Voices

Ever late to the party, I finally watched KPop Demon Hunters. But this is not really a post about KPop Demon Hunters.

This is mostly a post about Kubo and The Two Strings.

I really, really enjoyed Kubo and the Two Strings when I saw it ten years ago. I’ve always loved stop-motion (some of my earliest filmmaking attempts were with that technique) and the Japanese setting and stylings was an added bonus, especially for someone like me who grew up in Singapore with a steady diet of East Asian media. What stuck in my head most when I watched Kubo, though, was how much I would have absolutely loved this movie when I was a kid.

Which, perhaps makes the nature of the casting of Kubo so very disappointing. Charlize Theron and Matthew McConaughey play the main character’s mentors, with the big bad and his lieutenant being played by Ralph Fiennes and Rooney Mara respectively. It is a very white cast for a very Japanese movie. To be fair, George Takei and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa are in it too, but both are in minor roles and relegated to the background.

On the one hand, I don’t necessarily believe that voice actors necessarily need to be the same ethnicity (or gender) as their characters. But at the same time, Kubo felt like such a missed opportunity. There was a chance there to have a major western movie with a prominent Japanese — or indeed, East Asian — cast and, well, there wasn’t. Perhaps the powers that be felt Kubo would be safer with known (white) actors; a Matthew McConaughey would be more recognizable to a ticket-buying parents than a Ken Watanabe. 

Which feels all the more a thing in light of KPop Demon Hunters, a movie made by Korean-Canadian woman with a very Korean cast. The animated movie, with all its Korean specificity, defied expectations and became a global hit. There is still a fear in (western, mainstream) media that something too foreign, too other for the 1950s suburbs will be off-putting to audiences. I’m not optimistic enough to say that Demon Hunters will put those fears to rest, but hopefully it shows just how unfounded those worries are