Gee I dunno, are there a lot of thousand year old white men with pointy ears out there? Ever see a white kid who’s hair was a black-bordred featureless blob colored canary yellow? Or an Egyptian guy with bright orange skin, and his torso permanently cranked 90° away from his direction of travel when he walked?
Okay, fine, say we throw that out. Let’s say, no matter what the Earthly culture the setting is based on, if the story doesn’t specifically involve racial politics, we just forget about the actors’ race.
Now, let’s do Lord of the Rings. We cast all the Rohirrim with black actors—Denethor is played by Henry Cele. Doesn’t really matter. Not that important to the setting, or what the author had in mind, right?
Okay, forget fantasy, or what it’s based on—let’s try something else. A movie about the early Aztecs, and the founding of Tenochtitlan. We cast the Jonas Brothers as the leads, with Rutger Hauer as Huitzlipochtli. Eh?
Look, whatever other issues we’re getting into, completely and intentionally disregarding an a big element of the setting itself—what the people are supposed to look like, even implicitly—isn’t being artistically respectful to the work; and claiming that how the characters have appeared before through the limitations of a different medium, or that because they have elements of outright fantasy associated with them grants one carte blanche in reinterpreting them is being disingenuous.
I’m not entirely certain what point you think you’re making here. Most of this sounds like an argument for my position, not against it. The Egyptian thing, for example, is almost a parallel to what we’re talking about, except that I don’t think anyone’s ever made a movie directly from a set of hieroglyphics. If they did, however, I’d expect you to be livid if they didn’t paint the actors bright orange as not being artistically respectful to the original work.
You’re ignoring the argument, here, though. The question is, if there’s no reason for the character’s look to be tied to a real-world culture, does it matter what race the actors are? To counter this, you’ve taken an example of a work where there is a specific reason for the race of the character to be tied to a real-world culture (Middle Earth is specifically intended to be pre-historic Europe), and an actual, real-world culture.
I think the characters in the cartoon were deliberately not supposed to look like any real-world race. Which is going to cause some issues when you try to cast real people as these characters. The fact that they cast a couple of actors who were a few shades lighter than the characters isn’t that big a deal.
Now, casting all the heroes as white people, and all the villains as dark skinned people is more of a concern. Ironically, from what I understand, this was largely done in reaction to the complaining about the races of the characters in the first place. Still, not the best solution to what really was never a problem in the first place.
Your point seemed to be that, since Egyptians aren’t really bright orange in real life, if you’re making a movie about Ancient Egypt (adapted from said hieroglyphs, for this argument—I’d guess as a workaround for a new WGA strike ), there’s no reason to cast Egyptian or middle-eastern actors, because the original art was clearly not intended to represent a real people’s ethnicity, because of how it was stylized.
My point is that the Avatar cultures were specifically based on real-world cultures. The “Air Nomads” (airbenders) were Tibetan, “Water Tribe” were a blend of Inuit and Native American, the “Earth Kingdom” was China and east asia—a couple of minor characters even show up with Korean surnames and traditional clothing, in one episode. The magic “bending” forms are based on real world schools of martial arts. All the writing in the show is in actual traditional Chinese. Is the argument against that “well, since it’s not literally supposed to be Earth, there’s no reason to try to be consistent with the setting?”
I think it’s pretty clear that this isn’t the case—there are plenty of characters that do look plainly asian, or inuit, or whathaveyou. Characters that don’t so much can be explained by the art style of the series—it’s influenced by anime, with the big ol’ expressive eyeballs? Like Bambi? For various reasons, the depictions of race in anime tends to be more ambiguous than in western animation—look, here’s Miyamoto Musashi. And another one.—that doesn’t mean the races are supposed to be ambiguous, in the story. No more than Charlie Brown is supposed to be a hydrocephalus victim.
You mention the eye color, specifically, as a reason why characters from the show couldn’t be based on a “real” race. Yes, some characters have blue eyes. And they’re from a people known for having a magical ability to control water. A lot of characters from the same show who have an ability to control fire have bright gold eyes. Giving characters in a work of fiction odd colored eyes, especially when linked with some kind of magic, is not exactly unheard of.
Ah, right. OK, I didn’t know about that – or the surrounding displeasure… which makes sense given Le Guin’s concerns around the assumption of European protagonists in fantasy… and your comments are much more understandable in this context.
Kinda, sorta… oh, OK. I still don’t think based on the animation that they’re very Inuit, but I’ll certainly grant that they’re not pale skinned Nordic types.
If it had been me casting actors for the live action, and assuming that US actors were a prerequisite, I’d have gone with kids of mixed heritage… I’m thinking a look like Vanessa Hudgens for example, (European/Native American/Chinese/Filipino/Spanish) as a way to tone in with the animated source, make the characters look exotic, and not tie too closely to any one real-life ethnicity.
That’s one of the “fantastic touches” that **Ranchoth **mentions… and to be fair, I watch enough anime where the supposedly Japanese characters have, for example, purple eyes, or green hair that no one even remarks on, that blue eyes are practically mundane.
People are always going to find something to carp about – I’m reminded of the teacup-storm surrounding the supposed message that was being sent by having Jango Fett(being the clone template) played in Star Wars II & III by a Mexican.
Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Do the characters in Avatar not match any real-world race because they’re stylized, or because the show’s creators were deliberately trying to decouple race and culture, in an effort to emphasize the other-worldliness of the show’s setting?
Cultures, yes, undeniably. But you’re the first person to mention culture in this thread. Everyone else is talking about race.
One of the reasons race tends to be ambiguous in Japanese animation is that Japan is an extremely homogenous culture, and so there’s less concern with giving characters racial identifiers, as the audience is likely to project the dominant ethnicity in their culture onto the characters. In a more heterogenous and race-conscious society like the US, you don’t have that assumption in the audience. The audience is going to be actively trying to identify the race of the characters. As such, I don’t think it’s entirely coincidental that the show was done in a style that tends to obscure race. Nor, for that matter, do I think it’s an accident that the very first characters we see in the show are a pair of kids dressed like Inuit, but with fairer skin and blue eyes.
Except that Sokka doesn’t have any magical abilities at all. Neither does his grandmother, or any one else in the Southern Water tribe, other than Kitara. But they all have blue eyes. So eye color clearly isn’t directly linked to bending ability. And if you want to argue that the blue eyes are an artifact of them being a group of people in a fantastic setting, well, I won’t disagree with you there, because that’s the foundation of my argument: They aren’t a real ethnic group, they’re a bunch of people living in a fantasy world. Therefore, complaining that the actors cast to play them are the wrong ethnicity doesn’t make any sense, because the “proper” ethnicity doesn’t exist in the real world.
I’m not entirely sure what my take on this subject is, but I will add this - Avatar is an American TV show, not Japanese; while the style is anime, it’s erroneous to base opinions on it as if it were a Japanese programme. I admit that I was initially surprised when I heard that Avatar wasn’t Japanese but it really isn’t. The voices were by American actors because it was an American show.
The characters, to me, definitely looked like ordinary Japanese anime characters, and they would to most people, which is one of the reasons it would be jarring to have most of the live-action actors not be Asian at all.
Contrast it with Ben 10, which has a similar style fusing anime and Western cartooning but has main characters who are (for all the main characters and most of the recurring characters - except Julie, a regular in the cartoon but not the live action, who is Asian) definitely White European in their appearance.
Point of order sir, I and others have used the term “ethnicity” in the discussion. Ethnicity does suggest common race, but also common heritage and culture (and language, and religion, etc).
Are you serious? Considering all the effort they put into building the Asian tone of the setting of the series; considering all the characters that do resemble members of real-world races, even with the cartoon stylization, the creators decide “well, let’s now specifically make the characters not actually resemble any of the races from any of the places we’re basing this world on”? I don’t think that’s a reasonable idea at all.
Let’s see…I’ve been winding my way back through the spaghetti of posts, and it goes something like (to sum up):
[•b]spark240** Asks what about the Water Tribe makes it so you need any specific ethnicity when casting their actors, especially since skin color/race wasn’t the motif of the story.
•I reply, somewhat snarkily, attempting to make a point, that the ethnicity of the characters was important in regards to being part of the established setting—using examples of stories featuring cultures that would have had a specific racial makeup (prehistoric saxons; ancient Aztecs), and how casting the wrong raced actors for the roles would have messed with that part of the setting. (I think I tried to be implicit that Avatar was such a story, in regards to it’s cultures. Though I don’t think I spelled that out as much as I could.)
•You (Miller) reply by asking why, if there’s no reason to tie the characters look to a real-world culture, why the race of the actors matters. (Though I interpreted your comment as on my snarky examples above as acknowledgment that they were situations where the race of a character would (legitimately) be tied to their culture—if it was a real world culture, or or tied to one.)
•I said that there was a specific reason to link the Avatar characters in particular to a real world culture(s).
•You reply that yes, but that I’m talking about culture, not race.
Look, maybe I’m really missing a step that badly. But I don’t see it as that big of a leap to see the fictional cultures in Avatar as being tied close enough to real-world cultures where the characters’ race would be a factor, and thus should be when casting, especially when you consider the overall setting as a whole. I’d like to hope I didn’t do that badly in spelling that out. :o
(Bolding mine) Really? And not that, say, because the anime animation style is popular in the west at this moment, among artists and audiences? Or at it lends itself well to an action/adventure/comedy/drama series? Or it lends itself to the particular setting better than Tex Avery-styled cartoons? It’s because they wanted to* deliberately obscure the races of the characters?*
I’m sorry, but I think that’s a leap. I don’t know for certain what went through the creators’ heads, and no one else can, unless they tell us themselves. But from all I know about the series, all I’ve seen in the series, and what they did or were trying to do with it, I simply don’t think your conclusion follows at all. I don’t think it’s consistent with what we’ve seen on the show as it aired, and I don’t think it’s a particularly likely approach for the creators to want to take beforehand.
With all respect, this is splitting hairs. The Southern Water Tribe, in the story, had suffered genocidal campaigns of exterminating their members with bending ability—other water tribes had plenty of benders (and weird colored eyes), and the Fire Nation had even more of their own. That’s not even accounting for other in-universe explanations (trace bender genes floating around the non-bender gene pool; possible influence of natural magic), or stylistic explanations (like how all the cultures of the Avatar world have the name of their affiliated element in their name, and wear appropriately color-coded clothing, planetwide, all the time).
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And if you want to argue that the blue eyes are an artifact of them being a group of people in a fantastic setting, well, I won’t disagree with you there, because that’s the foundation of my argument: They aren’t a real ethnic group, they’re a bunch of people living in a fantasy world. Therefore, complaining that the actors cast to play them are the wrong ethnicity doesn’t make any sense, because the “proper” ethnicity doesn’t exist in the real world.
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And…I fear we’re going around in circles. I say a people in a work of fiction is pretty clearly based on a real world group; their culture is based on that people’s, their appearance is based on that people. But you say because there are some differences—they have pointy ears, or they have a different name, or it’s explicitly not our planet the story takes place on—all the other evidence just…doesn’t matter? Thus since it can’t be the exact same ethnic group, it can just as well be any ethnic group?
I don’t think that follows, and I really don’t think that’s enough to justify throwing chunks of the work’s setting out the window.
I know. That’s precisely my point. If it were a Japanese production, it would not be particularly notable that none of the characters have an evident real-world ethnicity. Because it is an American production, that fact suddenly becomes significant.
Ranchoth, I agree that we’re going around in circles at this point. I don’t think that there are any areas of our arguments that either of us need to clarify.
In the TV show at least, all of the “races” were evidently similar enough that a person from one tribe could appear to be a person from another, merely by changing clothes. It was a repeating plot point, and a major one.
Thus, whatever “race” they are, they must all look “racially” pretty similar (or have a similar mix). It cannot be the case that tribe A is racially A, while tribe B is racially B. If that were the case, then the gang wore fire-nation clothes and wandered around in the fire nation, they would have been pretty obvious …
Thus, making all of the fire nation dark-skinned is gonna be a problem. It would not have been a problem to have them all white, or all oriental, or all a sorta mix of everything.
Even though not all of the members of the Water Tribe are waterbenders, they do all have a racial proclivity towards waterbending. Two non-bender waterfolk could have a waterbending child, but they could not have an earthbending child, nor could two earthfolk have a waterbending child.
Not quite. When the main characters infiltrated the Fire Nation, they did not pass as being of Fire Nation ancestry, nor did they try to. Instead, they claimed to be from the colonies in the lands formerly controlled by the Earth Kingdom. So the typical Fire Nation person on the street could tell that they weren’t Fire Kingdom, but couldn’t tell the difference between Earthers and Waterers (and Air Nomads, but that’s more understandable, given that they were thought to be extinct). This could mean that the other three nations really did look similar and that it was just the Fire Nation who were distinctive, but more likely, it just reflects Fire Nation insularity and a cultural tendency to divide the world into “us” and “not-us” (a tendency which is, of course, found to at least some degree in all human cultures).
My impression was that they passed themselves off as “fire nation” children who happened to be from the colonies, not as earthers and water-ers. Aang gets sent to a school for fire-nation children, for example; he explained his odd choice of vocabulary, and lack of knowledge of current fire nation-slang, by the fact he was from the colonies - no-one raised a concern about his appearance, though he had to wear a headband to hide his tattoos.
I doubt an earth or water-nation child would be sent to a fire nation school, as allegedly they were dispised and oppressed colonial subjects.
Edit: moreover, the disguises sometimes went the other way: Prince Zukov and his uncle, for example, pretended to not be fire nation - and that is made very clear.
Hm, true, Zuko did pass as an Earther, and didn’t have to offer any explanation. This was probably helped by the fact that his most prominent feature is an obvious burn scar, which would naturally lead people to think that he’d been fighting against the Fire Nation, but it still indicates that there’s not all that much difference.
It’s been a while since I saw that (amazingly terrible) movie, but I remember being struck by how the main characters from the Water tribe were distinctly white looking, while the rest of the tribe were much darker skinned. It was to the point that I remember wondering if they had changed the story so that they were adopted. If my recollection is right, that would be a lot more conspicuous of a choice than if they had made the entire tribe white looking. Does anybody else remember this?
I’ve seen a couple of stills from the movie that showed a lot of Water Tribe extras who weren’t white actors—and IIRC, I heard one movie reviewer who said he was confused at first when he saw that, thinking at first they were going to make it a plot point that Sokka and Katara’s family were immigrants, or something, but no—apparently, the extras were actually Inuit. As they actually filmed part of the movie in Greenland. :smack:
), there’s no reason to cast Egyptian or middle-eastern actors, because the original art was clearly not intended to represent a real people’s ethnicity, because of how it was stylized.
I still don’t think based on the animation that they’re very Inuit, but I’ll certainly grant that they’re not pale skinned Nordic types.
