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Ghost in the Shell's ending spurs new accusations of even worse whitewashing

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Why do cartoons from Japan most of time have big eyes and not Asian ones?

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Because the style is inspired in Walt Disney and other early American cartoonists.



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You know, I think it would have been better if they had Hollywood'ed the whole story. Make it in future New York, Chicago or whatever, section 9 is a new CIA division, and they are American. The half whitewashing, half still faithful to the original setting only serves for the whitewashed elements to be highlighted by contrast.
 

Peterpan

Member
I find it funny. This is an unintentional commentary on Hollywood itself. It would be a smart plot point if the film was self aware, not willfully ignorant of its own plot point and not guilty of the same point it is stating.
 
It's baffling how the studio thought it was even remotely a good idea to go there

Unless they figured "shit they're already talking about this, may as well give them something else to talk about"

Like you dumb dumbs, what are you doing

If they ditched the amnesia angle and basically had the movie be about her being ashamed of her new body and the disconnect from heritage then like....I guess that could work better? But why even go there?

Instead it's like "they whitewashed me. but by the end this is who I am! embrace it!" You idiots
 

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
I literally heard the "anime characters look white anyway" excuse twice this weekend IRL. This movie seems to have brought it out.

Why do cartoons from Japan most of time have big eyes and not Asian ones?

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images
You know, Japanese don't actually think of themselves as having "small eyes". So they don't emphasis this trait in their cartoons of themselves.

They would probably ask you "how can you tell if a character is supposed to be white if you don't draw them with a huge nose?"
 

Vice

Member
Why do cartoons from Japan most of time have big eyes and not Asian ones?

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images
Influence from early America animation, iirc. Big eyes offer more expression. They also see their eyes as normal sized, in real life. Because they are.
American cartoons like Steven Universe use big eyes as well. And Disney. And Dreameorks, etc.
 

AmuroChan

Member
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=ghostintheshell2017.htm

Looks like it made more than half it it's budget if you include international sales. Pretty impressive considering everything. Wish we had a way to see how much it would have made without a big star.

Need to see the international breakdowns, but it bombed domestically. They also spent a pretty penny on marketing, at least in NA. The movie's going have to gross really well internationally for the studio to make a profit.
 
Are cartoons supposed to be photorealistic?


Word to Kaneda & Tetsuo but most anime doesn't aim for any level of realism.


The problem is, many people don't want to deal with that fact that we've been conditioned by mass media to believe people are white by default
 

Grizzlyjin

Supersonic, idiotic, disconnecting, not respecting, who would really ever wanna go and top that
I think the only way to make this work would be to lean into it hard. It has to be an integral part of the film. Like if the reveal went into how this society equates The Major's new body as a more acceptable standard of beauty, then you're giving the audience something they can work with. This felt more like "Lol see, she's Motoko and Not Motoko too! It's okay."

The movie just isn't deep enough to handle sensitive topics. They had time. The runtime is under 2 hours, they just made a choice not to. That's the big downfall here. It wants to be this cool and complex cyberpunk thriller, when it isn't complex or thrilling. It spends most of its time copying setpieces and showing off the locales.

It could have been fixed, but they again chose not to. Which makes me think everyone thought this was an acceptable conciliation and moved on. Leaving her past identity more ambiguous would've taken some of the sting out of it. You'd have to edit like 2 scenes. Keep the reveal of where she came from but cut the stuff with the mom. The movie is so emotionally hollow, it wouldn't have been some huge loss.
 

Bladenic

Member
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=ghostintheshell2017.htm

Looks like it made more than half it it's budget if you include international sales. Pretty impressive considering everything. Wish we had a way to see how much it would have made without a big star.

I dunno how many markets it opened internationally but that has flop written all over it. Definitely flopped in America. It would need to make about 250 mil to cover its budget, and I'm not sure that even covers marketing.
 

wazoo

Member
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=ghostintheshell2017.htm

Looks like it made more than half it it's budget if you include international sales.

Probably not true. This is revenue, so only half of it will go to the studio. And you have to add any marketing budget on top of it.

I would not be too worried about the end result. In these days, movie tickets are a small part of revenue for majors. TV rights, DVD and BR, VOD, etc

For blockbusters with FX, BR sales are usually quite good.
 

Grath

Member
Why do cartoons from Japan most of time have big eyes and not Asian ones?

This article on Verge has some historical info on this.

Prior to the war, human figures in Japanese fine and commercial art were allowed to look Japanese, just as they had in centuries of block prints. After the war, once the Japanese face had become synonymous in the western imagination with untrustworthiness and cruelty, toymakers, character empires like Sanrio — and, ultimately, artists — adopted a more benign countenance. Osamu Tezuka, who is credited with the creation of the "anime eye," was directly influenced by Walt Disney and Max Fleischer, and responded in kind with his manga series Astro Boy, the tale of a sweet doe-eyed robot boy who's been rejected by his creator.
 

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
I'm loving this "Batman and Superman are actually Asian" revelation.
 
as in she's scottish? which basically means shes white? what do you mean minority bro?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
No true Scotsman is a kind of informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect a universal generalization from counterexamples by changing the definition in an ad hoc fashion to exclude the counterexample.[1][2] Rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule ("no true Scotsman would do such a thing"; i.e., those who perform that action are not part of our group and thus criticism of that action is not criticism of the group).
 

Platy

Member
Actualy superman, as someone created to show foreign values on the usa by 2 jew dudes and having powers based on solar absorption, needs to be a black jew
 
as in she's scottish? which basically means shes white? what do you mean minority bro?

You don't know what you're talking about and you don't even know who you're talking to. I'm not the user you think you're replying to and I'm using "no true scotsman" to point out that I don't like seeing dick-measuring contests between minorities to see whose opinion matters more. I never actually commented on the guy with the fiancee (though his argument is silly and amounts to "the black friend"), I just think questioning his fiancee's minority is a dumb road to go down.
 
You don't know what you're talking about and you don't even know who you're talking to. I'm not the user you think you're replying to and I'm using "no true scotsman" to point out that I don't like seeing dick-measuring contests between minorities to see whose opinion matters more. I never actually commented on the guy with the fiancee, I just think questioning his fiancee's minority is a silly road to go down.

i never heard of that phrase or saying, so I learned something today. I was also asking questions because it didnt make sense to me due to me never hearing of that phrase before. lastly, I am on mobile, so when I'm on mobile, sometimes I dont pay attention to every user, and mixed up te guy with you due to me not understanding that that was a saying. Never in my life in Murica have I heard that so my apologies if u mad.
 
See I found the original controversy pretty stupid, as if an East Asian American is any more authentically right to play a Japanese character than any other American, and further proof to me that the modern left wing is becoming more obsessed with seeing race as something that separates us to the point of self segregation.

But this twist is just, wow, how could the people behind this movie be that oblivious to how bad this is?

I still think there's nothing fundamentally wrong with casting any race to play these characters, but with the context of our modern reactionary outrage culture, rise of the alt right and racism, wider trends toward casting decisions around American minorities in leading roles, and the general message this gives in the film itself, just what the flip were they thinking?!
 
Who cares if someone thinks anime characters don't look Asian when most of them look like freaks of nature anyway? They don't look like any human, never mind Japanese.
So?

No one in the Boondocks looks like a real human, but the main characters are clearly meant to be Black Americans. Sure, a Japanese person can read that Huey can be South Asian because of the darker skintone and the stylized art that doesn't indicate features that typify what a caricatured Black person might look like, but they'd be wrong.

A White person in America reading light-skinned main characters like Goku, Ash, or Light as White makes them wrong. There is an intention to make that particular animated character emblemic of a Japanese, or at the very least, an Asian identity.
 

Loudninja

Member
See I found the original controversy pretty stupid, as if an East Asian American is any more authentically right to play a Japanese character than any other American[ , and further proof to me that the modern left wing is becoming more obsessed with seeing race as something that separates us to the point of self segregation.

But this twist is just, wow, how could the people behind this movie be that oblivious to how bad this is?

I still think there's nothing fundamentally wrong with casting any race to play these characters, but with the context of our modern reactionary outrage culture, rise of the alt right and racism, wider trends toward casting decisions around American minorities in leading roles, and the general message this gives in the film itself, just what the flip were they thinking?!

It seems you dont get what is being discuss at all or just dont care.
 
You know, Japanese don't actually think of themselves as having "small eyes". So they don't emphasis this trait in their cartoons of themselves.

This article on Verge has some historical info on this.

Prior to the war, human figures in Japanese fine and commercial art were allowed to look Japanese, just as they had in centuries of block prints. After the war, once the Japanese face had become synonymous in the western imagination with untrustworthiness and cruelty, toymakers, character empires like Sanrio — and, ultimately, artists — adopted a more benign countenance. Osamu Tezuka, who is credited with the creation of the "anime eye," was directly influenced by Walt Disney and Max Fleischer, and responded in kind with his manga series Astro Boy, the tale of a sweet doe-eyed robot boy who's been rejected by his creator.

acc6d0cc2fa3030894e8979ca5c07a44.png
 

Ploid 3.0

Member
How awkward must it have been for Scarlet in those scenes with the mother. It was cringy for me just watching it.
 
Went to see it on Friday and once it got to
that section where she was sitting having tea with what turned out to be her mother and then the section afterwards, the hideway for the runaways where it revealed they were both Japanese
, I said fuck this, I'm out.

I feel really bad for enabling this as the trailers didn't give me that growing sense of bad vibes and dread the full movie gave me as it went along for the whitewashing and Hollywood racism it gave, but at least it's a lesson learnt for the future.
 

Izuna

Banned
Do you think the creator of boondocks, when drawing his doodles as a kid said to himself, "These must be white people"? I personally don't think so. A stick figure doesn't have any color attached to it, it's simply the idea/gesture of a human being. Maybe it's just my current surroundings tainting my view, living in a fairly diverse, multicultural city. Also having lived in china briefly where "Han" was the main culture, but a ton of different cultures exist outside of it

I don't really know what you're talking about...
 

TalonJH

Member
I wonder if this is something they wrote into the script as a "fix" for the controversy about ScarJo's casting.

It's either one of two things.

1. This was seen as a way to remedy complaints about whitewashing, which is LOL-worthy

Or

2. This was in the script the entire time and everyone involved is really that blind to the implication.

It's "dig up, stupid" territory either way.

Either way, the original arguments apparently flew over their heads.


After the original controversy, I remember thinking,"oh well, what's done is done." I never imagined they'd go this direction.
 
Not even Asian girlfriend. Minority girlfriend, which means not Asian. But you know, minority so obviously can speak for all minorities.

Didn't he clarify later that she was Jewish?



Hehe.

No actually I didn't. She's Mexican for the record, and the word is fiancée, not that it matters, all minorities have this issue in Hollywood, its not exclusive to asians, so I think her opinion is valid.

And really? Boiling my entire post down to "my gf liked it"? You guys debate like Trump. You'd think I posted "fuck asians white power" judging by the response it got.

I'm glad I can enjoy movies without dissecting them to the bone by not even watching them.
 
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