Though, let's be honest, we're not really able to see whether an actor is Chinese or Japanese, German or Swedish, so in those cases people only get pissed off when they read the actor's real name on the internet. I call that fake anger.
And then there's the interesting fact that if another race takes the role of an established white-skinned character, the audience is forced to praise it, otherwise you're an ignorant racist. I remember this when an old black lady was cast as Hermoine for a Harry Potter stage performance.
But for a while now there's this trend going on where white people are not allowed to have or do anything, and it's super cool to call them the devil. No reason. If you're born white, you're a suppresive shitlord. That'll teach you to be born white. That'll teach your parents to be white.
Some people would call that racism. Some.
But there's one special group of fictional characters I believe would do better with those "disgusting culture-stealing white people" representing them, and that's anime characters. And really, Japanese artists enabled this themselves.
When you look at manga and anime, the majority of characters, if not all of them, look like a caricature of the Western race (as it's based on the Western animation style). Them having Japanese names and living in Tokyo hardly makes them the common Japanese person, as they have giant eyes, long legs, and every eye and hair colour of the rainbow. You can definitely say that Western people possess more of those used colours naturally than the Japanese do. You can't make me believe that a girl with blonde hair and blue eyes is Japanese, just because she is named "Momoko".
So when Scarlett Johansson was announced to be cast for the main lead for a movie adaptation of an anime series called "Ghost in the Shell", fans lost every one of their shits, and immediately attacked her in their blogs and started talking about other movies that ruined their favourite franchise, like the live action Avatar movie, as if that's relevant at all.Avatar made the grave mistake of not using actors that looked like the original cast, and I agree that was some lazy casting, nevertheless, I always thought the Avatar boy himself to look fairly accurate, and that's because the original character also much looks like a wide-eyed, white-skinned little boy. That kid does not look Asian.
And that's the point I'm making here; Japan can keep on drawing their Western caricatures all they want, but when you make a movie and want to be "visually" accurate, then the Japanese themselves are not the first pick for the role.
Having that said, if you hate an anime movie adaptation for not using Japanese actors, then why don't you hate the anime itself? That too is just about a bunch of Western-looking people claiming to be Japanese.
Let's hate the Ghost in the Shell movie after it comes out and is actually shit. The Japanese have money, don't they. They can make their own movies and all you hipsters can go see their productions instead. But that doesn't mean that none of the other countries on the planet are allowed to take a foreign creation and make a movie about it. It's insane to think that way.
As dumb as the Avatar movie was, I don't think Shyamalan did it to insult the show or other races.
