Token Casting in Alita: Battle Angel!

The new trailer dropped yesterday for Alita: Battle Angel set for release on the most crowded release day, December 21st.  I had hopes for it as a long delayed James Cameron project, I heard him say Alita would be his next project when he was at Comic Con in 2002 for Solaris.  Then, there was the announcement that Robert Rodriguez would be directing the film, his early films are brilliant, but lately his movies are hollow and lifeless.  The part of Alita, she was known as Gally in the manga, was then said to be played by Rosa Salazar.  One of her aliases was Yoko Dornburg, which points to the character’s Asian heritage.  So you can see that they took the Asian likeness of the original manga character and CG’d it on Salazar.  Nothing new.  Christoph Waltz’s character is named Daisuke Ido, obviously Asian, renamed Dyson Ido for the movie.  You can just look at rest of the cast list; Ed Skrein, Jennifer Connelly, Eiza Gonzalez, Michelle Rodriguez, Mahershala Ali, which is diverse, but what seems to be missing is again Hollywood’s problem, no Asians in an Asian based story.  It was revealed later that the Scrapyard is near Kansas City, Missouri, but this is another Ghost in the Shell (2017).   

Ghost in the Shell is based on the Masamune Shirow manga and brilliant adapted in the 1995 Mamoru Oshii anime.  The main character is Major Motoko Kusanagi.  In the 2017 movie, she is played by Scarlett Johansson.  There is a history of whitewashing for these films, Emile Hirsch played the character originally named Go Mifune Americanized to Speed Racer in the translation in the 2008 film.  Justin Chatwin played Goku in Dragonball: Evolution (2009).  Tom Cruise played Bill Cage in the film Edge of Tomorrow (2014) who was Keiji Kiriya in the All You Need is Kill manga.  Gary Daniels played Kenshiro in the 1995 Fist of the North Star movie.  Jack Armstrong played The Guyver in two films, but the manga had the original Guyver, Sho Fukamachi.  Netflix adapted the manga Death Note with Light Yagami changed to Light Turner played by Nat Wolff.  It looks like Hollywood is trying to chase down a new franchise like the comic books and now manga.  They take the stories from manga and anime, the designs like in the case of Alita: Battle Angel, but the casting is white washed.  

There is potential there, anime has been popular world wide, slightly niche compared to American comic books, but it may play strong with the Asian markets (if cast properly).  It seems like the Americanized manga films are thirty years behind, no one has the bold vision to cast Asians, so these adaptations will flounder.  The potential is really seen in the Japanese live action films, Battle Royale, the 2000 film which many fans say was stolen for Hunger Games.  A full Japanese cast of course.   There was a 2015 Attack on Titan film based on the popular manga.  I thought the Gantz (2010) movie based on the manga (which would be rated R) was fun.  Blood: The Last Vampire (2009) was also entertaining.  My favorite though was the live action Space Battleship Yamato (2010) which had effects that didn’t look off the shelf and actually improved on the anime story!  They had the navigator girl, Yuki Mori, as a pilot and she actually knocks out the hero, very not Japanese and I loved it!

The Japanese adaptations are successful, last year there was a Fullmetal Alchemist movie.  Also, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure from Takashi Miike.  A Blade of the Immortal movie, also from Miike, it was released on April 2017.  There has been a film of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira in development.  Also, studios have been trying to bring Robotech to the screen, based on the Super Dimension Fortress Macross (1982) anime series.  The test for the viability of Asian casts in film will be Crazy Rich Asians to be released on August 15th.  It is based on the bestseller by Kevin Kwan.  The last time there was a predominantly Asian cast was in The Joy Luck Club (1993) based on the 1989 Amy Tan novel.  The appeal is not only setting films in Asia, especially if it is not part of the story, but also a number of Asian actors. Bingbing Li is in the upcoming The Meg, out on August 10th, a new character who was not in the Steve Alten novel.  Also, it looks like a Chinese setting, I guess to appeal to the Chinese audience.  She was incredible in The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) that teamed up Jackie Chan and Jet Li as the White-Haired Witch.  The lead actress in that film, Liu Yifei has the lead in Disney’s live action Mulan.  

There is also Tian Jing who is in Legendary films starting with The Great Wall (2016) directed by Zhang Yimou. She played Commander Lin Mae, who led the Crane Troop, female warriors who leap off the wall to take on the invading creatures called Tao Tieh.  There was criticism that the lead actor, Matt Damon, was a white savior.  His character, William, is an archer who allies with the defenders of the Great Wall.  William is not given awards and praise by the Chinese for his part in stopping the Tao Tieh, his character is not superior to the Chinese warriors, just risky, the film depicts the Wall defenders as brave and unyielding.  There is not a lack of Asian actresses who could play Alita, besides all of the actresses mentioned before, there is Karen Fukuhara who played Katana in Suicide Squad (2016), Rinko Kikuchi who is Akane in Westworld and was also in Pacific Rim (2013), Jamie Chung who currently the mutant Blink in The Gifted, and Ellen Wong who is Jenny Chey in GLOW and also Knives Chau in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010).  Alita: Battle Angel faces competition from Aquaman, the Transformers film Bumblebeee, the Will Ferrell comedy Holmes & Watson with Mary Poppins Returns opening on December 19th, Alita will need all of her Panzer Kunst to face these opponents in the box office Motorball arena.   

#BattleAngelAlita, #MasamuneShirow, #RobertRodriguez, #GhostintheShell