Ghost in the Shell: White Wash Complex

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > Ghost in the Shell: White Wash Complex

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Corek posted:

Doesn't Masamune Shirow draw straight-up porn now

Literal child porn too, going by an anime he made recently with the Excel Saga writer who appeared out of the aether after like 16 years. I don't know how bad it ended up being but it looked bad enough nobody sane would touch it with a pole for fear of the FBI

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_in_the_Crimson_Shell:_Ghost_Urn

# ¿ Apr 15, 2016 13:22

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 14:31

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Yoshifan823 posted:

edit: is the new series any good? I feel like having two movies and a couple of short seasons of a show all being good, despite being fairly unrelated (and the second movie/show being made like 20 years after the first) is really pushing someone's luck, and the odds are against the new one being any good, but I also don't follow anime at all, so I am just talking out my rear end here.

Not really no. It's not unwatchably bad but it's not nearly as good as SAC. I've never been a huge fan of GitS in any iteration though so maybe it's just me.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2016 14:22

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Tenzarin posted:

Funimation licensed it for North America and pretty sure its just his style in a adult swim friendly show.

the cover of the DVD is a naked 5 year old in a sexually suggestive position. i even have a high tolerance for most stuff like that in anime/don't think anime is as bad in that way as some people think , but it looks really loving bad

# ¿ Apr 15, 2016 20:05

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Whizbang posted:

Thanks for the update Aatrek.

Even I don't like Star Trek

# ¿ Apr 16, 2016 02:26

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

hemale in pain posted:

Oh my god do people really think anime characters are drawn for white people and not just stylised faces?

It's usually more of a "Ha ha those stupid loving nips think they're white lol" but yeah

# ¿ Apr 18, 2016 14:23

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Guy Mann posted:

Japan is the country that still classifies fictional characters by blood type based on disproven racial profiling pseudoscience from 50 years ago, if you want to compare anybody to Nazis it should be your precious japanese animes.

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Apr 19, 2016

# ¿ Apr 19, 2016 10:53

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Clipperton posted:

The Matrix is still awesome, don't be a grumpy gus

In other news, the Japanese appreciate Sony Walkmans on a much deeper level than you:

I guess that's better than the "All Japanese popular culture is a deep reflection on Japan's reckoning with WW2 history and its deep psychological scarring as a nation" thing people do

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Apr 19, 2016

# ¿ Apr 19, 2016 10:59

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Comrade Fakename posted:

That's true, and I do wish that the debate would stick to this central, actually relevant point, instead of allowing outrage to spread into increasingly tenuous arguments around it - "Hollywood's trying to CGI out all asians!", "For some reason, changing the location of a fictional story is immoral now!"

But while I can understand that it can be frustrating to see a character who's originally asian played by a white lady, it seems to me to be more an artifact of the adaption process. If GITS was Western, and Kusanagi was always Japanese-American, then there's no doubt that this would be terrible whitewashing. But since GITS was about a group of all Japanese people, in Japan, any adaptation for a Western audience was going to involve changing either the location or the characters or both. And in that instance, why shouldn't it be Kusanagi who changes, rather than, say Aramaki, who is being played by an actual Japanese person.

So, while it's a pity that another big film is coming out without an asian lead, it seems odd to single out GITS for that.

I agree. It is sort of bizarre seeing Korean and Chinese Americans come out of the woodwork claiming postwar Japanese media as their own. Literally endorsing Pan-Asianism with Japan at the helm, somehow completely ignoring the context of that entirely

I'm not sure why it's any more racist to not cast Asians in this than it is to not cast Asians in any other Hollywood movie

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Apr 19, 2016

# ¿ Apr 19, 2016 11:11

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Echo Chamber posted:

So are critics of the whitewashing actually pan-Asian whitewashers or Japanese supremacists? What's the story now for this film's defenders?

Have you ever thought maybe it's a matter of "if it looks like whitewashing, and if sounds like whitewashing..."

If digital yellowface tests aren't, I don't know what is.

Clipperton posted:

I think it's more that while there are excellent arguments against whitewashing, there are also a lot of stupid arguments against it ("only the noble Nipponese can truly know what it is to drive a Honda Accord") and in the case of GITS the stupid arguments are particularly prominent because anime

That twitter guy's argument is especially hilarious because the opinion of the Japanese left, people like Miyazaki, etc, has always been that technology and industry are terrible because of their intimate connection to the WW2 era Japanese military-industrial complex. The entire point of Akira is that cyberpunk Japan is evil and that the technology is a monster that is sacrificing the Japanese people on an altar of authoritarian military-industry

So yeah, he is actually implicitly endorsing the worldview of the Japanese right by saying that cyberpunk land is the true essence of Japanese-ness and by extension Asian-ness

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Apr 19, 2016

# ¿ Apr 19, 2016 14:14

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

what the heck are y'all talking about, the movie sucks and is incredibly boring philosophy-babble with some nice animation. the TV show is actually good

K. Waste posted:

The problem is twofold:

1) The whitewashing meme is objectively wrong in this scenario. Nobody involved in selling the IP/TM to Ghost in the Shell has any illusion that there is some essence of 'asian-ness' to a superficial economic property. More importantly, they are thoroughly willing and even earnestly affirmative of being complicit in Orientalism, as long as it will make them money.

*writes essay about how technological collectivism is baked into the essential nipponese spirit*

# ¿ Jul 19, 2016 04:12

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

K. Waste posted:

I actually said nothing about "nipponese spirit," racist crackpot - I was explicitly making a critique of capitalism.

I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about the opinion-having internet at large

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Jul 23, 2016

# ¿ Jul 20, 2016 06:31

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Zas posted:

if this was really Oshii's film then it might actually be good

it would be weird porn actually

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 09:14 on Sep 21, 2016

# ¿ Sep 21, 2016 08:59

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Jutsuka posted:

You're thinking of Masamune Shirow not Mamoru Oshii.

Oh yeah, duh. In that case, it would probably be something in that terrible Kerberos/Jin-Roh universe Oshii apparently considers his magnum opus

# ¿ Sep 22, 2016 03:29

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Hollismason posted:

Oh I've never read the manga or any of the other movies. Apparently, everyone is gay though because cyberbrains?

its because shirow loves drawing big boobie anime babes

# ¿ Sep 24, 2016 06:17

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Mantis42 posted:

Sounds to me they made ScarJo star in the wrong manga adaptation.

That's about the most suitable property in the entire canon of Japanese media to adapt. If there's some sort of patreon or gofundme where I can pay money to prevent the Naruto live-action movie from being made please show me immediately

# ¿ Apr 1, 2017 20:29

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Young Freud posted:

Box Office Mojo is reporting a 7.66 million dollar Friday. It got third place, after Boss Baby and Beauty And The Beast.

What were the expectations?

# ¿ Apr 1, 2017 20:30

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

freudorbison posted:

Supposedly the worldwide gross (including US) is around $59 million. At this point I'd be surprised if the box office totals didn't cover the production budget, but I highly doubt this will have much traction in the next few weeks.
And folks were trying to convince me that GitS was a household name. Do tweens even GitS?

GitS is well known because it's one of the few animes that conforms to the genre conventions of American nerd media and is thus accepted by American nerds, plus the 95 movie is interesting enough as a film that it's accepted by movie nerds

That's essentially all it has going for it. It's not a very good or interesting property in an absolute sense

# ¿ Apr 3, 2017 21:39

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

OAquinas posted:

Looking forward to the gritty reboot of My Neighbor Totoro.

There's a Naruto movie in production

gohmak posted:

The movie would have been better if it had tits, exploding heads and an Asian lead.

same

# ¿ Apr 3, 2017 23:48

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Milky Moor posted:

Are you serious, my dude?

edit: "Japanese people are self-loathing", "They worship white people", "[that actress] was playing an American bitch", why wasn't the mom a tiger mom, why didn't they cast a non-Japanese Asian actress in a Japanese role (like that hasn't been a minefield historically), we want to see a new Asian-American movie star - why didn't they cast Michelle Yeoh?, 'edited for length and clarity'? They flip-flop between 'why would a Japanese company make white robots' and 'JAPANESE PEOPLE ARE ALL hosed UP AND LOVE WHITE PEOPLE'

edit 2: Okay, I'll bite. What perspective is this? Beyond "four Asian-Americans think ScarJo was the Bad Choice but can't clearly elucidate why", of course.

so im not sure if you've noticed this but american and more broadly western views of japan are insanely racist. when you inject into that environment a self-loathing japanese-american talking poo poo on their ethnic homeland and thus legitimating the gut feelings of white liberals that the japanese are diseased and pathological subhumans the whole situation just becomes an apocalyptic singularity of racism

i've seen like 3 separate japanese-american writers put out articles that do exactly this in the last 18 months or so

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Apr 6, 2017

# ¿ Apr 5, 2017 23:51

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Sir Kodiak posted:

Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't this make anime effectively post-racial? Like, if the form dictates that visible characteristics are purely for visual readability, or to represent the character's personality or whatever, then what do we mean when we say that Major is ethnically Japanese in the anime? Given that race is a social construct built around appearance.

well her name is motoko kusanagi

white people in manga/anime are canonically blonde haired, blue eyed and huge-nosed. really the only perceptibly white thing about the major is eye color, and maybe skin color but japanese people irl are pretty light skinned so

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Apr 6, 2017

# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 00:55

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 14:31

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Shageletic posted:

I in turn find it weird that you wouldn't think Japanese Americans that actually have to navigate the hosed exoticizing and stereotyping and depriving of economic opportunities that happens to them due to living here wouldn't have more weight accorded to their views regarding an American film than people that live in another country.

I was talking about their views on society and politics in the modern nation-state of Japan, not their views on this film per se. IMO Japanese-American opinions regarding that have about as much weight as do Irish-American opinions on The Troubles, especially when they appear to play directly into sensationalist, orientalist, and racist caricatures of the modern nation-state of Japan

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Apr 6, 2017

# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 10:42

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > Ghost in the Shell: White Wash Complex