George Takei has taken to the internet to voice his displeasure at the all-white shortlist for the film adaptation of “Akira”. He has used his twitter account to talk about the issue, and now The Advocate have given him a platform to elaborate on the casting issue.
When asked whether he was surprised at Warner Brothers’ shortlist for the film, he said, “It’s not a surprise because it’s been a Hollywood tradition. For example, when I was very young, I read Paul Buck’s epic novel of China, ‘The Good Earth’. And that film, all of the principal major roles were cast with Caucasians. As a matter of fact, Luise Rainer, who played the wife, won an Oscar for that. Paul Muni was her husband. It’s an old Hollywood tradition that we’ve always been battling, not just Hollywood but Broadway too, if you remember ‘Miss Saigon’ and the furor over that.”
He went on to say that while he recognizes Hollywood still has issues to overcome, he feels the studio should have learned their lesson by now. “…[T]he audience has changed now, and I’m surprised Warner Bros. isn’t keeping up with the audience. The manga and anime phenomenon is mostly white in this country. It originated in Japan, and, of course, it has a huge Asian fan following. But it’s the multi-ethnic Americans who are fans of Akira and manga. The idea of buying the rights to do that and in fact change it seems rather pointless. If they’re going to do that, why don’t they do something original, because what they do is offend Asians, number 1; number 2, they offend the fans. The same thing happened with M. Night Shyamalan. He cast his project [The Last Airbender] with non-Asians and it’s an Asian story, and the film flopped. I should think that they would learn from that, but I guess big studios go by rote, and the tradition in Hollywood has always been to buy a project, change it completely and flop with it. I think it’s pointless, so I thought I would save Warner Bros. a bit of failure by warning them of what will most likely happen if they continue in that vein.”
You can read more of Takei’s interview in “The Advocate” here.
