Kubo and the Two Strings

Went to see this with Zena today, it's kind of really good, it looks great, has an interesting story with fun and unique characters, doesn't really end how you'd expect it, and has a pretty excellent soundtrack.

I am still a bit conflicted on it, due to something completely unrelated to the story though, that would be the casting, it's... pretty white, and by that I mean basically everyone of importance is white as hell. This wouldn't be an issue except the thing is set in a fictional ancient Japan, a country which is not known for its large population of white Europeans even today.

The studio that made it tends to be fairly diverse in its casting and defended their choices for Kubo by claiming that those who were cast were the ones who ended up making sense, presumably based on line reads and such, but they made no mention of if they even tried to find Japanese actors to do the parts. They also say that most of the human characters were voiced by Japanese actors, George Takei takes a pretty high billing after all, but what they don't mention is that none of those are main characters and the entirety of their lines take maybe ten minutes of the movie total, if that, Takei's lines would fit in this paragraph with room to spare for example.

Heck even the soundtrack had it going, the primary music being done on the Shamisen, a traditional Japanese instrument. But the song you will all recognize is "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" Written by George Harrison, performed by Regina Spektor, and arranged by Dario Marianelli, none of whom are Japanese. Indeed Marianelli composed the entire score, and while he certainly did a lovely job, one does wonder about the process that went into getting an Italian composer to score an entire movie with Japanese instruments.

I mean, like, it's still a good movie, and none of the choices made seem to have bad ones from a quality perspective at least, the subject matter and design was handled respectfully and there is nothing offensive in content, but put in context of the entire problem with whitewashing that has been gaining attention of late it is pretty glaring.

In some world this movie was made with a Japanese cast and musicians, I wonder if it would be a better movie or not, I think perhaps it wouldn't hurt to find out sometime.