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Originally Posted by mrpawn
And the whole race thing is completely stupid. "well the good guys are white, so that means THEY'RE RACIST!!!" its so dumb! who cares. He just made every tribe the same colors, like it should be. I think he should have made the air tribe white, and the water inuits like in the cartoon, but i guess that was shyamalan's "twist".
oh and isn't an anime styled cartoon supposed to not look like any specific race anyway?
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I appreciate it seems like an overblown reaction to what is basically a kid's film, but the controversy over the casting isn't 'completely stupid'. M. Shymalan took three ethnic minority heros and made them all Caucasian. It may be an anime, and facially they may not look like 'any specific race' but the characters still have strong associations in culture and clothing with certain races and those races aren't even remotely Caucasian. The fact that he made every other background character non-Caucasian is irrelevant; they're not the crux of the story, nor the overt heros. It's an especially poor thing to do when the whole of the story is about inter-ethnic group war and peace. And people really do care. In the anime, for once it's their face saving the world, but when the series finally gets some recognition, bam! that's taken away and given to Caucasians. Again. And right on the heels of the other Avatar controversy, and the Prince of Persia controversy. It's the third kick, and although it seems a relatively small thing, it's all part of something much bigger.
He might have got away with it if he'd cast one of the four main characters as Caucasion on a merit basis, but he cast all four (an even more glaring error compared to his deliberate choice of background cast) and then only by chance was Dev Patel cast as Zuko.
I don't know; to me M. Shymalan had the perfect chance to make a great film for kids with a minority hero, in contrast to all those hundreds of other films with caucasian heros, which would have then fitted with the original, very popular story, and might have actually gone beyond the mould. Now it's probably just going to flop.
For the record though, I don't think it was meant maliciously, like some people think; it was probably a case of standard hollywood pressure and the dim idea that white cast=money made at box office. Thoughtlessness, really.
Anyway I'm going to wait till it's out of box office before I see it; I'm not so fussed about seeing it soon or in 3D. By all accounts it's kind of blah story-wise, and it's not even aimed at my age-group so I probably will find it lacking.