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INTEREST: Kodansha's Sam Yoshiba Supports Scarlett Johansson Casting Choice for Live-Action GitS

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/15/11438080/ghost-in-the-shell-white-washing-johansson

Essentially he is saying the narrative of Ghost In The Shell isn`t made as a universal story, because when Ghost In The Shell`s manga released in 1989, it was during the time in which Japan was the leader in technology. Not anywhere else.

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Agree completely. As a White British Male how dare any of you adapt Shakespeare to your own countries morality and ethnicity! It is solely ours!

Really? What other Japanese/Asian adaptations are coming up?

GITS, Naruto, Death Note, Akira, Gunnm, Beyblade, Cowboy Bebop, Edge of Tomorrow 2.
(all confirmed officially, though most of them are still in early stages or not even started)

Nice Tea wrote:

GITS, Naruto, Death Note, Akira, Gunnm, Beyblade, Cowboy Bebop, Edge of Tomorrow 2. (all confirmed officially, though most of them are still in early stages or not even started)

Huh, I though the Cowboy Bebop and Akira movies had been in development hell for a long while. And just the other day didn't they announce that the Avatar movies were expanded to 4 films, which means the Gunnm adaptation likely won't happen until the 2020's?

A lot of times with anime adaptations I feel like "I'll believe it when I see it", though I don't doubt Edge of Tomorrow 2 will get made, since it was critically well-received.

All you Shonen Jump Weeklies should go back to tumblr and stop getting offended on behalf of other people.

Evolution didn't flop because it casted a predominately non-Asian cast to play roles that weren't (outside of few examples) Asian in the first place. Nor because it didn't needlessly
explore culture differences that weren't touched upon even in the source material.

It flopped purely because it simply didn't work as a live action production.

Harrison Ford didn't stop Blade Runner from flopping, and this was right after The Empire Strikes back and The Raiders of the Lost Ark. I'm sure you need more than a big star to sell tickets.

By trend I mean recent/upcoming/planned adaptations, there's a lot of them.
The examples I mentionned were to illustrate how almost every adaptation were bad and unnecessary.

Hollywood adaptions more often than not always end up ruining the source material because of business choices. Really because they're trying to take a work that isn't mainstream and trying to make it mainstream which pretty much results and it not resembling what fans of the original work liked in the first place.

Nitsugalego wrote:

All you Shonen Jump Weeklies should go back to tumblr and stop getting offended on behalf of other people.

I've never identified with the SoJus crowd, and to me this is an issue of faithfulness rather than affirmative action. I felt the same way when America adapted Jeffrey Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme series and casted Denzel Washington as a white quadrapalegic detective and Angelina Jolie as a red-headed Irish-looking cop. I don't see this as anymore Tumblr than complaining about a heavily censored anime dub. Hollywood adaptions more often than not always end up ruining the source material because of business choices. Really because they're trying to take a work that isn't mainstream and trying to make it mainstream which pretty much results and it not resembling what fans of the original work liked in the first place. This movie is not made for Ghost in the Shell fans any more than superhero movies are made for comic fans.

Oh, you mean Dragonball Evolution. I thought you meant the movie simply called Evolution, the one with the three-eyed smiley face.

Depends on what you mean by "ruin." What I see happening is a heavily altered adaptation ends up displacing the original work. Disney's been doing this with fairy tales since the 1930's, and even earlier than that, you had the Universal Monsters movies and The Wizard of Oz. Don't forget Shrek and the James Bond movies.

If the Ghost in the Shell movie turns out to be a critical and commercial success, it'll be ruined in the same way that Universal's Frankenstein ruined the Mary Shelley novel.

Quote:

Japanese manga fans have commented that if viewers wanted a Japanese cast, the film should be made in Japan.

And that should be the end of this controversy. I said should.

Which is completely crap. The themes of Ghost in the Shell are universal.

As for the historical point of Japan being the leader in technology it's not even true. For some aspects of consumer electronics maybe. Leader in basic science ? No. Leader in Biology/Genetics ? No. Leader in industry ? Leader in computer science ? No and no. Leader in physics ? No. What exactly has Japan of the 1980s bequethed to the world ?
Sony and its televisions or its playstations ? Lol.

Not really. The reasons for why GitS is a Japanese story runs much deeper than just "Japan was the leader in technology at the time it was written". It was also written by a Japanese person at that time and is largely inspired by Japan's relation to technology at large. They had previously been a very traditional society before WW2 and then they weren't even allowed to have their own national army, so they started pouring their economy into technology instead. That rapid change lead to a large cultural shift and a creeping fear about where they might be heading. It is a story and theme born from a very specific time-period in Japan's culture.