Day: April 13, 2016

I use to be- and still am, a fan of certain types of anime. Especially television and film series that focus on conceptual ideas and or thinking as well as futuristic soceities (this would include shows such as Cowboy Bebop and Fullmetal Alchemist).  Thus it was no surprise that when a live-action re make of the film ‘Ghost in a Shell’ was announced that I was more than interested.

The original anime ‘Ghost in a Shell’ directed by Mamoru Oshii was created in 1995  (more than twenty years ago), as IMDB fronts as it’s sysnoposis the film is about“A cyborg policewoman and her partner [as they] hunt [for] a mysterious and powerful hacker called the Puppet Master.”

It is surprisingly a very philosophical film and possibly not to far off from our own future. One of the films main themes focuses on rise in technology. The film itself is set in 2029 were society has become“interconnected by a vast electronic network that permeates every aspect of life.” 

Questions the film pose are, “What exactly is the definition of ‘human’ in a society where a mind can be copied and the body replaced with a synthetic form?”, “What exactly is the ‘ghost’ —the human soul— in the cybernetic body, or ‘shell’?”, and “Where is the boundary between human and machine when the differences between the two become more philosophical than physical?” For some these questions may be confronting but for me personally they are ideals I think about quite often, hence my interest in the film and future project.

The protagonist of the film is Major Motoko Kusanagi (草薙 素子) who is a a fictional law-enforcement division of the real Japanese National Public Safety Commission as well as an augmented-cybernetic human. The character can be seen in the above image, recently it was announced she would be played by Scarlett Johansson. To many this was extremely controversial.

Although Scarlett Johansson is Polish-american (western) and the film is of Japanese heritage- this comes as no real surprise. Generally speaking the American film industry (especially Los Angeles based and major studios) have always aimed to keep their majority of characters western so that the masses of un-racially diverse Americans can relate to these redesigned commercially produced characters. This is consistently happening and examples are foreign remakes of films that never needed to be re-made to begin with. A prime example is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, there are two versions one Swedish the original and another American, both very similar and both received mainly critical acclaim the main difference; language.

An article I read recently gives an interesting insight into why Americans watch less foreign films and are less tolerable to foreign languages on screen.
“As so many American independent films use short theatrical runs to promote their ancillary releases, “companies are releasing 30 movies a year because of VOD [as well as other platforms like Netflix],”the marketplace [has become] so crowded, that the theaters that would be playing foreign-language films don’t have enough room.”

In regards to all this and referencing back to the film ‘Ghost in a Shell’ what you may not know is that the android protagonist within the film was in fact based off a western ideal of an american women. The character in the 1995 film was also intended to have an androgynous face which did not show much emotion thus leaving the character more open to interpretation.

Overall I believe in keeping to a level of tradition, if you are creating a film based off source material of a different culture it is important not to appropriate that culture as well as giving respect to the original material.
In this case it would be casting an actor with Japanese heritage, instead of artificially creating the aesthetics of the race which a VFX production company associated with the production are apparently working upon- this would be to give Scarlett more of an aesthetic Asian character design, (tests were done with the company Lola VFX who also did the aging affect on Brad Pitt in the ‘Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ but they have yet to confirm their involvement).

For more information on the project click this link here and It will guide you to the original sourced article.