The Whitewashing of Avatar

I have been home for almost two weeks now. Sadface. I didn't want to leave Tokyo, I had an amazing year... I am behind on posting a few things, I know, and I'll try to get to that soon.

But first I wanted to post this. It's not directly related to Japan, and not at all to my stay in Japan, but it's something I still wanted to mention. I'm an Asian Studies major; I'm not focused solely on Japan, but also a wider variety of topics related to Asia.

Some of you have probably heard about the fuss over the live action Avatar movie that is being made by M. Night Shyamalan, due to its epic casting fail. Avatar: The Last Airbender was a popular tv show primarily aimed at kids (although I know plenty of non-kids who enjoy it as well!). It is not an anime, as it was not made in the States instead of Japan, but it has an obvious influence from anime. It draws heavily on Asian cultural influences and the creators of the series were thorough in their research. However, the live action movie, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, is quite a different story...

I came across some interesting pictures/articles/videos I thought I would share. I've picked them all up through some wandering on livejournal, can't remember where I originally came across some of them.

First off, comparison of three of the main characters from http://racebending.com/v2/ that I've been seeing around (got these ones from kate-nepveu:



An in-depth video criticizing the casting




At one point it shows the Airbender casting call for each of the main characters (Wanted: Caucasian or any other race). Here is an interesting comparison between the Heroes casting call and the Airbender one. Also, lololol at the casting director for Airbender saying "We want you to dress in traditional cultural ethnic attire. If you're Korean, wear a kimono." BECAUSE KOREANS WEAR KIMONO. And pfft, what? This is a small detail that the casting director for a movie made up of Asian influences shouldn't be expected to know! You can't ask these people to do research for their movies. Even though the original Avatar did...

They also decided to use unreadable symbols rather than Chinese calligraphy in the movie. Generic fantasy squiggles are so much better than using an influential writing system that lends authenticity and is a large part of the identity and culture of the original series. It's a fantasy land. Who actually wants to use the language from the original source? It's not as if Peter Jackson made an effort to use the languages created by Tolkien or anything in the Lord of the Rings movies.

Some people say, "but it's anime! The characters LOOK white!" Oh, really? Aang is white, is he?

Here's a really interesting video about whether or not anime characters actually look Caucasian, and an article discussing the same thing.