The Adaptation of GitS Defended by Black Widow Herself #JustThink
It’s not a new discovery or paranormal anomaly that filmmaking and visual entertainment is exclusive to countries like the United States and Great Britain, English-speaking empires and titans of the western world. Film is a worldwide medium that spans the globe, however methods and procedures can and more than likely will differ depending on the home land. America is known, almost infamously for its action and comedy movie classics, China is renown the world over for phenomenal martial arts premieres, there is even an animation studio in Brazil that makes horrendous knock-offs of Disney Pixar masterpieces, a studio that was founded in the US of A. However, one thing that usually, if not always separates the barriers is the resources. Different countries may have different budgets for animated movies, hence why Disney still reigns supreme in the animation industry because they have millions of dollars to shill out and use for big-budgeted films. Then we move over the Land of the Rising Sun: Japan, with its enormous conglomerates of anime television shows, movies, OVAs, etc. Sometimes even good actors are scarce to come by, especially when a director has the desire to create a bridge between mediums and cultures. Sometimes they succeed brilliantly and create expansions of international favorites like this old masterpiece that came out in 2002
Other times when a director tries to tackle a foreign property (or they are totally incompetent), they screw up. No, “screw up” is too nice of a term. I would get a little more brutal in tearing up the flops of some incompetent and outright terrible works in the regard of adaptation, but this is a school blog that is made for college peers, so I’ll leave that to a minimum. I will say that those in that category of awful fall on their face and create atrocities like these two pieces of horrendous cinema roadkill from 2010 and 2009 respectively.
As much as I like to rend this movie asunder, I’m here to talk about the “problem” in the filmmaking industry that has arisen as of late. In fact, the latter movie above is a perfect segway because that movie is a live-action adaptation of the 1984 Japanese manga series by Akira Toriyama titled Dragon Ball, which was later continued to become one of the most, if not the most influential and legendary manga of all time Dragon Ball Z. This movie did everything wrong from storytelling to fight choreography (a huge slap in the face to martial arts manga) and especially to casting. Most people will argue that one of the biggest problems with the movie is with the characters, especially the main character who portrays Dragon Ball’s protagonist Son Goku. Granted it is revealed in DBZ that Goku is an extraterrestrial, but it was still not an excuse to cast the sole protagonist and only the protagonist as the most basic, edgiest, teenage white boy when the majority of the cast beyond him are clearly of Asian descent, excluding the poor excuse of a Bulma impression (to the left of “Goku”). The former movie, The Last Airbender – a live action adaptation of the American written, Korean animated television show Avatar: The Last Airbender – had just as many problem as DBE, if not the same problems, and it was bashed even worse than Dragon Ball Evolution did. It had another issue in its casting involving the two characters of Katara and Sokka who are clearly portrayed as Inuit or Eskimo people in the television show, but played again by the most bland, basic white child actors that side of most Disney Channel sitcoms at the time. Eventually a name was coined for the act of taking characters of foreign origins and casting them with white actors: Whitewashing. Personally, I couldn’t less about whitewashing, except in TLA which put the director M. Night Shyamalan on my Hit List. However this is still something that people like to call on the Internet when foreign properties receive live-action adaptations, none more famously than the live action adaptation of the classic anime/manga franchise Ghost in the Shell, set in a steampunk futuristic universe focusing around the Japanese cyborg Public Security Agent, Motoko Kusanagi (who will be played by Scarlet Johansson in the movie coming March 31). Upon the initial reveal of this movie, people were quick to kick and scream that the producers and directors at DreamWorks Pictures were once again whitewashing one of their beloved characters. Personally I don’t mind as much because Johansson has proved time and again of how good of actor she is, not to mention she remotely looks the part, as shown in this picture here comparing Jo’s design to Matoko’s casual design.
Recently, Scarlet Johansson had defended herself on Good Morning America from the mounting criticism in that Motoko Kusanagi is merely a “human brain in a robotic body”, which is where the title of the franchise comes from, basically translating to “a human soul trapped within a inanimate physical figure”. She states that due to this fact, she would have no true ethnicity and race, therefore it shouldn’t bring so much tension that a white woman portrays the visage of a narratively Japanese woman. I personally haven’t seen the original animated movies, though I plan to before I lay eyes on this adaptation. However, knowledge hunting on the web has revealed that this is implied somewhat in the original manga, where a key character mentions of the existence of “Makotos”, inferring her that there are numerous versions/clones of Kusanagi. Coming from someone who hasn’t seen the original Ghost in the Shell, I don’t have a dog in the fight in this matter exactly. However, once I do see the original films and/or read the original manga (which may be more convenient for me) I will have a much firmer grasp on this situation.