I think part of this movie's failures definitely come down to a failure of marketing. Like yeah it's not very good, but lots of visually impressive not very good movies make lots of money. I've seen two explanations for why that might be, both of which seem pretty reasonable:
- First, the movie was RoboCop With Some GitS visuals. But then the marketing just pushed those visuals and a couple of weird sci-fi ideas without ever introducing characters or plot or motivations. They thought they were being clever with the marketing and instead it just confused people.
- The studio apparently had a leadership shakeup between when the first trailer came out and when the movie came out, and as in many other studio shakeups, the new bosses were no longer interested in promoting the old team's movie. We still had ads, but it was pretty much just the same trailer over and over.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
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.
These are the rules of the forum. And I'm a rule-follower at heart. But I find it incredibly awkward for a forum that discusses so many products of Japanese culture to have a taboo on a single medium. Not to mention the implied bigotry of hosting a thread on an American produced version of an original Japanese property.
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.
These are the rules of the forum. And I'm a rule-follower at heart. But I find it incredibly awkward for a forum that discusses so many products of Japanese culture to have a taboo on a single medium. Not to mention the implied bigotry of hosting a thread on an American produced version of an original Japanese property.
This thread is not for the purpose of discussing your criticism of forum rules as you believe them to be. Drop it.
The movie wasn't great, but I was mostly down with ScarJo being The Major right up until the reveal that the whitewashing was baked into the plot. Good Lord. Also that one scene on Batou's boat when The Major was taking off her wetsuit was kind of weird, like, she didn't care that she was naked at any other point in the movie, but all of a sudden she, Batou, and even the camera decided that it was "shameful" to see her naked robot body. I don't care if she's naked or not, but it felt like a weird inconsistency.
I thought I'd probably watch a TV series with this cast playing Section 9, but then I realized I really just want more SAC.
The movie wasn't great, but I was mostly down with ScarJo being The Major right up until the reveal that the whitewashing was baked into the plot. Good Lord. Also that one scene on Batou's boat when The Major was taking off her wetsuit was kind of weird, like, she didn't care that she was naked at any other point in the movie, but all of a sudden she, Batou, and even the camera decided that it was "shameful" to see her naked robot body. I don't care if she's naked or not, but it felt like a weird inconsistency.
I thought I'd probably watch a TV series with this cast playing Section 9, but then I realized I really just want more SAC.
Yeah, I can't pin down exactly why but it felt like it was being forced because it happened in the manga/'95 film - rather than organically occur in the story.
I enjoyed the film as a sort of B-movie action film that was visually interesting with good production values. I'd enjoyed more than the average action film. I saw a subbed version of the original Ghost in the Shell years ago, but I wasn't an enormous fan - but then, I much prefer dubs to subs, so that might have impacted how I felt about the original.
The whitewashing in the new film either should not have happened, or the plot shouldn't have made it a thing and then tip-toed around it. If the film had been willing to commit to the idea that Kusanagi had been stripped of her identity on every level, to make that the focus, it might have been able to say something interesting. It's like as if Arrival had ended with the heptapods giving Louise the plans to make a gun that she used to defeat the Chinese.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
Just saw the film, it was fine, I really enjoyed the visuals and found it enjoyable. It was basically the DEus Ex movie right down to some of the musical cues. I found some of the action far too dark to follow, and I'd say there wasn't enough interesting in it for me to ever watch again, like not a particular scene I'd want to go rewatch just because. Going in, they had to assess this type of film wasn't going to make millions and millions, it's a bleak sci-fi, even Blade Runner couldn't pull that off at the start.
But it was fun, it was compelling in places, I enjoyed it.
For the curious: Boxoffice Mojo currently has it sitting at $40,109,757 domestic and $127,391,402 foreign box-offices, as of yesterday. Japan was $8.6 million of that (almost the exact same as Russia/CIS countries).
Production budget was $110 million--not sure if that includes advertising, which there seemed like a lot of in the US.
so my take on this project, which seems to have rightly been mostly ignored by everyone at the theaters, is that they could have changed the ethnicity of the characters if they had also changed the setting. Instead, they kept the Asian setting but whitewashed the characters, throwing in some famous Japanese actor as the chief like a cigar store Indian.
I'd honestly be intrigued about a westernized adaptation/reimagining of ghost in the shell. that's something where at least someone somewhere has some space to get creative with something.
so I think the whitewashing thing is part of a more fundamental flaw, that the whole idea was just shitty, that the franchise was being adapted for its iconography rather than its content, which in this case is particularly egregious.
but hey i didn't see it so, maybe it's good. maybe i'm brainwashed by "western values" which in contemporary times are apparently about minorities unfairly punishing whites for their supremacy and i just wouldn't get it.
and maybe Asian societies have progressive views on race, given the degree of emphasis their homogeneous education systems place on critical thinking about race and their perspective should be considered seriously in terms of whether whitewashing is good or bad. Asian people think it's ok therefore it's ok.
man it's like saying black gay people shouldn't complain about homophobia because gays have no rights in Africa.
so my take on this project, which seems to have rightly been mostly ignored by everyone at the theaters, is that they could have changed the ethnicities of the characters if they had also changed the setting. Instead, they kept the Asian settings but whitewashed the characters, throwing in some famous Japanese actor as the chief like a cigar store Indian.
I'd honestly be intrigued about a westernized adaptation/reimagining of ghost in the shell. that's something where at least someone somewhere has some space to get creative with something.
so I think the whitewashing thing is part of a more fundamental flaw, that the whole idea was just shitty, that the movie was being adapted for its iconography rather than its content.
The argument is that GiTS can only be Japanese because it's an exclusively Japanese story. Honestly it seems a bit like rabid anime fandom hiding itself in valid criticism in most cases. Even if it's a reasonable position to a light extent, it's one that certain groups I've had conversation with really go overboard with.
Personally I'm going to do what I did for Lucy, Suicide Squad, X-Men Apocalypse and every other middling meh of an action movie.
Wait for it to roll on to HBO. It seems a reasonable compromise and while John Wick and Fury Road made me immediately throw money at a movie theatre, effects driven movies driven by masturbatory casting decisions don't really seem worth having a hard opinion on.
Shakespeare is quintessentially English but that doesn't mean it can't be adapted to other settings. I'm sure rabid anime fans hate it but this isn't about what they think.
I don't have an issue with changing the ethnicity of characters as such, but the way in which it's done matters and I think what they did and didn't change speaks volumes.
No one accused The Departed of being a whitewashed Infernal Affairs, because it was an adaptation of the content, not just the iconography with a racial makeover. I'm not an anime fan, but I think this movie is a bit of a flashpoint, particularly with regard to people that defend what's shitty about it in an disingenuous way (by saying they have some Asian people that are down with it that they wanna quote)
But hey, maybe this GiTS will be the shitty hollywood remake/adaptation that literally makes the world a worse place and they'll stop making shitty movies, or at least it can't get any worse than this.
i mean you gotta try to see the potentially positive side of anything right?
Saying that Shakespeare is quintessentially English is wrong. It would be more like saying that Romeo and Juliet was "quintessentially a love story". You can change some things up and up it in a different setting. But if it's not star crossed lovers it's not Romeo and Juliet. No matter how much you want to call your story about an underdog Jamaican bobsled team "Romeo and Juliet" it's not.
Ghost in the shell is indeed fundamentally japanese. You maybe could hedge and say it's "fundamentally ethnocentric" but there isn't really a nation which fits the bill to put the story given that it's ethnocentric. Maybe the US (but well does anyone want to say what would be required about the US in order to make that story?)
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.
Are you serious they don't kiss? I mean it's obvious they're supposed to be a thing. Come to think of it. I cannot recall a Hong Kong action movie where that kind of scene is in the movie.
Are you serious they don't kiss? I mean it's obvious they're supposed to be a thing. Come to think of it. I cannot recall a Hong Kong action movie where that kind of scene is in the movie.
Yep. You're right they're supposed to be a couple, on closer inspection - their lack of affection is notable when you know what to look for. This made the film controversial when it was released. IIRC it was a deliberate decision by the director/studio, too.
edit: It wasn't a Hong Kong action movie, it was an American made one with a few Chinese actors in it. And Americans love to see their couples kiss on screen.
Are you serious they don't kiss? I mean it's obvious they're supposed to be a thing. Come to think of it. I cannot recall a Hong Kong action movie where that kind of scene is in the movie.
Yep. You're right they're supposed to be a couple, on closer inspection - their lack of affection is notable when you know what to look for. This made the film controversial when it was released. IIRC it was a deliberate decision by the director/studio, too.
edit: It wasn't a Hong Kong action movie, it was an American made one with a few Chinese actors in it. And Americans love to see their couples kiss on screen.
While it wasn't Hong Kong the two biggest people working on the movie were Corey Yuen and Jet Li. And I will give you one guess where they came from.
Buuut it does appear it was cut in post. The kiss was at the end and it didn't test well with the target demo.
Are you serious they don't kiss? I mean it's obvious they're supposed to be a thing. Come to think of it. I cannot recall a Hong Kong action movie where that kind of scene is in the movie.
Yep. You're right they're supposed to be a couple, on closer inspection - their lack of affection is notable when you know what to look for. This made the film controversial when it was released. IIRC it was a deliberate decision by the director/studio, too.
edit: It wasn't a Hong Kong action movie, it was an American made one with a few Chinese actors in it. And Americans love to see their couples kiss on screen.
While it wasn't Hong Kong the two biggest people working on the movie were Corey Yuen and Jet Li. And I will give you one guess where they came from.
Doesn't make it a Hong Kong movie, just like The Mummy 3 had 3 famous Hong Kong actors - two of which were big roles. Actors can be actors anywhere, it's the location and who's calling the shots behind the scenes that distinguish where a movie is from.
It had a Polish director who moved to have a Hollywood career, it was shot in Canada and America, the studios who made it were American and the cast was primarily American.
Buuut it does appear it was cut in post. The kiss was at the end and it didn't test well with the target demo.
Case in point. And after all that there was only a single kiss between the two? lol
Saying that Shakespeare is quintessentially English is wrong. It would be more like saying that Romeo and Juliet was "quintessentially a love story". You can change some things up and up it in a different setting. But if it's not star crossed lovers it's not Romeo and Juliet. No matter how much you want to call your story about an underdog Jamaican bobsled team "Romeo and Juliet" it's not.
Ghost in the shell is indeed fundamentally japanese. You maybe could hedge and say it's "fundamentally ethnocentric" but there isn't really a nation which fits the bill to put the story given that it's ethnocentric. Maybe the US (but well does anyone want to say what would be required about the US in order to make that story?)
I'm not too familiar with the original comic, but I don't see how the story, setting and themes from the films and tv series, from what I remember of them, couldn't be transposed to other societies. Is Homeland fundamentally Israeli like the series it was originally based on?
Yes, there are particular themes like aging populations refugee crises and national existentialism that it explores in a Japanese context, but I don't see how those themes and the basic concept of a futuristic cyber crime unit staffed by philosophy quoting techno cops with identity issues couldn't be adapted to a different setting even under a different title, thereby avoiding inauthenticity, whitewashing and cultural appropriation and i'm sorry if I sound SJW but it seems like a lot of these social controversies are just down to sloppy and thoughtless executions of projects that get pushed in everyone's face worldwide by PR firms and JCDecaux.
If something's remade it doesn't matter if it retains the title or not. It can still owe a debt to something else and be its own thing with dignity.
No one accused The Departed of being a whitewashed Infernal Affairs, because it was an adaptation of the content, not just the iconography with a racial makeover. I'm not an anime fan, but I think this movie is a bit of a flashpoint, particularly with regard to people that defend what's shitty about it in an disingenuous way (by saying they have some Asian people that are down with it that they wanna quote)
But hey, maybe this GiTS will be the shitty hollywood remake/adaptation that literally makes the world a worse place and they'll stop making shitty movies, or at least it can't get any worse than this.
i mean you gotta try to see the potentially positive side of anything right?
It is, of course, equally possible they won't learn any sort of meaningful lessons because the film's creation wasn't intended as an exploratory or educational experience--that's the reality of purchasing an expensive license--but a money-making venture for an industry that, in this area, is demonstratively myopic (and has done this same thing before within recent memory).
Both possibilities are worth considering. And, of course, both of them come with the potential for a doing good (or doing a a lot of harm) in to the franchise's future in other market. We can take it even further: what does Scarlet Johansson's Ghost in the Shell mean for future attempts to adapt that specific franchise by Hollywood? It may actually mean that any future attempts will be utterly radioactive, to the possible disappointment of the minority opinion who really enjoyed the movie.
All of this has no less merit than the "You know, it's terrible, but eventually they have to get it right, because...well, they will!" mentality. It's not entirely dissimilar with the situation with video game adaptations by Hollywood--regardless of how you feel about six Resident Evil film (or for that matter, Assassin's Creed) there's an argument that "Yes, but at least they're trying! Six films later, granted, but trying!" alongside an argument about how it influences the original medium (the video games by Capcom, which have used elements from the films in the past).
There's a crucial difference, of course: the Resident Evil series has grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide, and is considered an enormous commercial success for video game adaptations. Ghost in the Shell can't make that claim presently. Personally I think the primary lesson from the Resident Evil film franchise is "How to make your money back consistently", which isn't exactly the ideal lesson to take about video game adaptations, but at least it is a useful quality from the filmmakers' standpoint....
Saying that Shakespeare is quintessentially English is wrong. It would be more like saying that Romeo and Juliet was "quintessentially a love story". You can change some things up and up it in a different setting. But if it's not star crossed lovers it's not Romeo and Juliet. No matter how much you want to call your story about an underdog Jamaican bobsled team "Romeo and Juliet" it's not.
Ghost in the shell is indeed fundamentally japanese. You maybe could hedge and say it's "fundamentally ethnocentric" but there isn't really a nation which fits the bill to put the story given that it's ethnocentric. Maybe the US (but well does anyone want to say what would be required about the US in order to make that story?)
I'm not too familiar with the original comic, but I don't see how the story, setting and themes from the films and tv series, from what I remember of them, couldn't be transposed to other societies. Is Homeland fundamentally Israeli like the series it was originally based on?
Well, there is the huge component of history in both the first season but particularly 2nd GIG, depicting the past rise of rightwing colonialism and autocracy on the warpath, and the demise of that philosophy with a foreign invasion and occupation (the country in the pre and post-war periods respectively), and what that means for a highly-industrialized state that is not allowed to exist as a normal military power.
Jokes about the the current competition of American (voters') hearts to either bring them into a glorious warmongering neoliberal paradise or a glorious warmongering fundamentalist ultranationalism aside, it's not exactly a scenario that is easily transposed towards White American cultures (particularly that whole "foreign occupation" aspect). Japan exists as a state rebuilt in the image of others (the victor)--the United States exists as a state that rebuilds others in its image (the vanquished). One can certainly imagine the Murai Vaccine scandal being replicated in the United States (as long as you don't look too hard into the details of the American healthcare industry), but the Individual Eleven are literally born out of Japan's role as a defeated power awkwardly returning to the world stage. They simply couldn't be the same in a setting that ignores Japan's own history in favor of something else (or nothing at all).
And just like fans of the Superman franchise can complain about those films from DC missing what they see as being hugely important themes to the character of Clark Kent, a an immigrant and a foreigner in a world that needs him, so too can fans of Ghost in the Shell complain about the film ignoring the entirety of that political history in favor of, "Scarlet Johannson is...secret Asian woman in white woman's body, becomes cop, finds Japanese mother for awkward reunion."
EDIT: Just saw "open spoilers" in the title. That makes this easier.
Saying that Shakespeare is quintessentially English is wrong. It would be more like saying that Romeo and Juliet was "quintessentially a love story". You can change some things up and up it in a different setting. But if it's not star crossed lovers it's not Romeo and Juliet. No matter how much you want to call your story about an underdog Jamaican bobsled team "Romeo and Juliet" it's not.
Ghost in the shell is indeed fundamentally japanese. You maybe could hedge and say it's "fundamentally ethnocentric" but there isn't really a nation which fits the bill to put the story given that it's ethnocentric. Maybe the US (but well does anyone want to say what would be required about the US in order to make that story?)
I'm not too familiar with the original comic, but I don't see how the story, setting and themes from the films and tv series, from what I remember of them, couldn't be transposed to other societies. Is Homeland fundamentally Israeli like the series it was originally based on?
Yes, there are particular themes like aging populations refugee crises and national existentialism that it explores in a Japanese context, but I don't see how those themes and the basic concept of a futuristic cyber crime unit staffed by philosophy quoting techno cops with identity issues couldn't be adapted to a different setting even under a different title, thereby avoiding inauthenticity, whitewashing and cultural appropriation and i'm sorry if I sound SJW but it seems like a lot of these social controversies are just down to sloppy and thoughtless executions of projects that get pushed in everyone's face worldwide by PR firms and JCDecaux.
If something's remade it doesn't matter if it retains the title or not. It can still owe a debt to something else and be its own thing with dignity.
We've talked about the uniquely Japanese aspects of Ghost in the Shell in the thread already.
We've also talked about how the American film could have taken inspiration from the earlier incarnations of the franchise and make something that embodies some of the core aspects of it while still being tailored to an American audience.
Instead, what the adaptation tried to do was have it both ways, and utterly fails at the bolded. It tried to make the Hollywood version but keep it set in Japan, writing convoluted justifications for whitewashing into the script, and ignoring important themes of the franchise while slavishly re-creating shot-for-shot action sequences.
Though I will say--at the time of the announcement of Johansson's casting, we extensively discussed the decision to make the Major a white woman in the context of, "Well, you know, maybe she's actually Motoko Kusanagi using a gynoid body that looks like a white woman." Based on previous incarnations where the Major only appears in the story in a camouflaged body (Innocence for example, though there are others).
A lot of us agreed this was ridiculous--you don't just cast Scarlet Johansson to be some empty shell (forgive the pun) for a comparatively no-name Asian actress who's the real Motoko Kusanagi. I was among them.
Hoy boy, talk about irony. The actual situation was both terrible and proved us wrong in a way.
I'm not too familiar with the original comic, but I don't see how the story, setting and themes from the films and tv series, from what I remember of them, couldn't be transposed to other societies. Is Homeland fundamentally Israeli like the series it was originally based on?
Yes, there are particular themes like aging populations refugee crises and national existentialism that it explores in a Japanese context, but I don't see how those themes and the basic concept of a futuristic cyber crime unit staffed by philosophy quoting techno cops with identity issues couldn't be adapted to a different setting even under a different title, thereby avoiding inauthenticity, whitewashing and cultural appropriation and i'm sorry if I sound SJW but it seems like a lot of these social controversies are just down to sloppy and thoughtless executions of projects that get pushed in everyone's face worldwide by PR firms and JCDecaux.
If something's remade it doesn't matter if it retains the title or not. It can still owe a debt to something else and be its own thing with dignity.
Because the techno-cops are the edifice the themes are played out through. The theme that the techno-cops are there to mimic is one of individual and national identity. Now, you can do a show about individual and national identity with techno-cops in another culture. But the stories of GitS, combined with the theme, become very uniquely Japanese in a way that is not easily replicable.
If Prisoners of War was a story about being Jewish in a Jewish state and dealing with the necessities of that, then it indeed would be "uniquely Israeli". Though ironically you could also move that to Saudi Arabia and get some mileage out of it probably.
You can totally do GitS in a western context. It's not like Japan has a lock on questions of nationalism, transhumanism, government/corporate overreach, and identity.
But you gotta own that shit. What doesn't work is doing a search/replace of classic anime/live action Hollywood.
I bet you could make a killer western version of GitS that was a combination of Blade Runner, Robocop, and Homeland. Those are western takes on the same sorts of issues as classic GitS, but aren't appropriating another culture gratuitously.
It's like that Oldboy remake, where in Korea there's cultural significance to using hammers in that classic scene, but in the American version it's just mindlessly copying something iconic from the IP; not doing something original or with similar resonance in the target market.
Not nationalism. National identity. Specifically ethnocentric national identity
There are no white majority nations which have a national identity in the same way that Japan does.
edit: like. The US is racist and all, but you would have a hard time convincing anyone that there was an ethnocentric national identity being threatened by refugees over shots of Lady Liberty. That ship sailed 200 years ago
You can totally do GitS in a western context. It's not like Japan has a lock on questions of nationalism, transhumanism, government/corporate overreach, and identity.
But you gotta own that shit. What doesn't work is doing a search/replace of classic anime/live action Hollywood.
I bet you could make a killer western version of GitS that was a combination of Blade Runner, Robocop, and Homeland. Those are western takes on the same sorts of issues as classic GitS, but aren't appropriating another culture gratuitously.
It's like that Oldboy remake, where in Korea there's cultural significance to using hammers in that classic scene, but in the American version it's just mindlessly copying something iconic from the IP; not doing something original or with similar resonance in the target market.
Oldboy was also originally a Japanese manga of the same name, but it had a new story the director wanted to tell, with the original premise just to capture imagination.
I am willing to forgive any adaptation that sets off an original creative spark. Which is why I hate that this has turned into such a business.
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.
Not nationalism. National identity. Specifically ethnocentric national identity
There are no white majority nations which have a national identity in the same way that Japan does.
edit: like. The US is racist and all, but you would have a hard time convincing anyone that there was an ethnocentric national identity being threatened by refugees over shots of Lady Liberty. That ship sailed 200 years ago
As I said, how much of contemporary United States culture is influenced by foreign military occupation?
Because, arguably, 100% of Japanese national culture is influenced by that. The entirety of my culture is defined by multiple foreign occupations.
Have fun translating that over to any American culture (considering how much Americans--I almost typed "we" there--suppress the role of war and occupation in American nation building in the national consciousness), muchless the mainstream American middle-class culture that films are marketing to.
Not nationalism. National identity. Specifically ethnocentric national identity
There are no white majority nations which have a national identity in the same way that Japan does.
edit: like. The US is racist and all, but you would have a hard time convincing anyone that there was an ethnocentric national identity being threatened by refugees over shots of Lady Liberty. That ship sailed 200 years ago
You're talking about SAC, right? The theme of the 1995 movie was more about the contrast of existential appreciation of the ramifications of technology on individual identity versus the conventional practicality that exploits it and the cultural inertia that refuses to understand it. I feel like that's relatable. Technology is usually a salve of multicultural divides and is freely appropriated.
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 I said, how much of contemporary United States culture is influenced by foreign military occupation?
Look, we threw a lot of tea in Boston harbor to get those damn redcoats out of our country.
...and now I want a Ghost in the Shell: Truths We Find Self-Evident. GitS:TWFSE follows young American leader George Kusinagi as he contemplates whether his wooden teeth make him more or less than human against the backdrop of a struggle to maintain American identity against the staggering weight of British taxes.
George has built his entire identity around an event in his past, the chopping down of a beloved cherry tree...but he comes to wonder- did this really happen, or was it simply a fabrication repeated often enough to SEEM like reality? Questions of what makes the "self"- our memories or our actual past, come to the forefront as Kusinagi inevitably and inexorably finds himself drawn towards the Delaware River, knowing that nothing will be the same after that Christmas.
Posts
- First, the movie was RoboCop With Some GitS visuals. But then the marketing just pushed those visuals and a couple of weird sci-fi ideas without ever introducing characters or plot or motivations. They thought they were being clever with the marketing and instead it just confused people.
- The studio apparently had a leadership shakeup between when the first trailer came out and when the movie came out, and as in many other studio shakeups, the new bosses were no longer interested in promoting the old team's movie. We still had ads, but it was pretty much just the same trailer over and over.
These are the rules of the forum. And I'm a rule-follower at heart. But I find it incredibly awkward for a forum that discusses so many products of Japanese culture to have a taboo on a single medium. Not to mention the implied bigotry of hosting a thread on an American produced version of an original Japanese property.
This thread is not for the purpose of discussing your criticism of forum rules as you believe them to be. Drop it.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-entertainment-news-updates-april-13-reasons-why-asian-whitewashing-shirt-1491263239-htmlstory.html
Switch: US 1651-2551-4335 JP 6310-4664-2624
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Okay, I had a little chuckle at that. Clever.
The movie wasn't great, but I was mostly down with ScarJo being The Major right up until the reveal that the whitewashing was baked into the plot. Good Lord. Also that one scene on Batou's boat when The Major was taking off her wetsuit was kind of weird, like, she didn't care that she was naked at any other point in the movie, but all of a sudden she, Batou, and even the camera decided that it was "shameful" to see her naked robot body. I don't care if she's naked or not, but it felt like a weird inconsistency.
I thought I'd probably watch a TV series with this cast playing Section 9, but then I realized I really just want more SAC.
Yeah, I can't pin down exactly why but it felt like it was being forced because it happened in the manga/'95 film - rather than organically occur in the story.
I enjoyed the film as a sort of B-movie action film that was visually interesting with good production values. I'd enjoyed more than the average action film. I saw a subbed version of the original Ghost in the Shell years ago, but I wasn't an enormous fan - but then, I much prefer dubs to subs, so that might have impacted how I felt about the original.
The whitewashing in the new film either should not have happened, or the plot shouldn't have made it a thing and then tip-toed around it. If the film had been willing to commit to the idea that Kusanagi had been stripped of her identity on every level, to make that the focus, it might have been able to say something interesting. It's like as if Arrival had ended with the heptapods giving Louise the plans to make a gun that she used to defeat the Chinese.
Just saw the film, it was fine, I really enjoyed the visuals and found it enjoyable. It was basically the DEus Ex movie right down to some of the musical cues. I found some of the action far too dark to follow, and I'd say there wasn't enough interesting in it for me to ever watch again, like not a particular scene I'd want to go rewatch just because. Going in, they had to assess this type of film wasn't going to make millions and millions, it's a bleak sci-fi, even Blade Runner couldn't pull that off at the start.
But it was fun, it was compelling in places, I enjoyed it.
Production budget was $110 million--not sure if that includes advertising, which there seemed like a lot of in the US.
Probably not going to be happening.
I'd honestly be intrigued about a westernized adaptation/reimagining of ghost in the shell. that's something where at least someone somewhere has some space to get creative with something.
so I think the whitewashing thing is part of a more fundamental flaw, that the whole idea was just shitty, that the franchise was being adapted for its iconography rather than its content, which in this case is particularly egregious.
but hey i didn't see it so, maybe it's good. maybe i'm brainwashed by "western values" which in contemporary times are apparently about minorities unfairly punishing whites for their supremacy and i just wouldn't get it.
and maybe Asian societies have progressive views on race, given the degree of emphasis their homogeneous education systems place on critical thinking about race and their perspective should be considered seriously in terms of whether whitewashing is good or bad. Asian people think it's ok therefore it's ok.
man it's like saying black gay people shouldn't complain about homophobia because gays have no rights in Africa.
fuck this movie.
The argument is that GiTS can only be Japanese because it's an exclusively Japanese story. Honestly it seems a bit like rabid anime fandom hiding itself in valid criticism in most cases. Even if it's a reasonable position to a light extent, it's one that certain groups I've had conversation with really go overboard with.
Personally I'm going to do what I did for Lucy, Suicide Squad, X-Men Apocalypse and every other middling meh of an action movie.
Wait for it to roll on to HBO. It seems a reasonable compromise and while John Wick and Fury Road made me immediately throw money at a movie theatre, effects driven movies driven by masturbatory casting decisions don't really seem worth having a hard opinion on.
I don't have an issue with changing the ethnicity of characters as such, but the way in which it's done matters and I think what they did and didn't change speaks volumes.
No one accused The Departed of being a whitewashed Infernal Affairs, because it was an adaptation of the content, not just the iconography with a racial makeover. I'm not an anime fan, but I think this movie is a bit of a flashpoint, particularly with regard to people that defend what's shitty about it in an disingenuous way (by saying they have some Asian people that are down with it that they wanna quote)
But hey, maybe this GiTS will be the shitty hollywood remake/adaptation that literally makes the world a worse place and they'll stop making shitty movies, or at least it can't get any worse than this.
i mean you gotta try to see the potentially positive side of anything right?
And yet, they had to fuck it all up.
Ghost in the shell is indeed fundamentally japanese. You maybe could hedge and say it's "fundamentally ethnocentric" but there isn't really a nation which fits the bill to put the story given that it's ethnocentric. Maybe the US (but well does anyone want to say what would be required about the US in order to make that story?)
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.
You mean the movie where a ex-cop falls for the daughter of a criminal and their love affair takes down both families?
The love affair where they don't kiss each other?
Yep. You're right they're supposed to be a couple, on closer inspection - their lack of affection is notable when you know what to look for. This made the film controversial when it was released. IIRC it was a deliberate decision by the director/studio, too.
edit: It wasn't a Hong Kong action movie, it was an American made one with a few Chinese actors in it. And Americans love to see their couples kiss on screen.
While it wasn't Hong Kong the two biggest people working on the movie were Corey Yuen and Jet Li. And I will give you one guess where they came from.
Buuut it does appear it was cut in post. The kiss was at the end and it didn't test well with the target demo.
Doesn't make it a Hong Kong movie, just like The Mummy 3 had 3 famous Hong Kong actors - two of which were big roles. Actors can be actors anywhere, it's the location and who's calling the shots behind the scenes that distinguish where a movie is from.
It had a Polish director who moved to have a Hollywood career, it was shot in Canada and America, the studios who made it were American and the cast was primarily American.
Case in point. And after all that there was only a single kiss between the two? lol
Almost certainly decision making too. You don't bring on an 18 year veteran director so that he can only do choreography.
I'm not too familiar with the original comic, but I don't see how the story, setting and themes from the films and tv series, from what I remember of them, couldn't be transposed to other societies. Is Homeland fundamentally Israeli like the series it was originally based on?
Yes, there are particular themes like aging populations refugee crises and national existentialism that it explores in a Japanese context, but I don't see how those themes and the basic concept of a futuristic cyber crime unit staffed by philosophy quoting techno cops with identity issues couldn't be adapted to a different setting even under a different title, thereby avoiding inauthenticity, whitewashing and cultural appropriation and i'm sorry if I sound SJW but it seems like a lot of these social controversies are just down to sloppy and thoughtless executions of projects that get pushed in everyone's face worldwide by PR firms and JCDecaux.
If something's remade it doesn't matter if it retains the title or not. It can still owe a debt to something else and be its own thing with dignity.
It is, of course, equally possible they won't learn any sort of meaningful lessons because the film's creation wasn't intended as an exploratory or educational experience--that's the reality of purchasing an expensive license--but a money-making venture for an industry that, in this area, is demonstratively myopic (and has done this same thing before within recent memory).
Both possibilities are worth considering. And, of course, both of them come with the potential for a doing good (or doing a a lot of harm) in to the franchise's future in other market. We can take it even further: what does Scarlet Johansson's Ghost in the Shell mean for future attempts to adapt that specific franchise by Hollywood? It may actually mean that any future attempts will be utterly radioactive, to the possible disappointment of the minority opinion who really enjoyed the movie.
All of this has no less merit than the "You know, it's terrible, but eventually they have to get it right, because...well, they will!" mentality. It's not entirely dissimilar with the situation with video game adaptations by Hollywood--regardless of how you feel about six Resident Evil film (or for that matter, Assassin's Creed) there's an argument that "Yes, but at least they're trying! Six films later, granted, but trying!" alongside an argument about how it influences the original medium (the video games by Capcom, which have used elements from the films in the past).
There's a crucial difference, of course: the Resident Evil series has grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide, and is considered an enormous commercial success for video game adaptations. Ghost in the Shell can't make that claim presently. Personally I think the primary lesson from the Resident Evil film franchise is "How to make your money back consistently", which isn't exactly the ideal lesson to take about video game adaptations, but at least it is a useful quality from the filmmakers' standpoint....
Well, there is the huge component of history in both the first season but particularly 2nd GIG, depicting the past rise of rightwing colonialism and autocracy on the warpath, and the demise of that philosophy with a foreign invasion and occupation (the country in the pre and post-war periods respectively), and what that means for a highly-industrialized state that is not allowed to exist as a normal military power.
Jokes about the the current competition of American (voters') hearts to either bring them into a glorious warmongering neoliberal paradise or a glorious warmongering fundamentalist ultranationalism aside, it's not exactly a scenario that is easily transposed towards White American cultures (particularly that whole "foreign occupation" aspect). Japan exists as a state rebuilt in the image of others (the victor)--the United States exists as a state that rebuilds others in its image (the vanquished). One can certainly imagine the Murai Vaccine scandal being replicated in the United States (as long as you don't look too hard into the details of the American healthcare industry), but the Individual Eleven are literally born out of Japan's role as a defeated power awkwardly returning to the world stage. They simply couldn't be the same in a setting that ignores Japan's own history in favor of something else (or nothing at all).
And just like fans of the Superman franchise can complain about those films from DC missing what they see as being hugely important themes to the character of Clark Kent, a an immigrant and a foreigner in a world that needs him, so too can fans of Ghost in the Shell complain about the film ignoring the entirety of that political history in favor of, "Scarlet Johannson is...secret Asian woman in white woman's body, becomes cop, finds Japanese mother for awkward reunion."
EDIT: Just saw "open spoilers" in the title. That makes this easier.
We've talked about the uniquely Japanese aspects of Ghost in the Shell in the thread already.
We've also talked about how the American film could have taken inspiration from the earlier incarnations of the franchise and make something that embodies some of the core aspects of it while still being tailored to an American audience.
Instead, what the adaptation tried to do was have it both ways, and utterly fails at the bolded. It tried to make the Hollywood version but keep it set in Japan, writing convoluted justifications for whitewashing into the script, and ignoring important themes of the franchise while slavishly re-creating shot-for-shot action sequences.
A lot of us agreed this was ridiculous--you don't just cast Scarlet Johansson to be some empty shell (forgive the pun) for a comparatively no-name Asian actress who's the real Motoko Kusanagi. I was among them.
Hoy boy, talk about irony. The actual situation was both terrible and proved us wrong in a way.
Because the techno-cops are the edifice the themes are played out through. The theme that the techno-cops are there to mimic is one of individual and national identity. Now, you can do a show about individual and national identity with techno-cops in another culture. But the stories of GitS, combined with the theme, become very uniquely Japanese in a way that is not easily replicable.
If Prisoners of War was a story about being Jewish in a Jewish state and dealing with the necessities of that, then it indeed would be "uniquely Israeli". Though ironically you could also move that to Saudi Arabia and get some mileage out of it probably.
But you gotta own that shit. What doesn't work is doing a search/replace of classic anime/live action Hollywood.
I bet you could make a killer western version of GitS that was a combination of Blade Runner, Robocop, and Homeland. Those are western takes on the same sorts of issues as classic GitS, but aren't appropriating another culture gratuitously.
It's like that Oldboy remake, where in Korea there's cultural significance to using hammers in that classic scene, but in the American version it's just mindlessly copying something iconic from the IP; not doing something original or with similar resonance in the target market.
There are no white majority nations which have a national identity in the same way that Japan does.
edit: like. The US is racist and all, but you would have a hard time convincing anyone that there was an ethnocentric national identity being threatened by refugees over shots of Lady Liberty. That ship sailed 200 years ago
Oldboy was also originally a Japanese manga of the same name, but it had a new story the director wanted to tell, with the original premise just to capture imagination.
I am willing to forgive any adaptation that sets off an original creative spark. Which is why I hate that this has turned into such a business.
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 I said, how much of contemporary United States culture is influenced by foreign military occupation?
Because, arguably, 100% of Japanese national culture is influenced by that. The entirety of my culture is defined by multiple foreign occupations.
Have fun translating that over to any American culture (considering how much Americans--I almost typed "we" there--suppress the role of war and occupation in American nation building in the national consciousness), muchless the mainstream American middle-class culture that films are marketing to.
You're talking about SAC, right? The theme of the 1995 movie was more about the contrast of existential appreciation of the ramifications of technology on individual identity versus the conventional practicality that exploits it and the cultural inertia that refuses to understand it. I feel like that's relatable. Technology is usually a salve of multicultural divides and is freely appropriated.
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.
Look, we threw a lot of tea in Boston harbor to get those damn redcoats out of our country.
...and now I want a Ghost in the Shell: Truths We Find Self-Evident. GitS:TWFSE follows young American leader George Kusinagi as he contemplates whether his wooden teeth make him more or less than human against the backdrop of a struggle to maintain American identity against the staggering weight of British taxes.
George has built his entire identity around an event in his past, the chopping down of a beloved cherry tree...but he comes to wonder- did this really happen, or was it simply a fabrication repeated often enough to SEEM like reality? Questions of what makes the "self"- our memories or our actual past, come to the forefront as Kusinagi inevitably and inexorably finds himself drawn towards the Delaware River, knowing that nothing will be the same after that Christmas.