Poll: Whitewashing, yay!!!

[Saltyk]

This isn't a thing that I feel there's a uniform one size fits all answer. It's more situational.

For example, I don't care that Heimdall in Thor was black. I didn't really care about the source material, so maybe that's why. But I didn't care that a character had a relatively minor change.

However, I do find it very strange that Katara and Sokka were white in The Last Airbender. What makes it more odd is that the villains were all Indian. It seems like a classic case of White Washing. Especially since Sokka and Katara were fairly dark skinned while the Fire Nation were themselves effectively white. It's very perplexing to see.

Do I get angry at these sorts of things? No, but in the later case, it is a very strange scenario. If the entire thing is changed, like taking a Japanese movie and setting it in Montana, then the changes make sense. Or if finding a suitable actor that fits the race of the character (or if you find someone of a different race who is a perfect fit), that's fine. But changing the character's race just because you can, is where I start questioning the intent.

 

[Saltyk]

Off topic (a little)Why do people say that making Goku a white guy was whitewashing? Is it explicitly stated that he is another race than white? I've seen some Dragonball Z and GT, but I can't say his face is necessarily Japanese looking and the guys hair does turn blonde when he goes super saiyan and he has round eyes except when he looks really angry and he has a pinkish skin-color.

I would address some of what you said here. But there is a video that fits so much better.

Spoiler: Goku's features would probably mark him more as Japanese than anything else

Of course, Goku is an alien. He can be anything. There were far worse betrayals of the characters than that. Like making Yamcha a surfer dude with no combat skills. Seriously, what was that about?

Examples, like the Last Airbender, they didn't even pick a huge actor to bank on. And that had a lot of history visually of being Asian themed and they tried it in the movie, which just white actors.

Of course, the casting of whites went specifically to the good guys. They still managed to find plenty of brown people to play the Fire Nation, and they were able to cross an ocean for such casting.

Just a strange, strange deal.

What makes it really odd is the fact that Shyamalan is Indian. So perhaps he was wanting to show off more of his own people in the casting? And Zuko is a favorite character of mine. Still, I agree that the whole role reversal in terms of race is very perplexing. Race was never really brought up in Avatar, but it was a heavily Asian influenced series. And the characters were obviously nonwhite. To specifically make the heroes lighter skinned while making the villains darker skinned does lead itself to sounding racist.

Mind you that movie has worse offenses to answer for. Earth Bending... That wasn't Earth Bending...

 

[HardkorSB]

stuff

...

And bonus question- do you think it's justified in this particular case?

Yes, I think it is.
This movie probably has a massive budget.
A movie with a massive budget needs to draw many people to the theaters, it needs to have box office draws.
Like it or not, there isn't an Asian actor who would fit this kind of role and draw in Western audience.
Tom Cruise is that kind of box office draw.
Ever since Top Gun, every movie with him in the lead has made a profit.
I think that's a good enough reason.

 

[Something Amyss]

It's just so insulting I don't understand how people tolerate it.

Quite possibly because there's a grain of truth to it?

But there is a video that fits so much better.

Thanks for posting that. I was trying to remember where I'd seen it and couldn't find it. It's probably not the biggest deal in the world, but yeah. Accurately, he's drawn asian, not european.

What makes it really odd is the fact that Shyamalan is Indian. So perhaps he was wanting to show off more of his own people in the casting? And Zuko is a favorite character of mine. Still, I agree that the whole role reversal in terms of race is very perplexing. Race was never really brought up in Avatar, but it was a heavily Asian influenced series. And the characters were obviously nonwhite. To specifically make the heroes lighter skinned while making the villains darker skinned does lead itself to sounding racist.

Mind you that movie has worse offenses to answer for. Earth Bending... That wasn't Earth Bending...

Doesn't MNS have a history of casting brown people in villainous roles? Maybe I'm remembering wrong.

But yeah, this is far from the biggest problem with either movie. Shyamalan probably shouldn't have been involved with TLA in the first place. Bad child actors are a bigger issue than white child actors. Brown people as bad guys and whites as good guys? Puzzling, but nowhere near the biggest sin. If it were a better movie, I think fewer people would notice or care. But it's sort of the cherry on top, rather than a substantial portion of the sundae.

And yeah, there's the overall trend. People try and justify it in the narrower scope of any given movie, but how often it happens is troubling. But then, in TLA, it was never mandatory that people be a specific race.

...Couldn't they have at least made Sokka funny, though? Damn!

 

[EternallyBored]

Those exosuits look stupid as hell, the action scenes look awkward too, still, at least sci-fi seems to be gaining some traction in Hollywood again, this new wave of high-tech future action movies with power armor and drones is kind of an interesting trend, at least more interesting than yet another zombie movie.

OT: Actually, this looks like one of those cases where I would consider whitewashing the characters to be at least partially appropriate in this situation. The movie may be adapted from a Japanese light novel, but the whole movie is being adapted for an American audience, not just plopping Tom Cruise in a Japanese unit for no reason.

It is kind of screwed up that the Japanese novel is actually more diverse than the movie adaptation, with the American female soldier still being the same, it looks more like a case of "America! Fuck Yeah!" than a movie about humanity coming together to fight off an implacable time traveling alien menace, but I haven't seen the movie so I don't know how close that is to the truth.

As for whitewashing in general, yeah it's a screwy thing to do, but it only really bothers me when they are trying to jam white people into historical movies that don't involve white people, or they try to make the white person look like a member of an ethnic group while simultaneously making all the background characters the actual race they are trying to display. In those cases, it comes off as a little patronizing, I can't think of any situations of the reverse happening though.

 

[Therumancer]

So I just watched Edge of Tomorrow trailer.
It looks interesting enough
Certainly my cup of tea
One tiny problem though
I looked up source material for it and it seems it was japanese light novel All You Need Is Kill
Main protagonist was young japanese (or at least asian, since I'm not sure about political situation in setting) guy named Keiji Kiriya
And what we have in movie?
William Cage played by Tom Cruise.
Really?
There wasn't any other young asian actor around Hollywood to be casted?
Or at least any other young actor?
Why miss so much when adapting character?
Why even make such unnecessary changes?
Especially in the country that claims equality'n'shit.
At this point I think I'll skip the movie and try to find translation of the novel.
But that is only my personal mini-rant.

Question is
Do you think it's justified to skip piece of adaptation media, if it makes unnecessary changes to race/nationality of main characters?

And bonus question- do you think it's justified in this particular case?

Well, the thing is that it's not the same story but something based loosely on it. Your dealing with a case where this has been re-written a number of times up until this point, the Wikipedia page mentions at least 8 people attempting re-writes of this to make it work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Of_Tomorrow

From the sound of things what they actually wanted was the basic idea of an alien invasion being defeated by an infinite time loop letting the protagonist(s) do everything perfectly in the end. Other than that it doesn't seem like they cared much about the original work or it's format (books do not always translate well into movies to begin with).

If they were taking the entire thing verbatim and saying this is "All You Need Is Kill" the movie, promoting it that way, and then changing the ethnicity of the character, I'd have a problem with that. It's similar to how they decided to make Heimdall into a black dude in a movie claiming to be Marvel's Thor and his Asgard and similar things like that. In this case they don't seem to be saying this is the same work, or titling it the same thing even, they are just basing it on ideas and concepts from another source.

On a lot of levels it's like "Power Rangers" (I was never into them, they were pretty much coming out right as I was getting out of that age group), the show and it's mythology is so different despite the base material that it's hard to seriously accuse it of white washing.

Not to mention when it comes to Japan there seems to be a lot of back and forth with US and Japanese cultures both making versions of things re-set into their own culture, conventions, and dominant ethnicity. At this point it's a little too late to say much about it.

I will say though that my opinion *might* be different if I ever wind up experiencing the original light novel and the movie and feel that the movie wound up being a whitewashed retread that somehow managed to miss the entire point, something that has happened before when I've become familiar with multiple versions of horror movies or whatever.

 

[Phantom Kat]

Is the race an important feature of the character, the plot or restricted by the setting? If so, then it should remain unchanged. If not, then I really don't care. I also think if characters are of a certain ethnicity then they should be played by someone as close to that ethnicity as possible.

There, of course, would be exceptions to this, but this is the general rule I have towards this.

 

[EternallyBored]

Those exosuits look stupid as hell, the action scenes look awkward too, still, at least sci-fi seems to be gaining some traction in Hollywood again, this new wave of high-tech future action movies with power armor and drones is kind of an interesting trend, at least more interesting than yet another zombie movie.

OT: Actually, this looks like one of those cases where I would consider whitewashing the characters to be at least partially appropriate in this situation. The movie may be adapted from a Japanese light novel, but the whole movie is being adapted for an American audience, not just plopping Tom Cruise in a Japanese unit for no reason.

It is kind of screwed up that the Japanese novel is actually more diverse than the movie adaptation, with the American female soldier still being the same, it looks more like a case of "America! Fuck Yeah!" than a movie about humanity coming together to fight off an implacable time traveling alien menace, but I haven't seen the movie so I don't know how close that is to the truth.

As for whitewashing in general, yeah it's a screwy thing to do, but it only really bothers me when they are trying to jam white people into historical movies that don't involve white people, or they try to make the white person look like a member of an ethnic group while simultaneously making all the background characters the actual race they are trying to display. In those cases, it comes off as a little patronizing, I can't think of any situations of the reverse happening though.

I don't think you can tell accents. Emily Blunt is not only British, but she was also using a British accent in the trailer.

The character she plays in the novel is American, it's possible they made her British for the movie, seems kind of arbitrary, but one of the core parts of her character in the novel was apparently being a U.S. special forces soldier, so until I see otherwise, a British accent doesn't really make the movie less America! Fuck Yeah! if all she has is an accent while still being an American special forces soldier.

Watching the trailer again, some of the shots seem to be in London, so there might be a weird reversal where Cruise is actually playing the foreigner, and Blunt is the local, which would be in reverse from the novel, and on the other side of the planet. Still on an island nation though, if they were going to do that, you'd think they'd just keep it in Japan and make Cruise the foreigner being helped by a Japanese special forces soldier. I'm not going to try and make sense of Hollywood's warped sense of logic for things like this though.

 

[likalaruku]

I just read an article about upcoming adaptations over at Cracked that's going to keep me away from Hollywood for another 4 years.

 

[EternallyBored]

Those exosuits look stupid as hell, the action scenes look awkward too, still, at least sci-fi seems to be gaining some traction in Hollywood again, this new wave of high-tech future action movies with power armor and drones is kind of an interesting trend, at least more interesting than yet another zombie movie.

OT: Actually, this looks like one of those cases where I would consider whitewashing the characters to be at least partially appropriate in this situation. The movie may be adapted from a Japanese light novel, but the whole movie is being adapted for an American audience, not just plopping Tom Cruise in a Japanese unit for no reason.

It is kind of screwed up that the Japanese novel is actually more diverse than the movie adaptation, with the American female soldier still being the same, it looks more like a case of "America! Fuck Yeah!" than a movie about humanity coming together to fight off an implacable time traveling alien menace, but I haven't seen the movie so I don't know how close that is to the truth.

As for whitewashing in general, yeah it's a screwy thing to do, but it only really bothers me when they are trying to jam white people into historical movies that don't involve white people, or they try to make the white person look like a member of an ethnic group while simultaneously making all the background characters the actual race they are trying to display. In those cases, it comes off as a little patronizing, I can't think of any situations of the reverse happening though.

I don't think you can tell accents. Emily Blunt is not only British, but she was also using a British accent in the trailer.

The character she plays in the novel is American, it's possible they made her British for the movie, seems kind of arbitrary, but one of the core parts of her character in the novel was apparently being a U.S. special forces soldier, so until I see otherwise, a British accent doesn't really make the movie less America! Fuck Yeah! if all she has is an accent while still being an American special forces soldier.

Watching the trailer again, some of the shots seem to be in London, so there might be a weird reversal where Cruise is actually playing the foreigner, and Blunt is the local, which would be in reverse from the novel, and on the other side of the planet. Still on an island nation though, if they were going to do that, you'd think they'd just keep it in Japan and make Cruise the foreigner being helped by a Japanese special forces soldier. I'm not going to try and make sense of Hollywood's warped sense of logic for things like this though.

The very first part of the trailer shows them flying over the Cliffs of Dover (aka, not America). I know everyone likes to think every single action movie these days is "America Fuck Yeah!" but you're grasping at straws here.

location doesn't mean much if all the characters are playing Americans, plenty of movies focus on Americans in foreign countries. Not that any of it is relevant, you seem to be grasping at one minor point to take issue with, even in my first post I mentioned that all it was, was a first impression based on the trailer, the point was a non issue at best, and I mentioned I didn't notice the London shots until watching it again, so your getting bent out of shape over nothing.

 

[Ldude893]

If anything, I'd be more mad at the upcoming adaptation of the 47 Ronin; a tale whose source material originally had all-Japanese characters but this adaptation took the liberty of putting Keanu Reeve as the lead role.
It's as if Hollywood is so frightened that a movie set in a foreign country wouldn't sell if there wasn't a caucasian person in it. That or someone was really eager to cast Keanu Reeves as a samurai.

 

[Relish in Chaos]

I?d only really care if their race was an important part of their character. I don?t mind changes to the original source material to an adaptation, as long as it retains the basic themes of the story and can be judged as a good film on its own merit (e.g. Kubrick?s A Clockwork Orange).

 

[Saltyk]

But there is a video that fits so much better.

Thanks for posting that. I was trying to remember where I'd seen it and couldn't find it. It's probably not the biggest deal in the world, but yeah. Accurately, he's drawn asian, not european.

It seems that it was taken down. The video I found stated as much and that they put it up because of that. It's still needed, as the issue still comes up every so often. Hell, even I use to think that a lot of anime and video game characters looked white. Watching that video helped me realize my own misconceptions.

What makes it really odd is the fact that Shyamalan is Indian. So perhaps he was wanting to show off more of his own people in the casting? And Zuko is a favorite character of mine. Still, I agree that the whole role reversal in terms of race is very perplexing. Race was never really brought up in Avatar, but it was a heavily Asian influenced series. And the characters were obviously nonwhite. To specifically make the heroes lighter skinned while making the villains darker skinned does lead itself to sounding racist.

Mind you that movie has worse offenses to answer for. Earth Bending... That wasn't Earth Bending...

Doesn't MNS have a history of casting brown people in villainous roles? Maybe I'm remembering wrong.

But yeah, this is far from the biggest problem with either movie. Shyamalan probably shouldn't have been involved with TLA in the first place. Bad child actors are a bigger issue than white child actors. Brown people as bad guys and whites as good guys? Puzzling, but nowhere near the biggest sin. If it were a better movie, I think fewer people would notice or care. But it's sort of the cherry on top, rather than a substantial portion of the sundae.

And yeah, there's the overall trend. People try and justify it in the narrower scope of any given movie, but how often it happens is troubling. But then, in TLA, it was never mandatory that people be a specific race.

...Couldn't they have at least made Sokka funny, though? Damn!

I know he tends to appear in a lot of his movies in some minor role. In Signs, he was the man that killed Mel Gibson's wife, for example. Perhaps that's what you're thinking of?

And yes, the bad acting is a problem. But looking at some of the other issues, like pacing, it could be bad directing more than bad acting. Seriously, they didn't even ask Aang his name until they reached the temple, and his backstory was explained without any of them showing onscreen. Everything was done poorly. The whole movie is a disaster. And it just makes the white washing stick out more.

The worst part, is that there was so much potential in the concept. I don't think we ever really needed a movie, as we have the show, but the movie could have been amazing if done right.

Making Sokka funny might have at least made it watchable, though. Not that they got Katara's personality right either...