While Hollywood is well known for its movie making prowess, there is an unfortunate lack of representation in terms of minorities within mainstream media—which is odd since minorities constituted nearly 40 per cent of the U.S. population in 2013, and this number is growing. Shouldn’t it follow that a diverse audience would want to see more diverse film and television content?
Melissa Leon from the Daily Beast, an opinion and news reporting website that focuses on popular culture and politics, laments over the lack of Asian actors filling the lead roles (of which are more often than not favoured to actors/actresses of Caucasian descent) in Western adaptations of anime in an article published on Oct. 30, 2015.
“It happens every time a beloved Japanese or East Asian-influenced animated work filters its way through Hollywood studios,” Leon wrote. “[They produce] a live-action American version where ‘American’ is taken to mean ‘white.’”
We can see this in the recent casting choices made for Hollywood’s upcoming live-action remakes of much beloved anime/manga productions such as Ghost in the Shell and Death Note. As of right now, both adaptations are reportedly slated for a spring 2017 theatre release. However, there has been much controversy over the casting of Scarlett Johansson as the lead role, Motoko Kusanagi, for Ghost in the Shell. Similarly enough, the lead roles in Death Note are to be portrayed by actors not of Asian descent.
While the desire to introduce the interesting content of these anime and manga to Hollywood is understandable, like Melissa Leon said, the fact remains that actors of Caucasian descent are still the default choice for casting directors in North America.
So, what is white washing? Essentially, it is when a character is originally depicted as a person of colour, but is intentionally depicted as white in an adaption of the original work. This happens in real life as well, wherein a white actor portrays themselves as being of a different race. Often times, facets of the racial identity of the portrayed characters are lost in translation, if not abandoned entirely.
Hollywood remakes of much beloved animated shows have been done before, a notably infamous example being the M. Night Shyamalan adaptation of Nickelodeon’s Avatar: the Last Airbender (AtLA), whose inspiring story takes place in a fictional world based in mythical Asia where Asian and Indigenous folklore run rampant. The 2008 live-action adaptation was met with massive amounts of unhappiness from those involved with the original production.The problem was that only white actors were sought out to play most of the core cast, and the distinct ethnic identities of the four fictional nations that are pivotal to the progression of the plot were disregarded (read: obliterated). Fans that were outraged over the racially discriminative nature of the casting directors’ executive casting decisions responded with the creation of Racebending.com, a website to “encourage diversity in entertainment media.”
Despite much supported petitions for a recast, Shyamalan bulldozed through the complaints to the disappointment of fans everywhere, and finished the film as planned. Unsurprisingly, the movie was met with much criticism and was, arguably, a complete flop—something that would appear to be a growing pattern for live-action remakes (another notable adaptation disaster being Dragon Ball Z: Evolution).
While Hollywood has made notable strides towards leaving such forms of (not-so-subtle) racism behind, there is still much work to be done. Practices like blackface and yellowface, in the past, were Hollywood strategies that prevented actors of colour from getting jobs. That such discrimination, whether it be intentional or not, towards characters and people of colour in this day and age is frustrating, to say the least. Hopefully, one day, Hollywood’s silver screen will have a better representation of ethnic diversity to match its diversified audience. Until then, we can only wait.