When I first heard that Disney was planning a live-action version of Mulan, my first reaction was, “They better cast an Asian person as Mulan.” I know it sounds ridiculous for me to say that because Mulan is fucking Chinese, but I wasn’t the only one as there was a petition to make sure Mulan was played by a Chinese actress, and it garnered nearly 105,000 signatures. It’s also not surprising I’d think that given the awful history of Hollywood in participating in yellowface, let’s say I wasn’t sanguine about this movie. At all. I mean, Katharine Hepburn as Jade in Dragon Seed. In fact, the whole main cast (except maybe one man) is not Asian, and it’s about the Second Sino-Japanese War! Andy Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is particularly dreadful. There are many examples of yellowface, and an Asian woman who runs the website home made mimi took it upon herself to recreate scenes from movies that have non-Asian actresses portraying Asian women. She includes a few recent examples, which I’ll get to in a minute. I loved the project, but it also filled me with sadness that it seems like we’re light years away from this actually happening, and it’s 2016!
Recently, there have been several anime that have been adapted into live-action movies. Most of them have non-Asian casts, including Airbender, Aeon Flux, and Akira, the last of which hasn’t been able to find itself out of production hell. Aeon Flux is one of the few anime that I really dug, and I was excited to learn that there was going to be a live-action version of it. Until it was revealed that Charlize Theron was going to be the titular character. Then, I lost complete interest and never saw the movie, not even on DVD. When I heard that the live-action version of Akira was going to be set in New York and feature white people, I was livid. Why the hell call it Akira if you’re going to cut the heart and soul out of it? It’s not Akira if it’s not set in Japan. This brings me to the movie that completely broke me–Ghost in the Shell. Deep sigh. GitS deals with the ramifications of a post-cybernetic world. It questions what it means to be human when you’re mostly robotic. And, it’s very Japanese at heart. So who gets cast as Major Motoko? Scarlett Johanssen. I can’t. Even, it’s what I can’t. To make matters worse, the director tried to defend it by saying he’s a huge anime fan and that it’s an international story. Steven Spielberg is producing the movie, and he said he’s a big GitS fan as well. He also said that a movie like this can’t be made if there isn’t a big name attached to the project, which made me scream in incoherent rage. He’s Steven fucking Spielberg. If his name isn’t big enough, who’s is? If it’s true that this is the reason Scarlett Johanssen was cast, then Hollywood is fucking broken.