The Latest Hullabaloo - Ghost in the Shell (live action) casting

[Gary]

Dreamworks is making a live action version of Ghost in the Shell.

For those who might not know, that's a Japanese anime series that reached a pretty strong following world-wide. Here's the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_i...

But the controversy is with the casting of Scarlett Johansson rather than an Asian actress in the lead role.

The original film is set in Japan, and the major cast members are Japanese. So why would the American remake star a white actress? The industry is already unfriendly to Asian actors without roles in major films being changed to exclude them. One recent survey found that in 2013, Asian characters made up only 4.4% of speaking roles in top-grossing Hollywood films.

Full article: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/683/36...

There have been an awful lot of arguments about the universality or racial neutrality of animated characters, and a due amount of alternate (and Asian) casting suggestions.

However, it's not clear from the information I have seen whether this live action version is an adaptation in the U.S. or if they are staying closer to the source material, and to me that's the crux of the matter. If the film is set in, say, New York rather than Tokyo then it puts it into an entirely different context. I've seen GitS maybe a dozen times over the years, and I do think there's a particular significance to setting it in Japan. But I would take issue with this assessment:

The franchise is rooted in Japan’s post-WWII experience, seeded with notions of the nation’s resistance to American imperialism in a dystopic future, and entirely based in questions of identity that make this racial shift especially ironic.

as, at the very least, over-stated. Those elements do certainly exist within that source material, but the core ideas of the first film (the nature of intelligence, identity, etc.) need be rooted in Japan no more than King Lear must only be in Britain rather than, say, medieval Japan in a film adaptation like Ran.

With that in mind, as a general rule, that kind of cross-cultural remake is problematic when it comes to implementation. I'll reference Shall We Dance? (Japanese 1996/U.S. 2004) and The Ring (Japanese 1998/U.S. 2002) as examples of how that can be done poorly or not-so-poorly....

If they are doing such a re-interpretation of the setting then that's a real roll of the dice on top of rolling the dice on a remake to begin with. So, I'm staying cautiously optimistic about a remake while remaining sympathetic to the whitewashing argument. It could be great, and it could wind up being Gods of Egypt.