Disney Americanizes Big Hero 6’s original characters

What do the movies Big Hero 6, The Last Air Bender, and 21 all have in common?

They all had white actors and white animated characters that replaced the Asian roles in the original stories. Commonly referred to as “whitewashing,” Hollywood has a long history of replacing original Asian and minority characters with white cast members.

Disney’s animated film Big Hero 6, which hit U.S. theaters on Nov. 7, was originally adapted from a Marvel comic book with the same title. In the movie five unlikely heroes and the robot Baymax form a superhero team to save their town from an evil super villain.

The American movie replaces Marvel’s original team of six Japanese superheroes with a Japanese American, a Korean American, a white American, a Latino American and an African American. Even the movie’s setting in the futuristic San Fransokyo combines San Francisco with the Japanese capital, Tokyo.

The Americanization of the film has many fans of the original comic book up in arms — blogs like Comics Alliance captured fans’ outrage.

The addition of the white character Fred to the team of heroes upset fans the most because he replaced an original comic book character, which represented “Japan’s marginal and persecuted indigenous Ainu culture,” wrote Andrew Wheeler in Comics Alliance.

Sarah Kruger, a mechanical engineering major, sympathized with outraged fans. She said fans of the comic “would definitely be unhappy that their characters are changed.”

While the sophomore said she understands that many fans will take issue with this, she also understands why Disney made these casting decisions.

“It makes sense to me that they would try and cater to the audience that they’re presenting this to,” Kruger said.

University of Maryland film professor Oliver Gaycken was not at all surprised with the cast translation.

He said if Disney did not Americanize the original set of characters “the real news story would have been ‘Mainstream Hollywood Film Stays True To Original Source.’”

Big Hero 6’s translation of Japanese characters to American ones in an animated film differs from movies like 21 and The Last Air Bender — where directors cast white actors to portray Asian roles.

Gaycken emphasized the difference between portraying Asian and minority roles with white actors as opposed to translating a set of animated characters.

“Big Hero 6 strikes me as a little bit of a different situation,” he said. “Because there I don’t see it so much as a question of trying to erase or kind of overlay white faces onto faces that are supposed to not be white. There they seem to have just taken the cast and translated it wholesale.”

Gaycken used Ridley Scott’s upcoming movie Exodus: Gods and Kings as an example of whitewashing minority roles with a real-life cast. He said that even though the movie portrays Egyptians, it’s almost an entirely white cast used.

Various internet campaigns have attempted to boycott the movie on these grounds. At a recent Brooklyn premiere, Scott responded: “I say get a life.”

Scott said he attempted to assemble the best possible cast with his approximately $140 million budget.

Another example of a whitewashed movie is 21. The real-life team of MIT students, whose card counting took down Las Vegas casinos, was predominantly Asian. Meanwhile white actors portrayed almost every prominent character in the movie.

Junior government & politics major Zach Boyles said he thinks viewers should be made aware if the actors in a film are different races than the characters they portray.

Professor Gaycken said spreading that awareness falls on the shoulders of critics and journalists.

“I don’t think filmmakers have that obligation,” said the professor. “Filmmakers try to make engaging films and if they do things that are offensive or problematic, then they’ll get called to task for it.”

Featured photo courtesy of DisneyLifestylers via Flickr Creative Commons.