I’m sure all avid watchers of anime have gotten around the concept of bright-haired teens bouncing around the romanticised streets of Japan with the occasional hail of rose petals. But that’s just one genre of anime.

I watched a fair bit of sailor moon as a kid and I just accepted that they were Japanese. An alarming amount of anime film adaptions cast our favourite characters with white actors. Why? Apparently asians just don’t have the screen presence. Some examples include Avatar the last Airbender, Dragon Ball evolution, and of course just as I thought we were turning a new leaf with the whitewashing; the new Death Note movie.

If we take a look at western animation it becomes clear that race and cartoons are more about context of the character than design. A more familiar example is The Simpsons, we know that they are a causation middle class family because of the context of their lives and its mentioned explicitly in the show. But they don’t LOOK WHITE they are literally yellow and the asian people on the show are literally white.

If people can mould their perceptions around meaning rather than what they literally look like then I think we can do it with anime.

This may not seem like a serious issue but it has negative effects on the film industry when it comes to casting white actors in place of asian actors. People often make the excuse that its not a lack of asian roles but a lack of asian actors that cause the imbalance of race in Hollywood cinema. But this is not true in my opinion as casting agents can easily find fresh faces to debut in films. This has been done countless times with white actors in order to make the characters seem more authentic without any pre-existing expectations from the actor’s track record.

Yet for some reason we keep seeing this happen:

In the comments of this article were extremely divided, but either way most were not happy with the announcement of Wingard’s role as the iconic Light Yagami.