At this week’s Comic-Con International in San Diego, there will be more than just fictionalized drama in the air between superheroes and villains, clashing over good, evil and the fate-of-the-world kind of stuff.
Rather, this drama is between fans of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and Paramount Pictures, which fans are accusing of racist casting for the film.
“The Last Airbender,” directed by M. Night Shyamalan and set for a July 2010 release date, was adapted from a Nickelodeon cartoon that proudly encompasses several aspects of different Asian cultures.
Physically, the characters (both good guys and bad guys) have Asian features, practice East Asian martial arts and write with Chinese characters.
Paramount Pictures, the studio releasing the film, released the cast list in December 2008, and much to the surprise of the show’s fanbase, all four of the main characters cast were white ““ including “Twilight” star Jackson Rathbone and actor and singer Jesse McCartney.
Almost immediately upon the release of the list, fans of the show decried the “whitewashing” of “The Last Airbender,” prompting the founding of Racebending.com, the group chiefly responsible for organizing the protests at Comic-Con and mobilizing other upset fans to action.
Over the next few months, McCartney dropped out and was replaced by “Slumdog Millionaire” star Dev Patel.
But Patel, the only dark-skinned character, was also cast as the villain, a fact that only made the situation worse for many fans.
“Appropriating elements of Asian culture to make a fantasy setting, yet locking out ethnically Asian actors to play the heroes, perpetuates the orientalism that the animated series so artfully avoided in the first place,” said Marissa Lee, a 2008 UCLA graduate and public relations coordinator for
Racebending.com.
Lee said that she was surprised to learn that Paramount would not be prominently featuring “The Last Airbender” at this year’s Comic-Con, given the popularity of its presence at last year’s convention.
Still, by protesting at Comic-Con, Lee believes that they will find an audience that’s receptive to their message.
“We hope to draw attention to how Paramount deliberately ignored the fact that the characters in the animated series were not white,” Lee said. “If Paramount is going to be marketing their film at Comic-Con, then we want to be there too, marketing how they discriminated in casting their film.”
So why protest now? The casting decisions are final, and production is already complete.
The organizers behind the protest and from Racebending.com have switched their goals from attempting to change the casting, to boycotting “The Last Airbender” when it comes out in theaters next summer.
In the meantime, they hope to bring awareness to other studios that might be casting for an Asian-themed film.
Michael Le, a former mechanical engineering graduate student at UCLA and a coordinator of the Comic-Con protests, said that they plan on handing out buttons and fliers and encouraging people to boycott the film when it is released next year.
“We hope that other studios will notice that discriminating against actors of color by “˜whitewashing’ is not worth the public outcry,” Lee said.
While the action taken by Racebending was a completely fan-organized protest movement, the organizers sought the guidance of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, an organization that works to challenge the stereotyping of Asians in various forms of media, including motion pictures.
This year, much of MANAA’s efforts have focused on protesting the casting of “The Last Airbender.”
Despite the multiple attempts of MANAA’s founding president, Guy Aoki, to meet with Paramount, the studio waited a month and a half to reply to a letter he sent, according to Aoki.
By this time, the pre-production window had closed, and the casting decisions had been finalized.
“We wanted to fix this before it was too late,” Aoki said.
There have been no official statements from the top brass at Paramount, who declined to comment on this story.
The reactions through various mediums on the Internet have had quite a public presence though, seen through the letters written between Aoki and the studio, and even through executive producer Frank Marshall’s posts about the casting on his Twitter account.
Aoki believes that Paramount’s lack of interaction with the protesting fans and special interest groups has been a purposeful avoidance.
“The NAACP can call up Paramount and say, “˜We have a problem,'” Aoki said. “If out of nothing else, Paramount would look really bad, racially insensitive.”