances to cast one should be seized, nor whitewashed.
Those countries generally don't have significant populations of those minorities, and would almost certainly adapt them to their own culture. Kinda disingenuous, because bollywood remakes western stuff all the time, and almost always spins it with local flavor (also singing & dancing).
At any rate, as a couple of people have said, we don't even know how they are going to play this. It could end up having almost zero to do with the source material a la Doom.
I mean, Hollywood race-bends all the time without people getting up in arms about it. Oscar Isaac for example, of Cuban-Guatemalan ethnicity, has played everything from Hispanic to Polish to Welsh to Egyptian to the goddamn king of England. Rashida Jones, who is Black, almost always plays characters of implied caucasian ethnicity because of her light skin tone and small features; the role that was her big break, Karen Filippelli on The Office, cast her as Italian.
The difference here is at least two-fold; for one, actors from ethnic minorities have a huge disadvantage in Hollywood getting leading parts, so someone like Rashida Jones playing a caucasian role doesn't have the same scale of opportunity loss as, say, Cameron Diaz playing the same role. Pretty white girls are gonna find work. Second, Jones, et al, can convincingly play certain caucasian ethnicities without asking the audience to suspend their disbelief--the same cannot be said if Scarlett Johansson or Emma Stone is playing an Asian character--so it seems far less like pandering to market demands when that happens.
Some stories, such as those specifically examining race relationships or intercultural relationships, become absolutely horrible when liberties are taken with the ethnicity of the characters. The King and I is one of those classic examples where this is a very real problem. The entire point of the story is the cultural shock between the Siamese king and the Victorian colonialist. Making either into a different race, and especially casting both from the same race, cheapens the story entirely. Another example of note are things like Wuthering Heights where while Heathcliff is depicted as ambiguously foreign, he is definitely not western european and casting him as such is a problem.
Anime characters fit in a middle ground here. Is the fact that Goku is a white guy the reason the Dragonball movie was bad? No. It was a bad movie. His casting was terrible anyway, but there is a perfectly acceptable version of that movie that could have told that story with Goku and the other sayains as the only white guys (Hell, look at Nappa. He's practically straight from a US trucker rally). There is room for interpretation. Ghost in the Shell is probably a good example of where casting the lead as a white woman IS a major problem, since GitS is mostly examining the implications of the evolution of technology specifically in a Japanese context. You can't easily take that story and move it elsewhere in the world and keep the same messaging, morals, or conflicts. So much of it is tied to where it comes from that you would have a very different story and context if it were taking place in the US (look at Person of Interest, I, Robot, and Minority Report for versions of the sameish story that could only be from an American/western perspective).
That said, just because many stories can be fluid in how you tell them doesn't mean there isn't a whitewashing problem that is absolutely rampant. There is, and it is 100% a hollywood engine problem. The same problem that keeps any minorities from the Academy Awards or from main casting roles without it being a "targeted demographic" movie, all of which are terrible and need to end. America has a massive number of highly impressive and capable actors and actresses from nearly everywhere in the world, availability is not the problem here.
Because this sort of thing keeps getting brought up, it's worth pointing out again that these are two entirely different issues.
An all-African adaptation of Shakespeare isn't a problem because there's not hundreds of years of history of African's subjugating the English and attempting to simultaneously destroy and appropriate their culture. A Bollywood adaptation of The Great Escape is fine because India never conquered Europe and spent centuries extracting resources for its own benefit.
People in this thread keep talking about whitewashing as this abstract artistic choice, as if it wasn't tied to a long history of white cultural imperialism. There's a context here, a history of white people taking what they want from minorities while also keeping those minorities out of cultural industries. Of stealing songs and stories and making them white, without giving anything back to the people who actually made those songs and stories.
This doesn't mean that it's always clear what counts as appropriation; people in this thread have already raised lots of examples (like A Fistful of Dollars, or The Hidden Fortress/Star Wars) where the adaptation is so substantial that the line gets kind of blurry. But in a case where a white actress is cast in an Asian role? Where Hollywood has essentially said "you people aren't fit to portray yourselves in your own stories"? Then yeah, that's pretty clearly wrong.
For example, maybe Scarlett Johansson would make an excellent Shell Ghost Lady or whatever (I don't know anything about that property, so bear with me), but it doesn't absolve or even really address the issue of her appropriateness in the role in today's climate of harmful racial exclusivity.
I don't really see how GitS examines the evolution of technology specifically in a Japanese context. Themes of identity, artificial intelligence, cybernetic replacement of a body, memories, etc. All these things have been looked at by artists in other countries and are universal themes.
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Appropriation has less to do with some these problems than the narrative of their stories, though. Shakespeare is telling stories that are pretty universal across cultures. The Great Escape would actually be pretty problematic depending on how it was depicted, the same way that portraying British people as Germans is problematic (but convenient) in US war films.
Casting an all-white version of Mulan is clearly problematic on a ton of levels, but perhaps casting an all-Chinese version of Robin Hood could be considered less problematic due to history, though in all likelihood the same problems would be apparent (with cultural interpretation tropes outweighing cultural accuracy). Historical context can't be ignored, but colonialization isn't applicable to a lot of tales we consider "western" because they are just western depictions of universal stories that exist in every culture. Shakespeare didn't write new stories, he just made the best versions of those in English within his time and got them widely read.
Nothing about Hamlet is dependent on its Danish location; it's a tale about severe family dysfunction.
Exactly, these are universal tales. You can find them anywhere in any culture, just with different names. Especially Hamlet which adds the step-parent and heir problems which are found in every society with some kind of feudalism or monarchy.
While something like Mulan or Robin Hood are about addressing specific cultural problems within a society. Divorce them from their culture, you lose a lot of the actual point of those stories. Sure, you can apply a Mulan-ish tale to a western setting, but given the lack of translation between Confucian values and Catholicism, it's not the same story of conflicts as Joan of Arc beyond both having strong female heroines in a time where there weren't many or any of those. The context and threats to Mulan can't be replicated beyond the society that created it, nor those that faced Joan of Arc. You can take the "bandits attack a evil authority" take and apply it anywhere, but Robin Hood is more about the breakdown of English cultural law and the impact of the crusades on the British Isles than just about robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. In some stories context does matter!
The actual substance of the original GitS movie and the later SAC series (season 1, I don't remember if I saw season2) is very firmly rooted in Japanese culture and history.
I believe the best example to throw out here is Seven Samurai vs The Magnificent Seven.
On the surface, they are both movies about small villages under attack by bandits, and the villagers need to enlist the aid of professional fighters to save themselves. There are similar character personalities, and the story plays out most of the same beats in the core narrative. Dig below the surface, though, and the differences begin to arise. At it's heart, Seven Samurai is a movie about the rigidity of social roles in 1500s Japan, about the inner conflict of being who and how society deems one should be, and how adherence to those social norms is what separates the civilized killers, the Samurai, from the uncivilized killers, the bandits. (I am sooooo oversimplifying here. I know.) On the flip, though, Magnificent Seven is about... badass outlaw cowboys being heroes, self-made men walking the path they choose and choosing to be heroes by not behaving as society dictates they should.
And they're both pretty good movies!
The point is, if Hollywood wants to make a movie about identity, AI, and cybernetics, by all means. Make that movie. But GitS already exists, so if you're not going to bring the heart over with it, don't call it GitS. Make it your own.
Which is a tangent to the whitewashing argument, but it's pretty tangled up with it. If you define GitS as just a collection of ideas, then it's easy to argue that you can remix those ideas and cast who you wish without consequence, but I propose we do not define it as such. It's a very specific story with very specific emotional and cultural themes beyond the surface-level sci-fi explorations. If you want to remake that story, then you need to keep the core of it true, which means you need the setting and the people and the culture it was born from. If you want to adapt and remix elements of that story, fine, but don't call it GitS, because it's not.
So? Just using "there aren't many of those guys so it doesn't matter" is goofy. Acting like you have to actively be the race in question to find ignoring cultural context a bit offensive is a silly idea.
Because specifically in Asian territories in the shadow of China, Japan and Korea were under subjugation from outside countries. In Korea, Hong Kong endured 100 years under British rule to protect them from China. Japan had two nuclear bombs dropped on it, had it's existing government replaced with a Westernized one, but couldn't focus on military. So, both countries entered a technological boom as the time when GitS was conceived and released (1989/1995 specifically) born of not a desire to reform, but being forced to. Both countries have indentity issues of being the way they are today because of being molded and modeled after Western values for some time. The same identity issues that arise from this period of an almost forced technological renaissance, helped invent the cyberpunk genre. There's a reason GitS and Akira are held up as embodying some of the most strongly recognized themes and ideas pushed forth from cyberpunk.
Listen to director of SAC season 1&2, Kenji Kamiyama:
"You might remember the Glico-Morinaga Case (*) and political corruption scandals of the 1980s. I wanted to get to the bottom of them.
As a vulnerable kid back then, I couldn't relate to the fact that politicians committed crime. It had been two or three decades, and I felt a strong desire to retrace these incidents, and solve them (in my stories, at least). And I guess I did realize my dream.
For the second series, when I discussed the theme with Oshii-san, we decided that we couldn't avoid the issue of "war". In other words, we simply couldn't ignore the way society had evolved since the events of 9-11. That was the approach we decided to take, and I tried to illustrate a 21st century (near-future) war. But to tell you the truth, I couldn't avoid feeding back into modern reality.
I had a wish, at least in the anime, to end the war and I kept on asking my staff to find a way to do that. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the solution. This was the hardest part.
When I was working on one episode about a refugee ghetto, incidents occurred one after another, such as the slaying of a Japanese traveler in Iraq and a Chinese submarine appearing near Okinawa.
I was totally carried away. The series shows how I committed myself to these issues, and you can see what may appear like remnants of a war. I put a lot into it. The process wasn't easy, but I can still feel the enthusiasm that I had back then. So the second series turned out to be one of my favorites."
That case is definitely an influence on The Laughing Man, a character being used in the movie:
"(*) The Glico-Morinaga Case - On March 18, 1984, two masked men with a cap on carrying a gun and a rifle stormed into the house of Katsuhisa Ezaki, president of the giant food maker Glico Corporation. The two men held Ezaki for ransom of 1 billion yen. Ezaki escaped three days later, but this was only the beginning. In May, blackmailing started with letters sent to the newspapers telling that they had laced some Glico products in the Nagoya-Okayama region with potassium cyanide. The letter was signed by "The Monster With 21 Faces", after the villain in Edogawa Ranpo's popular detective novels. Glico products disappeared from the stores, with a loss of more than 5 billion yen. In June, Japanese newspapers received a new letter from the group: "We forgive Glico." But then The Monster With 21 Faces shifted the target from Glico to other food companies, Marudai Ham, Morinaga and House. However, after one last message, dated February 27, 1985, nobody heard from The Monster With 21 Faces ever again. The identikit of the "fox-eyed man" as the police called the prime suspect of the Glico-Morinaga Case, was on all papers and TV channels, becoming one of Japanese crime history icons. In March 1994, the statute of limitation ran out for the abduction of Ezaki, leaving the case unsolved and without explanation. The Glico-Morinaga Case, or Case 114 as it is officially designated, has been the highest on the Japanese Police priority list for 10 years."
like, I get that you want Scarlett Johannsen in your movie, but did you really need the sweet, sweet star power that is Pilou Asbaek to play another asian role (Batou, specifically)? Is that going to help?
Michael Pitt I at least recognize, but I don't think he exactly puts butts in seats either
and he definitely doesn't look like a Hideo Kuze
like at some point it's pretty hard to see any kind of rationale except racism
Houn, I honestly appreciate the post but an argument made using a different movie entirely isn't very compelling. Are the firmly Japanese roots of GitS that are inextricably linked to the story supposed to be so obvious that my not seeing them is unbelievable? I'm not being sarcastic, but everything people have said is specifically Japanese in Ghost in the Shell doesn't seem specifically Japanese, and the setting of a fictional future Japanese city has never struck me as particularly vital to the story in either the manga or the first movie. I haven't seen SAC, so I dunno about that.
Compare it to Akira, where the Japanese setting is very much a part of the story and Japanese history obviously front and centre.
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They take themes from JD Salinger, such as from the short story "The Lauging Man" and also Catcher in the Rye. They also borrow heavily the format of The Lauging Man, in that it is a story within a story. That's why the villain in SAC is named after this story, and they are using The Laughing Man as the antagonist in the GitS movie.
"Every day, after the troop has completed its activities, The Chief gathers the boys for the next episode in an ongoing story about the eponymous Laughing Man. In the format of a serial adventure novel, The Chief’s story describes the Laughing Man as the child of missionaries who was kidnapped by bandits in China, who deformed his face by compressing it in a vise; he was obliged to wear a mask, but compensated by being profoundly athletic and possessed of a great Robin Hood-like charm and the ability to speak with animals.
The narrator summarizes the Chief’s ever more fantastic installments of the Laughing Man’s escapades, presenting him as a sort of comic book hero crossing “the Chinese-Paris border” to commit acts of heroic larceny and tweaking his nose at his archenemy “Marcel Dufarge, the internationally famous detective and witty consumptive”.
Eventually, The Chief takes up with a young woman, Mary Hudson. As the Chief’s relationship with Mary waxes and wanes, so too do the fortunes of The Laughing Man. One day, the Chief presents an instalment where the Laughing Man is taken prisoner by his arch-rival, bound to a tree, and in mortal danger; then he ends the episode on a cliffhanger. Immediately afterward, the Chief brings his troop to a baseball diamond, where Mary Hudson arrives. The Chief and Mary have a conversation out of earshot from the boys, and then both return, together yet distraught.
In the final installment of the story, the Chief kills off the Laughing Man, much to the Comanches’ dismay."
They very deliberately put those themes and frame them within the view of Asia's tech boom. An again, they take all these outside view points of dualism and what it means to be conscious, and puts these themes through that same lense:
"The concept of the ghost was borrowed by Masamune Shirow from an essay on structuralism, The Ghost in the Machine, by Arthur Koestler. The title itself was originally used by an English philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, to mock the paradox of conventional Cartesian dualism and dualism in general. Koestler, like Ryle, denies Cartesian dualism and locates the origin of human mind in the physical condition of the brain. He argues that the human brain has grown and built upon earlier, more primitive brain structures, the "ghost in the machine", which at times overpower higher logical functions, and are responsible for hate, anger and other such destructive impulses. Shirow denies dualism similarly in his work, but defines the "ghost" more broadly, not only as a physical trait, but as a phase or phenomenon that appears in a system at a certain level of complexity. The brain itself is only part of the whole neural network; if, for example, an organ is removed from a body, the autonomic nerve of the organ and consequently its "ghost" will vanish unless the stimulus of the existence of the organ is perfectly re-produced by a mechanical substitution. This can be compared, by analogy, to a person born with innate deafness being unable to understand the concept of "hearing" unless taught."
The ideas and themes proposed aren't inherently Japanese. But knowing the social and socetial reasons for the Japanese to get interested in these topics, and then make reflective art about the nature of the soul and indentity, are inherent to understanding how the story comes together at all.
Oh, I definitely agree. The context of the story is important. We've just had five pages arguing about the cultural context of GitS, after all. What I was trying to get at with my previous post is that story context isn't sufficient when trying to figure if something is appropriation. Who gets to tell a story, which story becomes the official version, these are issues of power dynamics. So it's important to consider the history of the cultures involved when considering adaptations.
I would personally argue that the cultural context is more important than the story context for these things. Story context is a tool you can play with; Hamilton casts all the founding fathers as people of colour because it emphasizes the role of immigrants in creating the nation, and because it reframes the story of "the powerless seizing their rights" in an explicitly racial context. It doesn't accurately replicate the societal context of the Revolutionary Era and it doesn't try to. It's using that story to do something fundamentally different.
Whereas, realistically, there's not anything a single movie or play can do to change the cultural context it exists in. Hamilton passes the power dynamics test, but an all-white adaptation of The Color Purple doesn't. No matter how hard that hypothetical adaptation tries to change the context of the story, it's always going to exist in a culture with hundreds of years of history of white people appropriating and exploiting black work. Story context matters, but cultural context matters too.