Forum - View topicNEWS: Live-Action Ghost in the Shell Film Posts 1st Photo of Scarlett Johansson as the Major
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Errinundra
Moderator
 Posts: 6535 Location: Melbourne, Oz |
|
|||
|
I've just deleted a troll post. Comrades, please make your points without throwing jibes at other posters. Thanks.
|
||||
|
||||
VoidWitch
 Posts: 157 |
|
|||
|
Ugh... This could be such an amazing opportunity for asian actors to see the light of day. What a shame.
Or maybe it's for the best? It doesn't seem like people involved in creation of the movie are particularly talented and Rupert Sanders as a director does not inspire confidence at all. Honestly i want this movie to bomb just because i don't want GITS to turn into Resident Evil 2.0 with million movies made just for the sake of money. Hollywood -_- |
||||
|
||||
|
Cptn_Taylor
Posts: 925 |
|
|||
 You make it sound like Hollywood stole the movie from the Japanese. Hollywood paid money for the movie rights to the Japanese. They got paid. Isn't that something that every anime fan would love ? That Japanese creators get their (financial) due ?
I |
||||
|
||||
|
VoidWitch
Posts: 157 |
|
|||
From Shirow interview with Dark Horse
But of course it's always all about money isn't it? EDIT: Ops! Sorry! For some reason i thought that Shirow doesn't own the rights to GITS. Nevermind then. |
||||
|
||||
residentgrigo
 Posts: 2439 Location: Germany |
|
|||
|
@enurtsol The official press releases / casting calls confirmed the SAC setting. Look the "controversy" isn´t the biggest concern to me. They could have had an African-Japanese as Motoko for all i care or skipped her. Scarlett isn´t even the weirdest decision but reading about the project for a decade left me to the bone despite being a fan of GitS since the 90s. We had way better people attached back in the day too!
I´ll be the first to eat cyber-crow if the finished product looks good and would like it to succeed (!!!) but adaptations should start by honoring what made the source great. I see NONE of that so far. The Asian cast Titan films were way less acceptable to me so that pendulum goes both ways but they also hung themselves by being trash in the end (i only saw Part 1). The PG-13 will be next misstep despite being based on TV-Ma material (a soft R is still an R, kidZ don´t care about politics/cyberpunk) and i view GitS 2017 as another example of modern Hollywood run amok... They should hand off the project to the Ex Machina people and do a HBO / Netflix Mini series with a mostly original story that fits the decade. I now exhausted all my opinions till the trailer. |
||||
|
||||
Relairknight
 Posts: 128 |
|
|||
|
Ehhhh...I love me some Scarlett, but I really can't see her as the Major. I guess its a good thing she's in it though, instant publicity and awareness.
|
||||
|
||||
|
residentgrigo
Posts: 2439 Location: Germany |
|
|||
|
I forgot: Arise is also a very Japanese tale but you would need to read the companion manga to fully get what i mean so SAC isn´t the only such example. Hups. That´s long form storytelling for you!
Oshii´s films lastly felt like Hong Kong cinema to me. John Woo would be a good choice to make a mid-budget / cinematic GitS adaptation... (I still can´t believe that Innocence got a PG-13! Germany wisely kept the 16+.) |
||||
|
||||
|
VoidWitch
Posts: 157 |
|
|||
Also don't forget that original GITS is coming from very specific place and time when Japan was ahead of the world in terms of tech. I wouldn't call GITS to be a universal story about evolution and relationship between technology and mankind. It's more about relationship between technology and japan. Erasure of cultural context is unacceptable. At least in my opinion... |
||||
|
||||
Mr. Oshawott
 Posts: 6773 |
|
|||
|
If one wants to understand why Hollywood's casting of Scarlett Johansson as Motoko Kusanagi and their Westernizing of Ghost in the Shell is a detrimental, regressive concept, look no further than Asian comic writer Jon Tsuei.
|
||||
|
||||
|
Cptn_Taylor
Posts: 925 |
|
|||
|
I never see people blaming the Japanese. After all they're the ones that have sold the rights to Hollywood. The reality is that the Japanese simply do not have the infrastructure to make films that cost hundreds of milions of dollars, don't have the capacity to market them to a world wide audience. They're simply out of their league. So the conundrum is either make low quality live action films based on anime that are relatively unknown even in Japan let alone the rest of the world, or appeal to Hollywood to make the big splash.
I swear, people criticising this deal should look at the shit films the Japanese make when adapting anime into live action. Faithfulness doesn't even come into the equation. Otherwise the live action film of Kyashan would have been different from what we got. And it's not the only example. Harlock says hello. So when it comes to anime adaptations of anime properties I will give much more trust to Hollywood than the Japanese film industry. |
||||
|
||||
|
Guile
Posts: 595 |
|
|||
Aren't Japanese companies known for not really caring about foreign audiences? Maybe they don't care what Hollywood does with it so long as they get money and they can continue making anime series. Selling a license is pretty hands off compared to the ones ruining a license. Michael Bay gets the hate for Transformers and NInja Turtles, not the original rights holders, and I think that fits. It's on them to use to license properly. The first thing that came to my mind was how big Johansson's nose is in that picture and seems off. I guess that's why anime often depicts foreigners as having big noses compared to Japanese characters. It's pretty noticeable when you compare things side by side. I don't have any interest in any kind of live-action adaptions of anime, because I don't see what a live-action version can offer that the original anime can't. Animation is a much more versatile medium, so trying to downgrade an animation to live-action always ends up poorly. |
||||
|
||||
Mr. Anobe
 Posts: 47 Location: Canada |
|
|||
|
Well, after reading the news and looking at the photo it's really hard to tell where this production will go. I'm a bit skeptical of seeing live-action adaptations of manga / anime series as I don't often watch movies adaptations of certain series. Same goes with seeing some anime / manga series adapted into LA films. As long as it doesn't go with the Kite route where they take the main characters and placed into a completely different "scrapbook" story, I will be somewhat supportive. Personally, I don't agree with how Kite was portrayed in such fashion even though it was rated decent in the IMDB page. I can even say the so-called "white-washing" could've been used towards Kite instead of DB Evolution or Avatar TLB.
Anyway, after seeing almost every movie and TV series of GitS I can safely say I'm looking forward to this adaptation, but at the same time very nervous at where this movie will go. 
Edit: Now I just finished reading Jon Tsuei's posts and never realized it had a more cultural influence in Japan than elsewhere. Nonetheless, wait and see I guess. |
||||
|
||||
|
MajorZero
Posts: 359 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
jdnation
Posts: 2012 |
|
|||
|
With regards to John Tseui, what he says isn't wrong. But again GITS is seen abroad largely as a universal story of future dystopian themes and what it means to be human at the core.
For all intents and purposes it was Mamoru Oshii who defined the series and those were the driving themes more so than the specific culture on which it is based. A movie of this expense would naturally aim at making a story more palatable for a global audience and the sci-fi/philosophical elements are universal to all. This doesn't take away from the culture within which the concept was originally born, but that aspect of its inspiration isn't really that crucial to GITS where it would cease to be Japanese. Even if we did set it in Japan with Japaneses casts it would still remain a sci-fi futuristic tech cop story that could easily appeal to many. That it was born out of the post-war tech-driven Japanese era is a footnote that would be of interest only in terms of trivia. I'd argue that Ghost in the Shell Innocence has a greater Eastern influence in its core themes than any of the GITS incarnations. That is if we ignore the political setups that are of course Japanese, but which could just as easily be accommodated to any political nation.
I have to ask... how do you feel about Asian/non-white people who have English/American/Christian names? Let's say for the sake of argument that Japan one day faces a severe local population/demographic crisis and started taking in non-native immigrants. And what if these American Immigrants married local people and gave birth to mixed ethnic children, many of whom wouldn't even look like ethnic Japaneses, but who might still be given Japanese names. Or for that matter what if they looked totally Japanese but possessed names like John of Mohamed? And let's say GITS took place in a future where precisely that sort of thing could be the case, particularly following a major 3rd World War. How would that make you feel? |
||||
|
||||
|
Johan Eriksson 9003
Posts: 281 |
|
|||
Real people are real people and what they are named is no ones business but their own. (And people with one Japanese parent would still be ethnically Japanese, no matter what they look like). Major Kusanagi is a fictional person and her name is given to her to reflect her role in the story. It makes absolutely no sense to change her ethnicity and the setting without also changing her name, and if the Major in this film adaption really is supposed to be only part-Japanese, then they should still have gotten an actress that fits the role. To my knowledge, Scarlett isn't even slightly Asian, so why exactly do you think it would be more ok for her to play an biracial character with a Japanese name than just a Japanese character with a Japanese name? At the end of the day, all this talk about how she could totally be in a different body or how history could have gone down in this universe, are really just overcomplicated excuses for white casting, when simply casting an Asian actor would be much simpler. As for how I feel about minorities taking western names? Not great honestly, but I doubt it is for the reasons you wanted to hear. See, when minorities give their children western names, it is usually because they feel they have to in order to assimilate into another culture and avoid discrimination. When westerners give their children names that they have no cultural ties to it tends to be because they think it sounds exotic or cool and because they can. I'm no more thrilled about a situation that makes minorities feel like they can't embrace their heritage than I am of majorities using other cultures as decoration. The context in this situation changes drastically when we go from talking about majorities to minorities. And all of this is kind of secondary to the fact that they should have kept the casting non-white because there are far too few movies with PoC casts right now. Whatever reasoning they can come up with for why it makes sense to whitewash this movie doesn't change the fact that they still shouldn't have done it for that reason alone. If the story really is supposed to be universal, then keeping the cast Japanese makes just as much sense as whitewashing it, unless they just think white people are just more "universal". There was never a reason to do this in the first place. In short, this has been a giant exercise in false equivalence. |
||||
|
||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group