Dear Hollywood Whitewashers: Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings)

Nope – I didn’t forget about you, Kubo.  This was an instance where the first trailer was reeling me in hard but took a sharp left turn when it proudly displayed the main voice actors for this Japanese story:  Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey, Ralph Fiennes, and Rooney Mara (I know stop-motion takes a long time to make, and I’m not sure when in that process the vocals get recorded.  I’m wondering if, for Mara, this was pre- or post-Pan?)  To be fair, as I said in my review, the film also features George Takei and Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa as the two least-significant characters in the main cast.  (A couple big spoilers.)

Now, this was a film that I did see despite the whitewashing, although I was conflicted about it and the casting still leaves a bad taste in my mouth (I always have such a sinking feeling when I see a white actor I love helping to perpetuate this practice.)  But as usual, those behind the film rush forward to assure me it’s not what it looks like.  Here’s what director Travis Knight had to say on the subject:  “For Kubo, most of our characters are not even human.  For those that are humans, it was important for us to have authenticity in terms of the characters. Most of the characters that are human characters are [voiced by actors] of Asian descent.”

First, let’s quickly address the fact that, again, the human characters voiced by Asian actors are all-but-nameless villagers who are little more than extras and don’t have important roles in the film.  In the purely-human characters, Asian voice actors might physically outnumber the white ones, but the actor voicing Kubo is white, and any character played by an Asian actor has only a sliver of screentime or significance compared to him.

But what I really want to focus on here is Knight’s point that it’s fine to be more flexible in casting non-human characters.  This is actually an area where I concede to some wiggle room.  Call it the Mushu Principle, if you like – Disney’s Mulan was voiced almost entirely by Asian actors, with the notable exception of Eddie Murphy playing the dragon spirit Mushu.  This doesn’t bother me, and I fully admit to loving how Murphy plays off of Ming-Na Wen’s Mulan.  If care is taken in the rest of the casting, I don’t think having actors of a different race voice non-human characters is necessarily a problem.

However, the situation with Kubo’s non-human characters is a lot dicier.  While there are a number of them, they can be split into two major categories:  gods and enchanted beings.  On the side of the gods, we have Ralph Fiennes as the Moon King and Rooney Mara playing the Sisters.  Now, we can argue about whether or not it would be insensitive to portray gods in a Japanese story as being white, but regardless of where you fall on that issue, the Moon King and the Sisters are definitely made to look Japanese, which makes Fiennes and Mara’s casting seem much more suspect.  Would Fiennes be cast as a god with demonstrably Asian facial features in a live-action film?  I sure hope not.

Then, there’s Monkey (Charlize Theron) and Beetle (Matthew McConaughey.)  One’s a monkey, one’s a beetle – on first glance, it seems racially neutral, and in the interview with Knight, it’s mentioned that he points to Monkey while making his comments about non-human characters.  But these characters aren’t just magical talking animals.  Over the course of the film, it’s revealed that they’re actually Kubo’s parents.  Monkey is the last vestiges of Kubo’s mother’s magic bringing a wooden talisman to life, and Kubo’s father was cursed by the Moon King and turned into the amnesiac Beetle.  Kubo has a vision of them in the bodies of his parents at the end of the movie, plus Theron voices Kubo’s mother both before and after she becomes Monkey.  And Kubo’s parents look Japanese.  Kubo’s mother is a former god who may or may not have gotten a human body when she left the Moon King’s realm, but either way, she’s clearly meant to appear Japanese.  And Kubo’s father was definitely human and decidedly Japanese.  Meaning these aren’t just non-human characters; they’re magical creatures who used to be people.

Again, think of it in turns of live-action.  If there was a live-action movie in which a Japanese man was turned into a beetle, would people be cool with having Matthew McConaughey play both versions of the character on the grounds that “it’s fine – most of the time, he’s a beetle anyway”?  I really, really hope not.