Yeah Bouma was definitely army of some sort, and he talks about having been in explosives during that time when they're looking at the bomb in SAC 2nd Gig. He phrases it as something like "yeah well I know this stuff from when I'd be the guy setting them up, not defusing them"
That as a very good game and I won't have you disparage it. The only improvement it could've had was being ported over to the original Xbox to help with the framerate and aliasing issues.
That game was amazing. I think it's been 10 years since I played it, but I'm going to dig it out and do it again. THAT was season 3 of SAC (right down to Batou shouting 'Motokoooooooooooooooo!' at the climax.
It looks like word of mouth doesn't support GitS and it will be considered a domestic flop. I wonder how much of that is due to the controversy surrounding it, and how much is a result of a simplified plot. As much as I'd like to think American audiences are responsive to nuanced plots, you've got box office successes like the Magnificent Seven (2016) which are also adaptations that spurn their source material even more and even less to say on their own. Is Sci-fi too hard a sell compared to a western, or is there a negative bias on Anime in general? I started listening to Emily Yoshida's podcast based on the recommendation of the thread, and it's interesting to say the least. I understand this board has had bad experiences in the past regarding the topic, but it's pretty much the only general interest board I frequent. Is this bias more widespread? My friends are predominately military, and they are generally pretty conservative on all topics, and my other friends from college I met through a Japanese culture club, so I don't really have a good grasp on the norm between these two extremes.
I think the American public has a complicated relationship with Japanese animation and graphic novels. In my experience, people who like them are a minority. It's not cool to like Japan or its products. Modern culture rejects globalization, which is why America-washed features perform well despite being similar to foreign films.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
It currently looks like GitS 2K17 is going to be worldwide flop to the tune of a 60-100 million dollar loss, if estimations of production and marketing costs are at all accurate.
It looks like word of mouth doesn't support GitS and it will be considered a domestic flop. I wonder how much of that is due to the controversy surrounding it, and how much is a result of a simplified plot. As much as I'd like to think American audiences are responsive to nuanced plots, you've got box office successes like the Magnificent Seven (2016) which are also adaptations that spurn their source material even more and even less to say on their own. Is Sci-fi too hard a sell compared to a western, or is there a negative bias on Anime in general? I started listening to Emily Yoshida's podcast based on the recommendation of the thread, and it's interesting to say the least. I understand this board has had bad experiences in the past regarding the topic, but it's pretty much the only general interest board I frequent. Is this bias more widespread? My friends are predominately military, and they are generally pretty conservative on all topics, and my other friends from college I met through a Japanese culture club, so I don't really have a good grasp on the norm between these two extremes.
The thing is, the lot is simplified beyond what is typically seen in movies like this (action/thriller/sci-fi). If the writing and plot were on the level of the average Mission: Impossible movie and the quality was higher they should have had superior armor against the whitewashing/cultural appropriation argument, that said there was absolutely no way to break free from that with GiTS. That's what they got when they paid for this IP. The twist only made this twice as harmful, I don't know what they were thinking. They really should have someone Asian and/or Japanese that can say no to that bullshit, because it's painfully obvious tone deafness on their part. I don't care what their reason was for putting it in the movie.
The problem wasn't the nuance, on the contrary the movie literally had none. M7 also comes with a separate history, distinct from GiTS and 7 Samurai though I doubt the original would have been made today under these conditions. That movie had the advantage of using new characters, a new title and putting the setting entirely in America.
I wouldn't put this on anime. This isn't about genre/media it's that these adaptions don't get the attention they deserve behind the scene (video game movie adaptions get similar treatment), the people doing them really don't give a shit about the material, plus this is coupled with the added baggage of adapting IP's in a broader context with their ties to Japan, this also varies depending on the IP itself. Cowboy Bebop would't be as burdened by this as Akira, for instance.
They should not have spent so much money right out of the gate. Save that for the sequels.
The bias against the movie for whitewashing/cultural appropriation is very wide spread. So much so the execs are blaming that for the movie bombing.
“We had hopes for better results domestically. I think the conversation regarding casting impacted the reviews,” said Davies, Paramount’s domestic distribution chief. “You’ve got a movie that is very important to the fanboys since it’s based on a Japanese anime movie. So you’re always trying to thread that needle between honoring the source material and make a movie for a mass audience. That’s challenging, but clearly the reviews didn’t help.”
And will someone at Paramount please make sure this idiot isn't their face to the media.
If this leads to less whitewashing in the future, yay.
But I'll put money on this ending up being blamed on having a female lead. Obviously audiences aren't ready for that.
Then if Wonder Woman doesn't pull the Marthaverse out of its tailspin...
If this leads to less whitewashing in the future, yay.
But I'll put money on this ending up being blamed on having a female lead. Obviously audiences aren't ready for that.
Then if Wonder Woman doesn't pull the Marthaverse out of its tailspin...
This bad better not put the Black Widow movie back on the shelf.
I have my doubts because of its international setting. Nobody wants to see a movie set in russia
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I see that point of view, but I don't think you can be so dismissive of general public criticism, even when that criticism is primarily from a vocal minority online. For better or worse Ghostbusters (2016) was impacted by it. My personal experience is people who had never heard of the term "whitewashing" were talking about it en mass because of this film. But I agree that it's not solely to blame.
The Matrix owes a lot to the source material too, and it had a phenomenal reaction. Was that because it was that much more of an engaging movie, or because it was far enough removed from the source bias? I'm with you that I'd like to believe it's the former, but seeing success followed by success of truly awful movies has embittered me to that argument.
It looks like word of mouth doesn't support GitS and it will be considered a domestic flop. I wonder how much of that is due to the controversy surrounding it, and how much is a result of a simplified plot. As much as I'd like to think American audiences are responsive to nuanced plots, you've got box office successes like the Magnificent Seven (2016) which are also adaptations that spurn their source material even more and even less to say on their own. Is Sci-fi too hard a sell compared to a western, or is there a negative bias on Anime in general? I started listening to Emily Yoshida's podcast based on the recommendation of the thread, and it's interesting to say the least. I understand this board has had bad experiences in the past regarding the topic, but it's pretty much the only general interest board I frequent. Is this bias more widespread? My friends are predominately military, and they are generally pretty conservative on all topics, and my other friends from college I met through a Japanese culture club, so I don't really have a good grasp on the norm between these two extremes.
The thing is, the lot is simplified beyond what is typically seen in movies like this (action/thriller/sci-fi). If the writing and plot were on the level of the average Mission: Impossible movie and the quality was higher they should have had superior armor against the whitewashing/cultural appropriation argument, that said there was absolutely no way to break free from that with GiTS. That's what they got when they paid for this IP. The twist only made this twice as harmful, I don't know what they were thinking. They really should have someone Asian and/or Japanese that can say no to that bullshit, because it's painfully obvious tone deafness on their part. I don't care what their reason was for putting it in the movie.
The problem wasn't the nuance, on the contrary the movie literally had none. M7 also comes with a separate history, distinct from GiTS and 7 Samurai though I doubt the original would have been made today under these conditions. That movie had the advantage of using new characters, a new title and putting the setting entirely in America.
I wouldn't put this on anime. This isn't about genre/media it's that these adaptions don't get the attention they deserve behind the scene (video game movie adaptions get similar treatment), the people doing them really don't give a shit about the material, plus this is coupled with the added baggage of adapting IP's in a broader context with their ties to Japan, this also varies depending on the IP itself. Cowboy Bebop would't be as burdened by this as Akira, for instance.
They should not have spent so much money right out of the gate. Save that for the sequels.
The bias against the movie for whitewashing/cultural appropriation is very wide spread. So much so the execs are blaming that for the movie bombing.
“We had hopes for better results domestically. I think the conversation regarding casting impacted the reviews,” said Davies, Paramount’s domestic distribution chief. “You’ve got a movie that is very important to the fanboys since it’s based on a Japanese anime movie. So you’re always trying to thread that needle between honoring the source material and make a movie for a mass audience. That’s challenging, but clearly the reviews didn’t help.”
And will someone at Paramount please make sure this idiot isn't their face to the media.
The other point really revolves around the fact that the 95 animated film influenced and inspired a lot of modern sci-fi action films to the point of being aped and copied in a number of scenes/concepts to the point where they are almost cliche. 22 years later and what does GitS 17 offer thats new? Even if they shot scene for scene exactly the same film as the animated one you would run into the same problems with audiences.
It looks like word of mouth doesn't support GitS and it will be considered a domestic flop. I wonder how much of that is due to the controversy surrounding it, and how much is a result of a simplified plot. As much as I'd like to think American audiences are responsive to nuanced plots, you've got box office successes like the Magnificent Seven (2016) which are also adaptations that spurn their source material even more and even less to say on their own. Is Sci-fi too hard a sell compared to a western, or is there a negative bias on Anime in general? I started listening to Emily Yoshida's podcast based on the recommendation of the thread, and it's interesting to say the least. I understand this board has had bad experiences in the past regarding the topic, but it's pretty much the only general interest board I frequent. Is this bias more widespread? My friends are predominately military, and they are generally pretty conservative on all topics, and my other friends from college I met through a Japanese culture club, so I don't really have a good grasp on the norm between these two extremes.
The thing is, the lot is simplified beyond what is typically seen in movies like this (action/thriller/sci-fi). If the writing and plot were on the level of the average Mission: Impossible movie and the quality was higher they should have had superior armor against the whitewashing/cultural appropriation argument, that said there was absolutely no way to break free from that with GiTS. That's what they got when they paid for this IP. The twist only made this twice as harmful, I don't know what they were thinking. They really should have someone Asian and/or Japanese that can say no to that bullshit, because it's painfully obvious tone deafness on their part. I don't care what their reason was for putting it in the movie.
The problem wasn't the nuance, on the contrary the movie literally had none. M7 also comes with a separate history, distinct from GiTS and 7 Samurai though I doubt the original would have been made today under these conditions. That movie had the advantage of using new characters, a new title and putting the setting entirely in America.
I wouldn't put this on anime. This isn't about genre/media it's that these adaptions don't get the attention they deserve behind the scene (video game movie adaptions get similar treatment), the people doing them really don't give a shit about the material, plus this is coupled with the added baggage of adapting IP's in a broader context with their ties to Japan, this also varies depending on the IP itself. Cowboy Bebop would't be as burdened by this as Akira, for instance.
They should not have spent so much money right out of the gate. Save that for the sequels.
The bias against the movie for whitewashing/cultural appropriation is very wide spread. So much so the execs are blaming that for the movie bombing.
“We had hopes for better results domestically. I think the conversation regarding casting impacted the reviews,” said Davies, Paramount’s domestic distribution chief. “You’ve got a movie that is very important to the fanboys since it’s based on a Japanese anime movie. So you’re always trying to thread that needle between honoring the source material and make a movie for a mass audience. That’s challenging, but clearly the reviews didn’t help.”
And will someone at Paramount please make sure this idiot isn't their face to the media.
The other point really revolves around the fact that the 95 animated film influenced and inspired a lot of modern sci-fi action films to the point of being aped and copied in a number of scenes/concepts to the point where they are almost cliche. 22 years later and what does GitS 17 offer thats new? Even if they shot scene for scene exactly the same film as the animated one you would run into the same problems with audiences.
Drainage, Eli. I drink your milkshake. I drink it up.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I see that point of view, but I don't think you can be so dismissive of general public criticism, even when that criticism is primarily from a vocal minority online. For better or worse Ghostbusters (2016) was impacted by it. My personal experience is people who had never heard of the term "whitewashing" were talking about it en mass because of this film. But I agree that it's not solely to blame.
The Matrix owes a lot to the source material too, and it had a phenomenal reaction. Was that because it was that much more of an engaging movie, or because it was far enough removed from the source bias? I'm with you that I'd like to believe it's the former, but seeing success followed by success of truly awful movies has embittered me to that argument.
I think GiTS was a movie that really moved the needle a little bit further with Hollywood, the last time this got so much attention was The Last Airbender. For that it;s worth it's extremely difficult to judge how the public reacted to a movie, especially which parts they liked and disliked. Hollywood knows how difficult this is, but if they admit it in the press they'll look weak and not the masters of the universe they think they are. A lot of how things work there comes down to luck, and timing and they know it. However, this works for us (whether it's true or not) because it means they can't casually ignore it for five more minutes. Progress was made this day. It's going to take many, many GiTS failures before the truly is fixed.
The Matrix was very distance from GiTS, despite being heavily influenced by the IP. It had neither the cultural backlash embedded into the IP, the history and it was brand new. There was no whitewashing there since it was not adapting Ghost in a Shell. It was it's own thing.
Quality does have impacts, but like I said sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Nobody knows for sure, but people do notice if a film is excellent or not. The public can tell the Transformers from The Dark Knights. Movies and franchise have their own reasons for getting tickets, they're not all the same. I wouldn't say a rise in quality for GiTS would have necessary hurt the movie, and I'm not saying they should made it into The Dark Knight, I'd settle for Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.
If this leads to less whitewashing in the future, yay.
But I'll put money on this ending up being blamed on having a female lead. Obviously audiences aren't ready for that.
Then if Wonder Woman doesn't pull the Marthaverse out of its tailspin...
This bad better not put the Black Widow movie back on the shelf.
They would have had to have been working on a Black Widow movie in the first place in order to shelve it.
If this leads to less whitewashing in the future, yay.
But I'll put money on this ending up being blamed on having a female lead. Obviously audiences aren't ready for that.
Then if Wonder Woman doesn't pull the Marthaverse out of its tailspin...
This bad better not put the Black Widow movie back on the shelf.
They would have had to have been working on a Black Widow movie in the first place in order to shelve it.
I thought there had been progress in making it a bigger priority going forward. That said, even that was merely words, rather than results.
I think the American public has a complicated relationship with Japanese animation and graphic novels. In my experience, people who like them are a minority. It's not cool to like Japan or its products. Modern culture rejects globalization, which is why America-washed features perform well despite being similar to foreign films.
Its uncool to be an otaku in nerd circles, but i think most anime is so far outside the mainstream that the mainstream doesn't even know or care what a weeaboo is. The anime that does get proper mainstream penetration, like Pokemon or DBZ, don't have any real stigma attached to them beyond being cartoons at all.
GitS was fairly obscure, so leaning on the show's cache was probably a bad idea because you're looking back into that nerd group which is where it was, but then leaning too much on starpower to try to salvage that lack of appeal caused more problems than it solved.
But at the end of the day you can only make so many analytical excuses about why a mediocre movie performed poorly.
I think the American public has a complicated relationship with Japanese animation and graphic novels. In my experience, people who like them are a minority. It's not cool to like Japan or its products. Modern culture rejects globalization, which is why America-washed features perform well despite being similar to foreign films.
Its uncool to be an otaku in nerd circles, but i think most anime is so far outside the mainstream that the mainstream doesn't even know or care what a weeaboo is. The anime that does get proper mainstream penetration, like Pokemon or DBZ, don't have any real stigma attached to them beyond being cartoons at all.
GitS was fairly obscure, so leaning on the show's cache was probably a bad idea because you're looking back into that nerd group which is where it was, but then leaning too much on starpower to try to salvage that lack of appeal caused more problems than it solved.
But at the end of the day you can only make so many analytical excuses about why a mediocre movie performed poorly.
Maybe, but it shouldn't be as dire or something that they can't improve upon after setting up the series with the first movie. This is an IP they should have spent a lot of time working on things long term and get rid of anything that they don't need or can live without with a lower budget. While GiTS cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk niche is weird, it isn't as weird as it used to be. Not with movies like Surrogates, Interstellar,Minority Report,Looper, Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy etc becoming a staple in films. The premise isn't entirely unfilmable or impossible to sell to the American market. If the latter was true the franchise would not have become the monster it is in the first place, if it can get this far it can get higher but that relies on Hollywood knowing what they're doing. They need a Kevin Fiege for something like this.
All movies also can start off with nothing or next to nothing and as long as they make a good impression they can expand their audience. That this one failed didn't mean the IP is incapable of doing that or that it is beyond Hollywood to do so. The bad news is that right now the people that control the property are incapable of doing this right. Any promising IP would get crippled by that baggage.
I think the American public has a complicated relationship with Japanese animation and graphic novels. In my experience, people who like them are a minority. It's not cool to like Japan or its products. Modern culture rejects globalization, which is why America-washed features perform well despite being similar to foreign films.
Its uncool to be an otaku in nerd circles, but i think most anime is so far outside the mainstream that the mainstream doesn't even know or care what a weeaboo is. The anime that does get proper mainstream penetration, like Pokemon or DBZ, don't have any real stigma attached to them beyond being cartoons at all.
GitS was fairly obscure, so leaning on the show's cache was probably a bad idea because you're looking back into that nerd group which is where it was, but then leaning too much on starpower to try to salvage that lack of appeal caused more problems than it solved.
But at the end of the day you can only make so many analytical excuses about why a mediocre movie performed poorly.
It's just from my personal experience. Generally people I talk to or overhear are quite proud of expressing distaste for foreign origin media, including anime. My environment tends to skew liberal and is composed of a variety of ethnicities trending toward a younger age group than me.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
As an Asian living in America (people are always shocked when they find out I'm not actually Asian-American), I've been aware of controversies with Hollywood whitewashing for over 10 years, so I've made it a point since then to never give money to films that get surrounded by these controversies (in contrast to one of my Asian-American friends who proudly talks about herself being very whitewashed culturally who thought the outrage against Hollywood whitewashing was some new phenomena). And obviously I love and support shows like Fresh off the Boat for what it can do for Asian-Americans.
And on the flip side, I also literally grew up with manga and anime. My parents engaged in it. My relatives engaged in it. And I find terms like weeaboo dumb and inherently culturally racist. And yes, I can see why some aspects of anime are kind of cringey. But yeah, I get annoyed by anti-anime stances like this forum. Most of my friends enjoy anime and go to cons (and a lot of them also did watch GitS and liked it). My work is more mixed in that only some people enjoy it, but they aren't anti it. But getting my housemate who's an Asian-American to watch anything anime related is like pulling teeth. She mentioned she watched 5 minutes of Spirited Away and gave up.
Edit: This forum software is dumb. Editing a post is not the same as posting as far as spam goes. First time I've hit this.
The forum doesn't have an anti anime stance, just an anti talking about anime stance. Mainly because several people repeatedly failed to do so in a suitable for work way. Though there's exceptions for at least a couple shows I think.
Regarding the movie, I don't think it failed because it was based on anime. Plenty of movies use unpopular original mediums to make successful movies. Comics in particular come to mind. I also don't think it was because of the whitewashing of the main character though that probably dissuaded some people. It primarily failed because it simply wasn't a very good movie.
As an Asian (and not an Asian-American at that), I've been aware of controversies with Hollywood whitewashing for over 10 years, so I've made it a point since then to never give money to films that get surrounded by these controversies. And obviously I love and support shows like Fresh off the Boat.
And on the flip side, I also literally grew up with manga and anime. My parents engaged in it. My relatives engaged in it. And I find terms like weeaboo dumb and inherently culturally racist. And yes, I can see why some aspects of anime are kind of cringey. But yeah, I get annoyed by anti-anime stances like this forum. Most of my friends enjoy anime and go to cons (and a lot of them also did watch GitS and liked it). My work is more mixed in that only some people enjoy it, but they aren't anti it. But getting my housemate who's an Asian-American to watch anything anime related is like pulling teeth. She mentioned she watched 5 minutes of Spirited Away and gave up.
It's not anime itself that was the problem, it was the discussion of anime that was the problem, which is why we have a "no anime thread" rule.
The forum doesn't have an anti anime stance, just an anti talking about anime stance. Mainly because several people repeatedly failed to do so in a suitable for work way. Though there's exceptions for at least a couple shows I think.
Regarding the movie, I don't think it failed because it was based on anime. Plenty of movies use unpopular original mediums to make successful movies. Comics in particular come to mind. I also don't think it was because of the whitewashing of the main character though that probably dissuaded some people. It primarily failed because it simply wasn't a very good movie.
But they totally Americanize them is the key. It's either an American story of a foreign culture or a foreign story set in an American culture, except for England; we really like them.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I personally have no idea how much of a presence anime and manga have in the US now. Books-a-Million still has a massive manga section, and every now and then I'll overhear a kid talking excitedly about Attack on Titan or something. I imagine most people watch anime online, which makes it hard to figure out what is being watched.
I think they could have used the GitS setting for purely american story, using original cast of any racial background.
Deciding to use pre existing characters, copying pre existing stories, and trying to milk nostalgia, they kinda painted themselves into a corner where there is no escaping whitewashing accusations.
If this leads to less whitewashing in the future, yay.
But I'll put money on this ending up being blamed on having a female lead. Obviously audiences aren't ready for that.
Then if Wonder Woman doesn't pull the Marthaverse out of its tailspin...
This bad better not put the Black Widow movie back on the shelf.
Sometimes there is harm in trying, if you're bad enough at it. Whether or not it offsets the possible gain is, of course, up for debate, but there are consequences for big fuck-ups, both among audiences and among producers and investors.
As an Asian living in America (people are always shocked when they find out I'm not actually Asian-American), I've been aware of controversies with Hollywood whitewashing for over 10 years, so I've made it a point since then to never give money to films that get surrounded by these controversies (in contrast to one of my Asian-American friends who proudly talks about herself being very whitewashed culturally who thought the outrage against Hollywood whitewashing was some new phenomena). And obviously I love and support shows like Fresh off the Boat for what it can do for Asian-Americans.
And on the flip side, I also literally grew up with manga and anime. My parents engaged in it. My relatives engaged in it. And I find terms like weeaboo dumb and inherently culturally racist. And yes, I can see why some aspects of anime are kind of cringey. But yeah, I get annoyed by anti-anime stances like this forum. Most of my friends enjoy anime and go to cons (and a lot of them also did watch GitS and liked it). My work is more mixed in that only some people enjoy it, but they aren't anti it. But getting my housemate who's an Asian-American to watch anything anime related is like pulling teeth. She mentioned she watched 5 minutes of Spirited Away and gave up.
(This is very difficult to describe, so bear with me.)
It's worth remember that, without exaggeration, in the United States, anime is generally considered a genre. Not a medium, which it is in real life, but a genre, which it sort of is in the limited scoped of anime in the US. To restate the obvious, the distinction is that "anime" should mean "the animated films, movies, television series and serialized series produced by Japan--not to be confused with the same from South Korea, Taiwan, etc." What it does mean, nine times out of ten in common conversation is, the rather specific profile of generally long-running, successful productions that tend to be aimed at a male audience in the teens and twenties. After all, the vast majority of successful American cartoons fall into roughly the same categorization as well. Historically that's what got on television (after the years of "child-only anime"), advertised for DVD distribution, advertised for streaming and so forth.
Part of this is what happens to any imported media. Take a guess what films from China, or even the whole of the Chinese-speaking world, overwhelmingly make it to the United States--it's not hard. Take a guess what Indian cinema. Anime ought to be like the ideal conception of French cinema--if I say, "I'm a fan of French cinema," at least in theory, that tells you "I like films made in France" not "I like dreary, dull-colored dramas set in apartment blocks where everyone smokes nonstop, only for interruptions for a man and a wife to scream at each other before the man leaves and the woman sits at her kitchen table, arms crossed over her flower-patterned shirt." Because there's a variety of French cinema and television. There's a variety of anime too, just as wide. But what French cinema comes to the United States is a frequently more exclusive and biased towards a particular narrative. And for anime, where unlike cinema Francophile, the fandom is much younger, it's even more biased. We don't get French workplace comedies aimed at women, we get French crime thrillers aimed at men. Remember, there was a time where literally 90% of the anime exposure in the United States was the Pokemon series, specifically the portions brought over and localized and dubbed in English. That time has gone, but in many cases we haven't really moved that far from it.
And considering the Japanese imports that Americans get--and get the most publicity--it's not too surprising. If we decided that we were only going to import lascivious, sexy comedies from France, it'd be the same problem. That would be the genre of French films.
At the same time, the variety of anime imported to the United States is among the most varied it's ever been (and far and away the easiest in terms of technical availability--even if we've passed the boom point of Best Buy having a pair of aisles exclusively for anime, and Borders going out of business.) If you were just an average person in an American audience, who watched anime, who followed several shows over several years, you could certainly say "What're you talking about? English-subtitled anime is more diverse than ever!" Which is true--it's just that, and there's no way to say this without a haughty air of superiority, you don't know better.
Living in Taiwan, not unlike Dracil perhaps I grew up with anime. And the differences in the industry in Taiwan, and the television network syndication system (which has always been friendly to imports, because there was a time where Taiwan hardly produced any original programming of its own, and everyone watched O.S. Star Trek instead), mean it's an entirely different beast. When I was a seven-year-old, I could watch (and read) Doraemon, a prototypical "modern Aesop's fable" semi-serialized format child's program--a variety of anime that didn't exist in the US until recently. I could watch Pokemon, video game juggernaut tie-in, like Americans could. Or I could watch shoujo anime, shows aimed at young girls the same age, running from everything from crime mysteries to fantasy to school dramas to slapstick comedies to modest romantic adventures--as oppose to Sailor Moon, the only show of that kind in the US for a decade or longer. When I grew older, I could watch romantic dramas aimed at single women, or crime thrillers for young adult audiences, or action adventures that didn't have mecha or magic in them, and multiple choices from each of those--whereas in the United States, you were lucky if you got one from each (and you frequently didn't). Of course, that also meant a lot of crap I could watch would never make it to the United States (except maybe out of a macabre interest), but those shows had a very short life in Taiwan too, victims of their mediocrity (or worse), so it wasn't a surprise they remained forgotten.
The move towards purely online distribution, rather than only marketing what you can put on TV to sell toys, has done a great deal to fix that problem. But at the same time, that does nothing to change what anime was twenty years ago in the US, and very little to change what it is now to a media consumer who doesn't actively go to Crunchyroll and go, "Wow, there's actually a pretty wide variety of stuff. As oppose to the very narrow genres that Adult Swim, god bless them, has been showing for the last decade between Robot Chicken reruns." This his how you get the likes of Giant Bomb/Giant Beastcast, a group of fairly like-minded individuals with common interests, where one flat-out states, "Yeah, I fucking hate anime. Get it away from me. I'm not putting up with that trash," and another raves about how much they love the Persona series of story-driven role playing adventures. Both of them are right, its the exposure (intentional and unintentional) that gives them that perspective.
Taiwan is a weird case: we honestly may consume the most anime--as a medium, not a genre--of any of Japan's neighbors, anywhere in the world, per capita. We (and South Korea) are active in its production processes, and unlike the South Koreans, our networks pretty much grab anything they can get their hands on, and never let it go. It's sort of how I imagine Canadians consuming more American television than any other non-American audience worldwide. We've had anime conventions longer than much of America had anime period. The situation in America, for anime, is not that unusual given its history--it's the country that could only show Space Battleship Yamato, itself older than Star Wars, as Star Blazers. Taiwan was part of Japan, American once conquered and occupied it. Naturally there are going to be greater obstacles to bringing over foreign media--and those obstacles build up right into the present, even when technology makes it so easy to overcome it.
That's my theory. Ever since I came to the United States, I'm always a little surprised how the huge craze of the year--your Nana's, your Space Battleship Yamato 2199, your Detective Conans--would be obscure footnotes or even nonexistent in the United States, where Bleach, Naruto and One Piece (admittedly popular shows in Japan too--the same can't be said about, for example, Gurren Lagaan) remained king forever. But reasoning makes perfect sense: of course foreign media will be treated as a narrow novelty when it has to compete with a huge, vibrant domestic industry. And I think that's a distinction worth making. Of course, now I've gone waaaaay off topic, so I should stop.
I might as well add I don't like Fresh off the Boat. I don't actively dislike it, but I don't like it. I mean, I was not-so-long-ago an immigrant myself. Not certain exactly why, I haven't seen that much of it either. I wonder if my own mixed racial background, rather than the "traditional" immigrant image (of having two immigrant parents from the same culture) is the reason for that.
Ok, how's this for a GitS movie plot:
Newly joined FBI officer with an experimental cyber brain and a prototype articifial body is tasked to look into the disappearance of a young lower class woman who has gone missing, leaving behind a disabled grieving mother whom she had been supporting by working part time jobs, not all of which completely legal.
From there the movie goes following both the investigation in the present, and the events leading to the victims disappearance in flashbacks side by side.
After an hour of intrigue, investigations and action sequences, the reveal, the two women are one and the same, a brain they thought nobody would miss wiped of memories and given new ones, in a body custom made for purposes of the corporation that created it.
From there, more action, with thought provoking questions about identity, race, corporate power and what it means to be a human in between, culminating in, somekind of weird ass reveal about plot to take over the world or something.
Halfway competent writing staff could really do something with that.
I think they could have used the GitS setting for purely american story, using original cast of any racial background.
At this point why not just make a damn Shadowrun series/movie? The setting has a lot of themes like the corporate wage slave culture, the treatment of the metahumans, the politics, the idea of technology literally wiping out your humanity the more of it you implant in yourself, and so on that speak more and more to our society as time goes on. Hell, Seattle is well on its way to becoming Shadowrun's Seattle. Literally the only reason to use GitS in an adaptation like that is purely for name recognition but general audiences don't know what the hell GitS is anyway and the fans will be pissy because it's a rethemed adaptation, so what are you really gaining from using the name?
I love GitS, but I can see why it flopped. The marketing was....not good. Certainly not good enough to push high initial ticket sales before word of mouth got around on what a trainwreck the movie itself is.
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Gabriel_Pitt(effective against Russian warships)Registered Userregular
Halfway competent writing staff could really do something with that.
At the core of it, I don't think the poor performance has anything to do with controversy over casting, problems with anime, foreign media, or anything like that. Those would probably just shift numbers around after the decimal point at best.
The problem is that it just isn't a very good movie.
I think they could have used the GitS setting for purely american story, using original cast of any racial background.
At this point why not just make a damn Shadowrun series/movie? The setting has a lot of themes like the corporate wage slave culture, the treatment of the metahumans, the politics, the idea of technology literally wiping out your humanity the more of it you implant in yourself, and so on that speak more and more to our society as time goes on. Hell, Seattle is well on its way to becoming Shadowrun's Seattle. Literally the only reason to use GitS in an adaptation like that is purely for name recognition but general audiences don't know what the hell GitS is anyway and the fans will be pissy because it's a rethemed adaptation, so what are you really gaining from using the name?
An interesting setting that does not necessarily require that much work for special effects outside action scenes?
Sure the movie might not have taken advantage of that, but GitS is fairly lowkey scifi when not using spidertanks and shit.
I think they could have used the GitS setting for purely american story, using original cast of any racial background.
At this point why not just make a damn Shadowrun series/movie? The setting has a lot of themes like the corporate wage slave culture, the treatment of the metahumans, the politics, the idea of technology literally wiping out your humanity the more of it you implant in yourself, and so on that speak more and more to our society as time goes on. Hell, Seattle is well on its way to becoming Shadowrun's Seattle. Literally the only reason to use GitS in an adaptation like that is purely for name recognition but general audiences don't know what the hell GitS is anyway and the fans will be pissy because it's a rethemed adaptation, so what are you really gaining from using the name?
An interesting setting that does not necessarily require that much work for special effects outside action scenes?
Sure the movie might not have taken advantage of that, but GitS is fairly lowkey scifi when not using spidertanks and shit.
If you want to go lower budget there's also always Deus Ex which strips out the magic elements of Shadowrun and focuses on the themes of the far reaching impacts of corporate power, government conspiracies, and the implications of technology. The first Deus Ex admittedly goes off the rails a bit with the rather silly Illuminati thing, but Human Revolution and Mankind Divided do a good job of keeping things grounded and get more heavily into the actions against the augmented which recall relevant racial themes and fears of "the other." Not to mention that there's always the masterwork of cyberpunk: William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy. Hell, they could remake Johnny Mnemonic into something more cohesive.
The general point is, we've got damn good options that already speak to things relevant to American society that makes trying to hammer GitS into that mold just seem like a waste. Let GitS be GitS.
If this leads to less whitewashing in the future, yay.
But I'll put money on this ending up being blamed on having a female lead. Obviously audiences aren't ready for that.
Then if Wonder Woman doesn't pull the Marthaverse out of its tailspin...
This will be blamed on the public not being responsive to Anime. Obviously it can't succeed if, even when Hollywood pulls out all the stops, it fails. Hollywood can't fail, it can only be failed.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I mean, I wrote a more interesting movie in my head, where Scarlett Johansonn is still the lead, because Motoko Kusanagi would meet the Major. It would basically be about "what is identity" and "how do we identify personhood" while still with the shooting and so on.
As an Asian living in America (people are always shocked when they find out I'm not actually Asian-American), I've been aware of controversies with Hollywood whitewashing for over 10 years, so I've made it a point since then to never give money to films that get surrounded by these controversies (in contrast to one of my Asian-American friends who proudly talks about herself being very whitewashed culturally who thought the outrage against Hollywood whitewashing was some new phenomena). And obviously I love and support shows like Fresh off the Boat for what it can do for Asian-Americans.
And on the flip side, I also literally grew up with manga and anime. My parents engaged in it. My relatives engaged in it. And I find terms like weeaboo dumb and inherently culturally racist. And yes, I can see why some aspects of anime are kind of cringey. But yeah, I get annoyed by anti-anime stances like this forum. Most of my friends enjoy anime and go to cons (and a lot of them also did watch GitS and liked it). My work is more mixed in that only some people enjoy it, but they aren't anti it. But getting my housemate who's an Asian-American to watch anything anime related is like pulling teeth. She mentioned she watched 5 minutes of Spirited Away and gave up.
(This is very difficult to describe, so bear with me.)
It's worth remember that, without exaggeration, in the United States, anime is generally considered a genre. Not a medium, which it is in real life, but a genre, which it sort of is in the limited scoped of anime in the US. To restate the obvious, the distinction is that "anime" should mean "the animated films, movies, television series and serialized series produced by Japan--not to be confused with the same from South Korea, Taiwan, etc." What it does mean, nine times out of ten in common conversation is, the rather specific profile of generally long-running, successful productions that tend to be aimed at a male audience in the teens and twenties. After all, the vast majority of successful American cartoons fall into roughly the same categorization as well. Historically that's what got on television (after the years of "child-only anime"), advertised for DVD distribution, advertised for streaming and so forth.
I agree. This is the main problem with anime, and also the main problem why the GitS, or any anime, adaptation is doomed to fail. Most Americans don't see different genres of anime, they only see anime. This really hit me when I went to see Your Name. The preview materials attached to the film induced giggles, eyerolling, and groans from a large portion of the audience. They were trying to sell the matinee crowd who bothered to get up early weekend morning to catch the latest Makoto Shinkai masterpiece stuff like My Little Pony and Despicable M3. The generalized view of anime is very, very surface level. It is sad that the only anime creator to receive any form of mainstream respect in the US is Hayao Miyazake. Come on, highest grossing anime film of all time and never even warranted an Oscar nomination for best animated feature?
Consider GitS. What would a faithful adaptation be like? Existential philosophy? What it means to be human? Identity in an age where the self is malleable? For people who dug into the manga, SAC, and all the movies, sure. But most people who know of GitS really only think spider tanks (witness Watch Dogs) and stripping for optical camouflage (which bugs me to no end cause in the manga Makoto never had to strip. Oshii probably went that route to signify Makoto casting away all her worldly accouterments in an act of Shinto purification.). So to sell a GitS adaptation to a mass audience while also serving as a ScarJo vehicle, the actual film is what we got. If there had been a producer or director who had more in-depth knowledge of the original material, then maybe we might have gotten a good adaptation.
For an example of a good adaptation dealing with popular perceptions of Asian media, witness Into the Badlands. It does Iron Fist (which in my reading is a kungfuploitation comic) better than Netflix's Iron Fist. The martial arts direction is wonderful and a joy to watch, which is all you would want from such a series. I suspect the fact that Daniel Wu and Stephen Fung are on board as executive producers might have something to do with that.
Also, I would add my voice to the "Annoyed at the forum's anti-anime attitude" crowd. The mod rules to some extent (e.g., the closing of the Attack on Titan thread), but more specifically rather every single time forum users toss around "weebo". In a forum with dedicated threads to nearly all forms of nerd activities, for people to use that noun is incredibly hypocritical.
I think we should police ourselves a bit with regard to the more general anime discussion and forum policy regarding anime, based on precedent. The further we get from the social aspect of the controversy and the movie itself, the more we lose the justification to reference Japanese media.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Just reading up that a number of people that went to see early test screenings of this film suggest that a lot was changed up to theatrical release. In fact the biggest change was the focus on the whole
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had a lot more focus and weight throughout the whole film which made the scene with the Doctor later on have greater impact.
While I can't confirm it myself it does make some sense as the Doctor scene in Act 3 tonally felt off like it should have meant more when I watched it.
Consider GitS. What would a faithful adaptation be like? Existential philosophy? What it means to be human? Identity in an age where the self is malleable? For people who dug into the manga, SAC, and all the movies, sure. But most people who know of GitS really only think spider tanks (witness Watch Dogs) and stripping for optical camouflage (which bugs me to no end cause in the manga Makoto never had to strip. Oshii probably went that route to signify Makoto casting away all her worldly accouterments in an act of Shinto purification.). So to sell a GitS adaptation to a mass audience while also serving as a ScarJo vehicle, the actual film is what we got.
There is a balance which can be reached, what we got in the movie regarding the IP's themes and intelligence was on such a low scale it made the Mission: Impossible films look like a philosophical thesis. GiTS has plenty of material and examples both in the manga and the anime adaptions to give them direction on the format for this, a talented and understanding director could have done this right (or at least someone who had the slightest grasp on the material and how to have films which aren't afraid of the slightest complexity you'd find on a random NCIS episode). Personally, I think they should tone down the philosophical angle, but not enough that it's a foot note. Make it count.
IMO they could have made this a police procedural/espionage story, delve a bit into the technology applications, and dumb down the political/philosophical aspects and make the setting less hard sci-fi for the audience to grasp - which this movie did, except the down side is that they did this poorly. Even by Hollywood standards. There's room to maneuver with this IP that they were too lazy, uncreative or incapable of doing and instead of truly understanding or utilizing the best aspects properly they only instead insulted the fanbase, confused the new people and pleased nobody.
Makes me think they should have given it to Christopher MacQuarrie.
If there had been a producer or director who had more in-depth knowledge of the original material, then maybe we might have gotten a good adaptation.
What's weird is that clearly there was someone or two on staff who got the visuals for the '95 film and SAC, but they were in the artistic side and the director just liked the pretty pictures and didn't listen to anything with that gave the IP any intellectual or philosophical weight. This is why it's not a good idea to give a franchise to Rupert Sanders', he'll try to Bay TF it (and fail).
For an example of a good adaptation dealing with popular perceptions of Asian media, witness Into the Badlands. It does Iron Fist (which in my reading is a kungfuploitation comic) better than Netflix's Iron Fist. The martial arts direction is wonderful and a joy to watch, which is all you would want from such a series. I suspect the fact that Daniel Wu and Stephen Fung are on board as executive producers might have something to do with that.
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Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The thing is, the lot is simplified beyond what is typically seen in movies like this (action/thriller/sci-fi). If the writing and plot were on the level of the average Mission: Impossible movie and the quality was higher they should have had superior armor against the whitewashing/cultural appropriation argument, that said there was absolutely no way to break free from that with GiTS. That's what they got when they paid for this IP. The twist only made this twice as harmful, I don't know what they were thinking. They really should have someone Asian and/or Japanese that can say no to that bullshit, because it's painfully obvious tone deafness on their part. I don't care what their reason was for putting it in the movie.
The problem wasn't the nuance, on the contrary the movie literally had none. M7 also comes with a separate history, distinct from GiTS and 7 Samurai though I doubt the original would have been made today under these conditions. That movie had the advantage of using new characters, a new title and putting the setting entirely in America.
I wouldn't put this on anime. This isn't about genre/media it's that these adaptions don't get the attention they deserve behind the scene (video game movie adaptions get similar treatment), the people doing them really don't give a shit about the material, plus this is coupled with the added baggage of adapting IP's in a broader context with their ties to Japan, this also varies depending on the IP itself. Cowboy Bebop would't be as burdened by this as Akira, for instance.
They should not have spent so much money right out of the gate. Save that for the sequels.
The bias against the movie for whitewashing/cultural appropriation is very wide spread. So much so the execs are blaming that for the movie bombing.
http://www.indiewire.com/2017/04/ghost-in-the-shell-box-office-whitewashing-reviews-1201801224/
And will someone at Paramount please make sure this idiot isn't their face to the media.
But I'll put money on this ending up being blamed on having a female lead. Obviously audiences aren't ready for that.
Then if Wonder Woman doesn't pull the Marthaverse out of its tailspin...
This bad better not put the Black Widow movie back on the shelf.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The Matrix owes a lot to the source material too, and it had a phenomenal reaction. Was that because it was that much more of an engaging movie, or because it was far enough removed from the source bias? I'm with you that I'd like to believe it's the former, but seeing success followed by success of truly awful movies has embittered me to that argument.
The other point really revolves around the fact that the 95 animated film influenced and inspired a lot of modern sci-fi action films to the point of being aped and copied in a number of scenes/concepts to the point where they are almost cliche. 22 years later and what does GitS 17 offer thats new? Even if they shot scene for scene exactly the same film as the animated one you would run into the same problems with audiences.
Drainage, Eli. I drink your milkshake. I drink it up.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I think GiTS was a movie that really moved the needle a little bit further with Hollywood, the last time this got so much attention was The Last Airbender. For that it;s worth it's extremely difficult to judge how the public reacted to a movie, especially which parts they liked and disliked. Hollywood knows how difficult this is, but if they admit it in the press they'll look weak and not the masters of the universe they think they are. A lot of how things work there comes down to luck, and timing and they know it. However, this works for us (whether it's true or not) because it means they can't casually ignore it for five more minutes. Progress was made this day. It's going to take many, many GiTS failures before the truly is fixed.
The Matrix was very distance from GiTS, despite being heavily influenced by the IP. It had neither the cultural backlash embedded into the IP, the history and it was brand new. There was no whitewashing there since it was not adapting Ghost in a Shell. It was it's own thing.
Quality does have impacts, but like I said sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Nobody knows for sure, but people do notice if a film is excellent or not. The public can tell the Transformers from The Dark Knights. Movies and franchise have their own reasons for getting tickets, they're not all the same. I wouldn't say a rise in quality for GiTS would have necessary hurt the movie, and I'm not saying they should made it into The Dark Knight, I'd settle for Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.
They would have had to have been working on a Black Widow movie in the first place in order to shelve it.
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I thought there had been progress in making it a bigger priority going forward. That said, even that was merely words, rather than results.
Its uncool to be an otaku in nerd circles, but i think most anime is so far outside the mainstream that the mainstream doesn't even know or care what a weeaboo is. The anime that does get proper mainstream penetration, like Pokemon or DBZ, don't have any real stigma attached to them beyond being cartoons at all.
GitS was fairly obscure, so leaning on the show's cache was probably a bad idea because you're looking back into that nerd group which is where it was, but then leaning too much on starpower to try to salvage that lack of appeal caused more problems than it solved.
But at the end of the day you can only make so many analytical excuses about why a mediocre movie performed poorly.
Maybe, but it shouldn't be as dire or something that they can't improve upon after setting up the series with the first movie. This is an IP they should have spent a lot of time working on things long term and get rid of anything that they don't need or can live without with a lower budget. While GiTS cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk niche is weird, it isn't as weird as it used to be. Not with movies like Surrogates, Interstellar, Minority Report, Looper, Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy etc becoming a staple in films. The premise isn't entirely unfilmable or impossible to sell to the American market. If the latter was true the franchise would not have become the monster it is in the first place, if it can get this far it can get higher but that relies on Hollywood knowing what they're doing. They need a Kevin Fiege for something like this.
All movies also can start off with nothing or next to nothing and as long as they make a good impression they can expand their audience. That this one failed didn't mean the IP is incapable of doing that or that it is beyond Hollywood to do so. The bad news is that right now the people that control the property are incapable of doing this right. Any promising IP would get crippled by that baggage.
It's just from my personal experience. Generally people I talk to or overhear are quite proud of expressing distaste for foreign origin media, including anime. My environment tends to skew liberal and is composed of a variety of ethnicities trending toward a younger age group than me.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
And on the flip side, I also literally grew up with manga and anime. My parents engaged in it. My relatives engaged in it. And I find terms like weeaboo dumb and inherently culturally racist. And yes, I can see why some aspects of anime are kind of cringey. But yeah, I get annoyed by anti-anime stances like this forum. Most of my friends enjoy anime and go to cons (and a lot of them also did watch GitS and liked it). My work is more mixed in that only some people enjoy it, but they aren't anti it. But getting my housemate who's an Asian-American to watch anything anime related is like pulling teeth. She mentioned she watched 5 minutes of Spirited Away and gave up.
Edit: This forum software is dumb. Editing a post is not the same as posting as far as spam goes. First time I've hit this.
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Regarding the movie, I don't think it failed because it was based on anime. Plenty of movies use unpopular original mediums to make successful movies. Comics in particular come to mind. I also don't think it was because of the whitewashing of the main character though that probably dissuaded some people. It primarily failed because it simply wasn't a very good movie.
It's not anime itself that was the problem, it was the discussion of anime that was the problem, which is why we have a "no anime thread" rule.
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But they totally Americanize them is the key. It's either an American story of a foreign culture or a foreign story set in an American culture, except for England; we really like them.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Deciding to use pre existing characters, copying pre existing stories, and trying to milk nostalgia, they kinda painted themselves into a corner where there is no escaping whitewashing accusations.
Sometimes there is harm in trying, if you're bad enough at it. Whether or not it offsets the possible gain is, of course, up for debate, but there are consequences for big fuck-ups, both among audiences and among producers and investors.
(This is very difficult to describe, so bear with me.)
It's worth remember that, without exaggeration, in the United States, anime is generally considered a genre. Not a medium, which it is in real life, but a genre, which it sort of is in the limited scoped of anime in the US. To restate the obvious, the distinction is that "anime" should mean "the animated films, movies, television series and serialized series produced by Japan--not to be confused with the same from South Korea, Taiwan, etc." What it does mean, nine times out of ten in common conversation is, the rather specific profile of generally long-running, successful productions that tend to be aimed at a male audience in the teens and twenties. After all, the vast majority of successful American cartoons fall into roughly the same categorization as well. Historically that's what got on television (after the years of "child-only anime"), advertised for DVD distribution, advertised for streaming and so forth.
Part of this is what happens to any imported media. Take a guess what films from China, or even the whole of the Chinese-speaking world, overwhelmingly make it to the United States--it's not hard. Take a guess what Indian cinema. Anime ought to be like the ideal conception of French cinema--if I say, "I'm a fan of French cinema," at least in theory, that tells you "I like films made in France" not "I like dreary, dull-colored dramas set in apartment blocks where everyone smokes nonstop, only for interruptions for a man and a wife to scream at each other before the man leaves and the woman sits at her kitchen table, arms crossed over her flower-patterned shirt." Because there's a variety of French cinema and television. There's a variety of anime too, just as wide. But what French cinema comes to the United States is a frequently more exclusive and biased towards a particular narrative. And for anime, where unlike cinema Francophile, the fandom is much younger, it's even more biased. We don't get French workplace comedies aimed at women, we get French crime thrillers aimed at men. Remember, there was a time where literally 90% of the anime exposure in the United States was the Pokemon series, specifically the portions brought over and localized and dubbed in English. That time has gone, but in many cases we haven't really moved that far from it.
And considering the Japanese imports that Americans get--and get the most publicity--it's not too surprising. If we decided that we were only going to import lascivious, sexy comedies from France, it'd be the same problem. That would be the genre of French films.
At the same time, the variety of anime imported to the United States is among the most varied it's ever been (and far and away the easiest in terms of technical availability--even if we've passed the boom point of Best Buy having a pair of aisles exclusively for anime, and Borders going out of business.) If you were just an average person in an American audience, who watched anime, who followed several shows over several years, you could certainly say "What're you talking about? English-subtitled anime is more diverse than ever!" Which is true--it's just that, and there's no way to say this without a haughty air of superiority, you don't know better.
Living in Taiwan, not unlike Dracil perhaps I grew up with anime. And the differences in the industry in Taiwan, and the television network syndication system (which has always been friendly to imports, because there was a time where Taiwan hardly produced any original programming of its own, and everyone watched O.S. Star Trek instead), mean it's an entirely different beast. When I was a seven-year-old, I could watch (and read) Doraemon, a prototypical "modern Aesop's fable" semi-serialized format child's program--a variety of anime that didn't exist in the US until recently. I could watch Pokemon, video game juggernaut tie-in, like Americans could. Or I could watch shoujo anime, shows aimed at young girls the same age, running from everything from crime mysteries to fantasy to school dramas to slapstick comedies to modest romantic adventures--as oppose to Sailor Moon, the only show of that kind in the US for a decade or longer. When I grew older, I could watch romantic dramas aimed at single women, or crime thrillers for young adult audiences, or action adventures that didn't have mecha or magic in them, and multiple choices from each of those--whereas in the United States, you were lucky if you got one from each (and you frequently didn't). Of course, that also meant a lot of crap I could watch would never make it to the United States (except maybe out of a macabre interest), but those shows had a very short life in Taiwan too, victims of their mediocrity (or worse), so it wasn't a surprise they remained forgotten.
The move towards purely online distribution, rather than only marketing what you can put on TV to sell toys, has done a great deal to fix that problem. But at the same time, that does nothing to change what anime was twenty years ago in the US, and very little to change what it is now to a media consumer who doesn't actively go to Crunchyroll and go, "Wow, there's actually a pretty wide variety of stuff. As oppose to the very narrow genres that Adult Swim, god bless them, has been showing for the last decade between Robot Chicken reruns." This his how you get the likes of Giant Bomb/Giant Beastcast, a group of fairly like-minded individuals with common interests, where one flat-out states, "Yeah, I fucking hate anime. Get it away from me. I'm not putting up with that trash," and another raves about how much they love the Persona series of story-driven role playing adventures. Both of them are right, its the exposure (intentional and unintentional) that gives them that perspective.
Taiwan is a weird case: we honestly may consume the most anime--as a medium, not a genre--of any of Japan's neighbors, anywhere in the world, per capita. We (and South Korea) are active in its production processes, and unlike the South Koreans, our networks pretty much grab anything they can get their hands on, and never let it go. It's sort of how I imagine Canadians consuming more American television than any other non-American audience worldwide. We've had anime conventions longer than much of America had anime period. The situation in America, for anime, is not that unusual given its history--it's the country that could only show Space Battleship Yamato, itself older than Star Wars, as Star Blazers. Taiwan was part of Japan, American once conquered and occupied it. Naturally there are going to be greater obstacles to bringing over foreign media--and those obstacles build up right into the present, even when technology makes it so easy to overcome it.
That's my theory. Ever since I came to the United States, I'm always a little surprised how the huge craze of the year--your Nana's, your Space Battleship Yamato 2199, your Detective Conans--would be obscure footnotes or even nonexistent in the United States, where Bleach, Naruto and One Piece (admittedly popular shows in Japan too--the same can't be said about, for example, Gurren Lagaan) remained king forever. But reasoning makes perfect sense: of course foreign media will be treated as a narrow novelty when it has to compete with a huge, vibrant domestic industry. And I think that's a distinction worth making. Of course, now I've gone waaaaay off topic, so I should stop.
I might as well add I don't like Fresh off the Boat. I don't actively dislike it, but I don't like it. I mean, I was not-so-long-ago an immigrant myself. Not certain exactly why, I haven't seen that much of it either. I wonder if my own mixed racial background, rather than the "traditional" immigrant image (of having two immigrant parents from the same culture) is the reason for that.
Newly joined FBI officer with an experimental cyber brain and a prototype articifial body is tasked to look into the disappearance of a young lower class woman who has gone missing, leaving behind a disabled grieving mother whom she had been supporting by working part time jobs, not all of which completely legal.
From there the movie goes following both the investigation in the present, and the events leading to the victims disappearance in flashbacks side by side.
After an hour of intrigue, investigations and action sequences, the reveal, the two women are one and the same, a brain they thought nobody would miss wiped of memories and given new ones, in a body custom made for purposes of the corporation that created it.
From there, more action, with thought provoking questions about identity, race, corporate power and what it means to be a human in between, culminating in, somekind of weird ass reveal about plot to take over the world or something.
Halfway competent writing staff could really do something with that.
At this point why not just make a damn Shadowrun series/movie? The setting has a lot of themes like the corporate wage slave culture, the treatment of the metahumans, the politics, the idea of technology literally wiping out your humanity the more of it you implant in yourself, and so on that speak more and more to our society as time goes on. Hell, Seattle is well on its way to becoming Shadowrun's Seattle. Literally the only reason to use GitS in an adaptation like that is purely for name recognition but general audiences don't know what the hell GitS is anyway and the fans will be pissy because it's a rethemed adaptation, so what are you really gaining from using the name?
The problem is that it just isn't a very good movie.
Sure the movie might not have taken advantage of that, but GitS is fairly lowkey scifi when not using spidertanks and shit.
If you want to go lower budget there's also always Deus Ex which strips out the magic elements of Shadowrun and focuses on the themes of the far reaching impacts of corporate power, government conspiracies, and the implications of technology. The first Deus Ex admittedly goes off the rails a bit with the rather silly Illuminati thing, but Human Revolution and Mankind Divided do a good job of keeping things grounded and get more heavily into the actions against the augmented which recall relevant racial themes and fears of "the other." Not to mention that there's always the masterwork of cyberpunk: William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy. Hell, they could remake Johnny Mnemonic into something more cohesive.
The general point is, we've got damn good options that already speak to things relevant to American society that makes trying to hammer GitS into that mold just seem like a waste. Let GitS be GitS.
This will be blamed on the public not being responsive to Anime. Obviously it can't succeed if, even when Hollywood pulls out all the stops, it fails. Hollywood can't fail, it can only be failed.
I agree. This is the main problem with anime, and also the main problem why the GitS, or any anime, adaptation is doomed to fail. Most Americans don't see different genres of anime, they only see anime. This really hit me when I went to see Your Name. The preview materials attached to the film induced giggles, eyerolling, and groans from a large portion of the audience. They were trying to sell the matinee crowd who bothered to get up early weekend morning to catch the latest Makoto Shinkai masterpiece stuff like My Little Pony and Despicable M3. The generalized view of anime is very, very surface level. It is sad that the only anime creator to receive any form of mainstream respect in the US is Hayao Miyazake. Come on, highest grossing anime film of all time and never even warranted an Oscar nomination for best animated feature?
Consider GitS. What would a faithful adaptation be like? Existential philosophy? What it means to be human? Identity in an age where the self is malleable? For people who dug into the manga, SAC, and all the movies, sure. But most people who know of GitS really only think spider tanks (witness Watch Dogs) and stripping for optical camouflage (which bugs me to no end cause in the manga Makoto never had to strip. Oshii probably went that route to signify Makoto casting away all her worldly accouterments in an act of Shinto purification.). So to sell a GitS adaptation to a mass audience while also serving as a ScarJo vehicle, the actual film is what we got. If there had been a producer or director who had more in-depth knowledge of the original material, then maybe we might have gotten a good adaptation.
For an example of a good adaptation dealing with popular perceptions of Asian media, witness Into the Badlands. It does Iron Fist (which in my reading is a kungfuploitation comic) better than Netflix's Iron Fist. The martial arts direction is wonderful and a joy to watch, which is all you would want from such a series. I suspect the fact that Daniel Wu and Stephen Fung are on board as executive producers might have something to do with that.
Also, I would add my voice to the "Annoyed at the forum's anti-anime attitude" crowd. The mod rules to some extent (e.g., the closing of the Attack on Titan thread), but more specifically rather every single time forum users toss around "weebo". In a forum with dedicated threads to nearly all forms of nerd activities, for people to use that noun is incredibly hypocritical.
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Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
While I can't confirm it myself it does make some sense as the Doctor scene in Act 3 tonally felt off like it should have meant more when I watched it.
There is a balance which can be reached, what we got in the movie regarding the IP's themes and intelligence was on such a low scale it made the Mission: Impossible films look like a philosophical thesis. GiTS has plenty of material and examples both in the manga and the anime adaptions to give them direction on the format for this, a talented and understanding director could have done this right (or at least someone who had the slightest grasp on the material and how to have films which aren't afraid of the slightest complexity you'd find on a random NCIS episode). Personally, I think they should tone down the philosophical angle, but not enough that it's a foot note. Make it count.
IMO they could have made this a police procedural/espionage story, delve a bit into the technology applications, and dumb down the political/philosophical aspects and make the setting less hard sci-fi for the audience to grasp - which this movie did, except the down side is that they did this poorly. Even by Hollywood standards. There's room to maneuver with this IP that they were too lazy, uncreative or incapable of doing and instead of truly understanding or utilizing the best aspects properly they only instead insulted the fanbase, confused the new people and pleased nobody.
Makes me think they should have given it to Christopher MacQuarrie.
What's weird is that clearly there was someone or two on staff who got the visuals for the '95 film and SAC, but they were in the artistic side and the director just liked the pretty pictures and didn't listen to anything with that gave the IP any intellectual or philosophical weight. This is why it's not a good idea to give a franchise to Rupert Sanders', he'll try to Bay TF it (and fail).