What, I thought to myself, to call a series of articles looking at trailers and at forthcoming films in general. I toyed with 'Trailer Park', but couldn't resist the critical implications of 'trailer trash'.
So, the first Doctor Strange teaser is out and making some waves. It's got folks excited, with its Inceptionesque folding worlds and Tilda Swinton punching Cumberbatch's ghost out of his body. It delivers on what people seem to want from their Doctor Strange and on what we've come to expect from Marvel, including its... problems.
Marvel is still a property that needs more minority representation, and while casting a female Ancient One adds another woman to the MCU, it takes away a non-white character, and just as Black Panther and Luke Cage (gratuitous rap sting notwithstanding) were making some headway in that area. There's an argument to be made that the wise old mentor isn't exactly a groundbreaking Asian character trope, but surely the answer to that is to write the character better. For example, unlike what I can learn of the character on Wikipedia, they could not conflate 'Tibetan' and 'Chinese'. Oh, wait; if they make that point too strongly (or cast a Tibetan actor with 'views') they might not get to send the film to China, so I guess that was never happening.
I'm still excited about this, and I don't want to start boycotting the MCU, but damnit that could be doing better. They should be doing better. The film series represents a massive investment, yes, but with its long-term plan, more or less guaranteed returns and more than $7 billion in profits to date (and that's Box Office alone, never mind the even more hegemonic merch,) and the heritage of comic books as leaders - albeit imperfect ones - on inclusion (sure, all early black superheroes were Black Something or dressed like they were going to a disco, but they were there and they inhabited the same world as white superheroes,) they should be bucking the trend of whitewashing, not perpetuating it.
On a separate note, it does occur to me that the dynamic of the Ancient One and his best friend/rival has basically been done already this year with Master Oogway and Kai in Kung Fu Panda 3. And those two Chinese character were played by a Korean and a white American.
In related news, I saw the trailer for Kubo and the Two Strings in front of Zootropolis. It's a stop-motion animated feature and it looks gorgeous and sounds gorgeous (when I recognised that the music was an arrangement of 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' I got an actual shiver,) but I couldn't help noticing that this was one more animated film with an Asian setting and an overwhelmingly white cast. I'm... actually not sure if this is as bad as, better than or worse than live action whitewashing. The characters are still clearly Japanese, and if it was a Japanese film they'd probably still have hired Charlize Theron to dub the monkey (oo-er.)
It's also got George Takei and Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa in it, so it's not all bad.
That issue aside, the film looks fascinating. As well as the amazing production and my own love of stop motion, the use of origami and music as magic is pretty unique and visually exciting. The nearest I've seen was Read or Die, which was a lot... bigger, and of course cel-animated. I'm going to go ahead and look forward to this, and see what my daughter makes of it.
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