Ghost in the Shell

Ghost in the Shell is a pretty cool manga/anime and I recommend reading and watching any of it's multiple series if you get a chance. A near-future sci-fi that covers themes of humanity in an increasingly technology dominated world, it manages to tell a good story with excellent visuals and action while at the same time talking intelligently about increasingly relevant topics and for the most part stays out of it's own ass, which can't be said about most of say, William Gibson's work on similar topics.

It is getting a live action movie coming in the next year or so and there is some controversy surrounding the casting of Scarlett Johansson as the central character Motoko Kusanagi, as the name might imply, Kusanagi is Japanese, well, probably and there is some concern about whitewashing when an American actress takes the role, this is unfortunately pretty common but is it a problem specifically in this instance?

Well, probably, first the arguments in favor as I see them. From a story perspective there is no need for Kusanagi to be a particular ethnicity, the character is a cyborg with a completely artificial body and can look like anything she wants to, and her depiction in the manga and the anime don't really have stereotypical Japanese features particularly so it isn't like there is an image to keep up, hell the character design changed a couple times between series anyway so it isn't even consistent there. The story can be told no matter what the actors look like so in a sense it shouldn't matter.
Really, that reasoning should justify the casting of anyone as any role, if a story is worth telling it shouldn't matter what the actors look like.

Notice I said should, the problem is we don't actually live in a post racial society and people who aren't white are still underrepresented basically everywhere, so taking a major role that, regardless of the justifications I wrote about, really should be played by a Japanese woman and replacing her with a white person, no matter how skilled an actress she is, is pretty hard to see as anything but blatant racism and an example of how little the studios trust both non-white actors to lead roles as well as how little they trust white Americans to go to their movies.

Which is sort of ironic given that they licensed a Japanese property to make a movie out of, I mean, themes of technology overtaking humanity aren't exactly unique to Ghost in the Shell, if they just wanted to make an action/cyberpunk style movie they surely could have, but they picked the property for it's name and then chose to change the main character and face of the franchise because they don't think enough tickets will sell otherwise.

Basically it shouldn't matter, and if we lived in a society with true equality it wouldn't matter, but we don't, so it does, and it means I am going to have to make a tough choice whether or not to see the film next year or whenever it comes out. And I probably will choose not to.