the groundhog day project

Writing for The Atlantic , Christopher Orr sides with the more positive take on Wes Anderson's choice of a Japanese setting and having (mostly) Japanese-speaking humans in his latest film, Isle of Dogs . Yet, in passing mention of the other side, Orr makes an interesting error that both clarifies the positive take and suggests a whole other version of the problem... Let me backtrack. Orr writes (parenthetically): Unlike the dogs, the Japanese characters--which is to say all of the human beings save one--do not have their words rendered into English, except when explicitly restated by a translator voices by France's McDormand. I leave to individual viewers to decide whether this is a way of center-staging the hounds--my view--or sidelining the Asian protagonists. First, a small point: Orr's initial phrasing suggests that the dogs are not Japanese, which is either a mislabeling because they are obviously just as much from Japan as the human characters, or it is a cute sor...

Let's move right on past the whole yellow peril angle of a villain like Ming the Merciless for a moment and focus on the real racist tragedy in Flash Gordon . There are no Lion Men from Ardentia in the film. Instead of the awesome Thun with the mane and the fangs, we get what amounts to a stereotypical African native type. And then, to add insult to injury, he gets killed by Ming after almost no screentime. Let's not even mention the lizard men, who we see not only in Ming's jail but also Arboria's jail. Plus, one is killed onscreen, to be mourned alongside King Thun, and he doesn't even get any dialogue. So then, there's Ming. In Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America , Cheng (2012) argues that Asian villains in science fiction brought "the otherness of advanced and degenerate civilization... Degeneracy justified conquest--exploration's coincidental and expeditious by-product--as redemptive reclamation" ...