A Movie That Proves That A Western Resetting Does Not Mean Whitewashing

When you constantly hear about a manga or an anime being whitewashed (the same can be said of novels like "All You Need Is Kill" which was whitewashed as Edge of Tomorrow), one of the constant arguments to support that racism is that it is fine because it is a "western adaptation" or an "American adaptation". This argument is inherently a white supremacist one because it is working under the fantasy that the U.S. is an all white country when it is nowhere near that. It ignores all of the nonwhite Americans that were born and raised in the United States and are just as American as any white American. This is in stark contrast to homogeneous countries like Japan that are nowhere near multi-ethnic like the United States is.

A Western resetting is just a trick in order to justify whitewashing. This was done previously with the two live action Guyver movies, it has just been done with the Netflix Death Note trash and it is supposedly going to be done with Akira. Additionally, the Dreamworks Ghost in the Shell whitewash is also reset but in some "international setting" (which goes directly against the source material) in order to also justify the whitewashing.

However, there was once a movie that was made about 20 years ago that was a Western adaptation of a manga, reset in North American but it was not whitewashed. It is also a good movie. This automatically makes it as of this point the gold standard of manga/anime film adaptations made in the West. I am referring to the 1995 live action adaptation of Crying Freeman.

The original Crying Freeman story and its anime adaptation mainly took place in Japan. The 1995 live action adaptation mainly takes place in Canada. However, unlike all these racist productions, the main character (the Crying Freeman) was not played by a white actor but instead by Marc Dacascos. That is historic. On top of that, despite the Western resetting, the Asian elements were still kept. Freeman was still of Japanese origin just simply operating in North America and the story still kept the Asian elements with the Triad and Yakuza still present along with Chinese and Japanese still spoken amid the mostly English dialog. The story works just as well as it did in the original source material and it was done without any whitewashing of the main character.

What's telling about this is that the movie has never been officially released in the U.S.. The 1995 Crying Freeman movie was not even a Hollywood movie. It was a French/Canadian production. It's kind of amazing how film makers not from Hollywood had no problem, 20 years ago, hiring an actor of Asian descent to play the main character of an Asian property even though the setting was changed from Eastern to Western. That's also most likely the reason that Hollywood did not want the movie to be released in America as it would destroy the white supremacist lie that they are still trying to push to this day. A lie that they have gone as far to push as outright denying nonwhite Americans from even auditioning for the roles of nonwhite main characters as Asian American actor Edward Zo testified: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdxz2htgPiQ

All of the movies based on Asian novels, comic books, animations, etc... that are being reset to the West can all be Asian American stories. The Crying Freeman movie from 1995 proved that. There is no excuse.