OMG I'm not dead, also a brief rant about the Avatar movie.
Sorry I haven't been posting. Busy making my film. Anyway, taking a few seconds aside to rant about something that's been bothering me a lot:
Avatar: The Last Airbender is a program that aired on Nickelodeon for the past three years. It's an American show that utilizes some Japanese "anime" elements, and is a huge critical and commercial success. The show aired during prime time and brought in around 5.6 million viewers regularly. Nickelodeon expects the franchise to bring in about $254 million in 2009. They've won numerous awards, including a Peabody Award (for "Unusually complex characters and healthy respect for the consequences of warfare"), 2 Pulcinella Awards, a prime-time Emmy and 5 Annie awards.
The thing is, the show is set in a fantasy world populated entirely by asian cultures and asian ethnic groups, and Nickelodeon is making a trilogy of big-budget live action films, and hope to make the franchise into "their Harry Potter". M. Night Shamalan is directing the trilogy and has told them that he thinks they have the next "Star Wars" on their hands. The first film is supposed to come out in 2010 and clearly they intend to make it big.
And so when the producers at Paramount went to cast their lead characters, they had the chance of a lifetime to finally break down barriers and cast some Asian American kids and other actors of color in the film, launching tons of careers. Since it's Hollywood most people expected that some of the actors would be white - maybe the hero of the film, maybe a few of the villains, they're all fair-skinned enough that it's at least plausible...but they all expected that the female lead ( http://iroh.org/screencaps/ep1/ep1-16.png ) and her brother would at least be cast as Hispanic, Black or Indian...but instead Paramount chose to go the safe route of casting all the leads with white actors, and then to add insult to injury they're casting all asian extras and villians...and they're having the actor and actress playing the Inuit-inspired characters get a tan. So they're acknowledging that these characters are brown skinned, but refusing to cast actors that naturally have that skin tone.
As an animator and someone who found Avatar very exciting as a 'step in the right direction' towards more mature and serious story-telling for the medium, this whole thing bothers me for a variety of reasons.
The main one is that, while I don't think animated products need live action adaptations, it's undeniable that re-doing something in live action format will broaden the market for it, and hopefully bring people back to the source material and make the audience for animation larger, and help people accept the idea that animation can be used to tell serious stories and isn't purely a children's medium.
I'm afraid that if Paramount persists with their terrible casting practices, their film may flop due to the boycotting (since they're very effectively alienating large chunks of their 5.6 million fanbase), and then instead of realizing it flopped because they alienated their audience, Hollywood producers will blame the source material, and decide that "animated plots" can't sell movie tickets and that "asian themes" don't sell tickets either.
So as an animator, I desperately want Avatar the franchise to succeed, for the sake of the 2D animation industry in America, but I can't get behind it morally because they're doing yellowface and tanface, and I worry that even casual viewers with no idea about the controversy will wonder why a bunch of white people are running around in Chinese robes and eating with chopsticks and living in Chinese houses, and why a white girl and boy are wearing Inuit fur robes and hunting with spears while leading asian extras in a war against other asian extras.
The program had a close relationship with MANAA (Media Action Network for Asian Americans) and the East-West Players, the former being used as cultural consultants for the program when it was on TV, and the latter being a place where they found a lot of their voice-over talent.
Here is MANAA's response to the issue:
http://www.manaa.org/lastairbender.html
Here is the East-West Players':
http://www.jedifreac.com/art/avatarchibiicons/EWPletter.pdf
Cartoon Brew also had something to say:
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/anime/the-whitewashing-of-avatar-the-last-airbender.html
The Washington Post talks about the casting of extras with ethnic minorities.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/01/AR2009030102088.html
Entertainment Weekly, the San Fransisco Chronicle, and various other news outlets have made some noise too, but Paramount/Viacom/Nickelodeon has maintained perfect silence, and given no response whatsoever to the angry letters, threats of boycott, and the protests taking place at the casting locations.
PS:
The most comprehensive resource on the topic can be found here:
http://aang-aint-white.livejournal.com/
And this is a lovely visual essay that helps explain why the insertion of white actors into the film's setting seems offensive to so many:
http://aang-aint-white.livejournal.com/1007.html
PPS:
5.6 MILLION VIEWERS. Now for a moment imagine that every one of those people goes to see the movie, so times 5.6 million by $10 a pop for tickets.
That's $56,000,000. Obviously not EVERY VIEWER will go, but also assume that part of that 5.6 million was 2-5 people sitting together at home watching the show, so say only 80% of the viewers show up at the box office, they'll show up with their families in tow, which will make up for the amount of non-shows.
Right now Fast and Furious did $70,950,500 this weekend. You can see other weekend numbers here:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/
Obviously Avatar has a long way to go beyond the fan base if they want to compete with those kinds of numbers...but the point is, they're alienating their original viewers and the end result will be that they're losing out on the people they SHOULD HAVE counted on to see the film. They had a core group of people who would have been behind them absolutely 100%, guaranteed money, and they're throwing that out-- or at least, risking a large chunk of it.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is a program that aired on Nickelodeon for the past three years. It's an American show that utilizes some Japanese "anime" elements, and is a huge critical and commercial success. The show aired during prime time and brought in around 5.6 million viewers regularly. Nickelodeon expects the franchise to bring in about $254 million in 2009. They've won numerous awards, including a Peabody Award (for "Unusually complex characters and healthy respect for the consequences of warfare"), 2 Pulcinella Awards, a prime-time Emmy and 5 Annie awards.
The thing is, the show is set in a fantasy world populated entirely by asian cultures and asian ethnic groups, and Nickelodeon is making a trilogy of big-budget live action films, and hope to make the franchise into "their Harry Potter". M. Night Shamalan is directing the trilogy and has told them that he thinks they have the next "Star Wars" on their hands. The first film is supposed to come out in 2010 and clearly they intend to make it big.
And so when the producers at Paramount went to cast their lead characters, they had the chance of a lifetime to finally break down barriers and cast some Asian American kids and other actors of color in the film, launching tons of careers. Since it's Hollywood most people expected that some of the actors would be white - maybe the hero of the film, maybe a few of the villains, they're all fair-skinned enough that it's at least plausible...but they all expected that the female lead ( http://iroh.org/screencaps/ep1/ep1-16.png ) and her brother would at least be cast as Hispanic, Black or Indian...but instead Paramount chose to go the safe route of casting all the leads with white actors, and then to add insult to injury they're casting all asian extras and villians...and they're having the actor and actress playing the Inuit-inspired characters get a tan. So they're acknowledging that these characters are brown skinned, but refusing to cast actors that naturally have that skin tone.
As an animator and someone who found Avatar very exciting as a 'step in the right direction' towards more mature and serious story-telling for the medium, this whole thing bothers me for a variety of reasons.
The main one is that, while I don't think animated products need live action adaptations, it's undeniable that re-doing something in live action format will broaden the market for it, and hopefully bring people back to the source material and make the audience for animation larger, and help people accept the idea that animation can be used to tell serious stories and isn't purely a children's medium.
I'm afraid that if Paramount persists with their terrible casting practices, their film may flop due to the boycotting (since they're very effectively alienating large chunks of their 5.6 million fanbase), and then instead of realizing it flopped because they alienated their audience, Hollywood producers will blame the source material, and decide that "animated plots" can't sell movie tickets and that "asian themes" don't sell tickets either.
So as an animator, I desperately want Avatar the franchise to succeed, for the sake of the 2D animation industry in America, but I can't get behind it morally because they're doing yellowface and tanface, and I worry that even casual viewers with no idea about the controversy will wonder why a bunch of white people are running around in Chinese robes and eating with chopsticks and living in Chinese houses, and why a white girl and boy are wearing Inuit fur robes and hunting with spears while leading asian extras in a war against other asian extras.
The program had a close relationship with MANAA (Media Action Network for Asian Americans) and the East-West Players, the former being used as cultural consultants for the program when it was on TV, and the latter being a place where they found a lot of their voice-over talent.
Here is MANAA's response to the issue:
http://www.manaa.org/lastairbender.html
Here is the East-West Players':
http://www.jedifreac.com/art/avatarchibiicons/EWPletter.pdf
Cartoon Brew also had something to say:
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/anime/the-whitewashing-of-avatar-the-last-airbender.html
The Washington Post talks about the casting of extras with ethnic minorities.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/01/AR2009030102088.html
Entertainment Weekly, the San Fransisco Chronicle, and various other news outlets have made some noise too, but Paramount/Viacom/Nickelodeon has maintained perfect silence, and given no response whatsoever to the angry letters, threats of boycott, and the protests taking place at the casting locations.
PS:
The most comprehensive resource on the topic can be found here:
http://aang-aint-white.livejournal.com/
And this is a lovely visual essay that helps explain why the insertion of white actors into the film's setting seems offensive to so many:
http://aang-aint-white.livejournal.com/1007.html
PPS:
5.6 MILLION VIEWERS. Now for a moment imagine that every one of those people goes to see the movie, so times 5.6 million by $10 a pop for tickets.
That's $56,000,000. Obviously not EVERY VIEWER will go, but also assume that part of that 5.6 million was 2-5 people sitting together at home watching the show, so say only 80% of the viewers show up at the box office, they'll show up with their families in tow, which will make up for the amount of non-shows.
Right now Fast and Furious did $70,950,500 this weekend. You can see other weekend numbers here:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/
Obviously Avatar has a long way to go beyond the fan base if they want to compete with those kinds of numbers...but the point is, they're alienating their original viewers and the end result will be that they're losing out on the people they SHOULD HAVE counted on to see the film. They had a core group of people who would have been behind them absolutely 100%, guaranteed money, and they're throwing that out-- or at least, risking a large chunk of it.