Poll of the Day > Does it matter to you if most of the main cast of the new live action aladdin...

(+) Yeah! (+)

...movie are not middle eastern? Iirc disney was having some trouble casting actors for the role of jasmine and aladdin specifically. Those 2 roles i remember reading. Maybe this applied to jafar and some of the other roles. The new beauty and the beast is the highest grossing movie of the yr still, so i'm not surprised disney is very eager to make a live aladdin. Does this personally matter to you? And do you think this matters to most americans and other moviegoers around the world if the actors are not middle eastern?

I think it'd be way better that way, but tbh I won't see the movie no matter what they do, so w/e
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for most cases no, but aladdin is a pretty distinctly middle eastern story as long as it still takes place where it does, with genies and middle eastern architecture
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Just cast Jake Gyllenhal as Aladdin.
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Did anyone complain when they didn't cast french people in Beauty and the Beast?
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They just announced the cast today though

https://mobile.twitter.com/Disney/status/886294265667530752

Supposedly the issue is that they were looking for middle eastern actors who could both sing and dance, which is kind of a narrow niche in the USA.
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if they can cast black people as white characters why cant they cast white people as middle-eastern characters?
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Blighboy posted...

https://mobile.twitter.com/Disney/status/886294265667530752

"They're not white..."

"It's still white washing"

Ugh, these people I swear.
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What about ghosts in the shell with scarlett johanson? A lot of people claimed that was whitewashing. The studios didn't seem to care. Maybe a lot of the audience cared as i heard that movie bombed at the box office. Heard big hero 6 was kinda whitewashed too.

UT1999 posted...

What about ghosts in the shell with scarlett johanson? A lot of people claimed that was whitewashing. The studios didn't seem to care. Maybe a lot of the audience cared as i heard that movie bombed at the box office. Heard big hero 6 was kinda whitewashed too.

ghost in the shell isnt a big deal because the major being japanese doesnt really have anything to do with the story, in fact she has been in and out of several different bodies so her being white isnt a particularly odd choice
Aladdin is a story about middle eastern royalty, so unless they are changing the location, they should definitely be middle eastern.
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It'd be racist to have an Arab character being a thief who has to lie to get a woman.
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^
thor is about a god who becomes a hero based off of the male god. didnt stop marvel from making a female thor.

if you can do that then you can cast anyone as anything
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Krazy_Kirby posted...

^
thor is about a god who becomes a hero based off of the male god. didnt stop marvel from making a female thor.

if you can do that then you can cast anyone as anything

There's a female thor? I thought that was BetaRayBill
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Krazy_Kirby posted...

if you can do that then you can cast anyone as anything

Except a white person, because datz racist.
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The original Aladdin myth is Chinese IIRC and there was enough travel in the ancient world that a white thief could easily have existed in the middle east.
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Blighboy posted...

The original Aladdin myth is Chinese IIRC

I thought the original Aladdin myth was in and of itself an internalized story of 1001 Arabian Nights.
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Lokarin posted...

Blighboy posted...

The original Aladdin myth is Chinese IIRC

I thought the original Aladdin myth was in and of itself an internalized story of 1001 Arabian Nights.

Oh sorry you're right, it takes place in China but the myth itself is not from there.
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Krazy_Kirby posted...

^
thor is about a god who becomes a hero based off of the male god. didnt stop marvel from making a female thor.

if you can do that then you can cast anyone as anything

And they changed the story of thor around it to make that fine, and they can do they same with alladin, the question is will they? because I have a feeling its just gonna be non ME people thrown into a ME setting like there is nothing weird about that
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TheSlinja posted...

Krazy_Kirby posted...

^
thor is about a god who becomes a hero based off of the male god. didnt stop marvel from making a female thor.

if you can do that then you can cast anyone as anything

And they changed the story of thor around it to make that fine, and they can do they same with alladin, the question is will they? because I have a feeling its just gonna be non ME people thrown into a ME setting like there is nothing weird about that

they have done that with black people.

for example in the tv show merlin both guinevere and her brother were black despite being white in the stories.
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are you not listening to what im saying?
I dont care if they change the race or genders or whatever as long as they write the story differently to accomodate this
All I'm saying is if this is just the same alladin as last time with random races thrown into it its gonna be wonky
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TheSlinja posted...

are you not listening to what im saying?
I dont care if they change the race or genders or whatever as long as they write the story differently to accomodate this
All I'm saying is if this is just the same alladin as last time with random races thrown into it its gonna be wonky

you also said you thought they were just going to throw non ME people into a ME setting with no explanation. the point is that has been done numerous times already with other races so there shouldnt be a big problem now.

if people complain about it then they better also complain about all the other times
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I dont care what other people complain about, I'm not other people so dont lump me in with what was and wasn't okay for them
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Blighboy posted...

takes place in China

So technically, they should have made Aladdin Chinese in 1992.
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TheSlinja posted...

for most cases no, but aladdin is a pretty distinctly middle eastern story as long as it still takes place where it does, with genies and middle eastern architecture

Technically speaking, Aladdin (the Disney movie) takes place in a non-existent fantasy world that has similarities to real world Arabia but which really ISN'T real world Arabia in any meaningful sense.

Try to find Agrabah on a map or in a history book.

That being said, Agrabah is basically the Baghdad of Arabian Nights with the serial numbers filed off, so you could argue that it's basically the same... but that level of disconnect DOES help justify looser restrictions on casting. Especially since the original Arabian Nights blurred Arabic, Chinese, and Indian fairy tales together into a mismash anyway, and the (itself somewhat mythical) Baghdad of the era was one of the more cosmopolitan cities in terms of people of different ethnicities being in the same place at the same time.



UT1999 posted...

Heard big hero 6 was kinda whitewashed too.

Big Hero 6 wasn't "whitewashed" as much as it was radically different from the comic it was based on in pretty much every possible way except for the characters' names.

That being said, the original Big Hero 6 comic was kind of racist as fuck itself in a lot of ways (though nowhere near as bad as Grant Morrison's attempts at writing anything Asian), and was written by white guys whose knowledge of Japan seemingly stemmed entirely from anime, so it's not as if it was a huge loss.



TheSlinja posted...

UT1999 posted...

What about ghosts in the shell with scarlett johanson? A lot of people claimed that was whitewashing. The studios didn't seem to care.

ghost in the shell isnt a big deal because the major being japanese doesnt really have anything to do with the story, in fact she has been in and out of several different bodies so her being white isnt a particularly odd choice

The real problem with Ghost in the Shell is that it's based on manga/anime. And a hell of a lot of anime characters look blatantly white even when they're SUPPOSED to be Japanese (and that's a line that blurs even more when you get into anime that is set in space/the future/fantasy worlds). Most of the time people will say "Well, you know they're supposed to be Japanese characters from the setting, so they should be played by Japanese actors", but then you wind up with characters who may look radically different from their original versions.

I mean, say you wanted to make a Western live-action Sailor Moon film. Do you make the girls look exactly the same way they do in the manga and anime (in which case most of their features look Caucasian, with at least two major characters being blonde), or do you make them all look Japanese (in which case they look significant different from the characters they're based on, potentially alienating the audience you're trying to appeal to)? Do you split the difference and put Japanese girls in wigs (which will look stupid and definitely alienate viewers)? No matter WHAT you do, you're going to piss off someone.

It gets even worse if you try to use "Well, the show clearly states that it's set in Japan" as justification, because in some cases, that's not true (ie, Sailor Moon is definitely set in Japan... unless you watch the English dub, where it doesn't seem to be - at least until Crystal Tokyo becomes a thing and everything gets way too messy).

Anime is a mess when it comes to live-action casting. Especially for Western productions.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Technically speaking, Aladdin (the Disney movie) takes place in a non-existent fantasy world that has similarities to real world Arabia but which really ISN'T real world Arabia in any meaningful sense.

Try to find Agrabah on a map or in a history book.

That being said, Agrabah is basically the Baghdad of Arabian Nights with the serial numbers filed off, so you could argue that it's basically the same... but that level of disconnect DOES help justify looser restrictions on casting. Especially since the original Arabian Nights blurred Arabic, Chinese, and Indian fairy tales together into a mismash anyway, and the (itself somewhat mythical) Baghdad of the era was one of the more cosmopolitan cities in terms of people of different ethnicities being in the same place at the same time.

that makes sense, I'd be fine with however they do it now as long as it stays agrabah or whatever
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Anime is a mess when it comes to live-action casting. Especially for Western productions.

FMA is an anime/manga with a varied ethnic cast and asian characters who look recognizably asian but since the adaptation is Japanese the entire cast is Japanese people in wigs it's funny.
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Lokarin posted...

Krazy_Kirby posted...

^
thor is about a god who becomes a hero based off of the male god. didnt stop marvel from making a female thor.

if you can do that then you can cast anyone as anything

There's a female thor?

I guess apparently they tried to explain it away by suddenly making Asgardian names out to be titles instead of proper names. Don't think they ever mentioned that point before this, right? But now, that's the story. So Thor was never THE Thor, he was always just A Thor.
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Lokarin posted...

Krazy_Kirby posted...

^
thor is about a god who becomes a hero based off of the male god. didnt stop marvel from making a female thor.

if you can do that then you can cast anyone as anything

There's a female thor?

There's a female Loki too.
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There aren't a whole lot of big middle eastern actors.

I can't think of one.
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they could hire mia khalifa to play jasmine
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Krazy_Kirby posted...

they could hire mia khalifa to play jasmine

I'd watch this. Especially if she wore glasses through it
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darcandkharg31 posted...

Just cast Jake Gyllenhal as Aladdin.

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As long as they have the approximate complexion, I don't really care.

Smarkil posted...

darcandkharg31 posted...

Just cast Jake Gyllenhal as Aladdin.

Heh.
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I hate this changing things just for the sake of it generation we are in now. Although with that said it could have been worse. They could have made Aladdin a obese female.
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