avatar film casting

haven't posted my thoughts yet, so here they are:

i don't think the whitewashing is as big a deal as the bulk of the fandom is making it out to be. mainly because 99.9% of this cast will be children, and talented child actors are hard enough to find without limiting yourself further. particularly when race is not an issue in this show. if it were, katara and sokka would never get away with what they're pretending when they're sneaking through the firenation. and at least when casting aang, they had an open call and picked a kid who's familiar with martial arts and (hopefully) knows a thing or two about acting. that, at least for this story, is far more important than the cosmetic problem of his race. i would rather have a whitewashed cast of children that knows what it's doing than a racially-appropriate cast of wooden children.

all that being said, i think more attention should be paid when casting the adults. (though, to be honest, i wouldn't mind seeing clancy brown as long feng in the film as well. he can do the creepy. oh can he do the creepy. see carnivale for details.) anyway, i guess my point is, people are making this a bigger deal than it needs to be, particularly since the characters involved are, y'know, kids. this show is not about the cosmetic differences between the nations--see 'sokka's master'. piandao's dark enough himself that he could've accepted sokka as firenation if sokka hadn't been stupid enough to use his real name. race is so fundamentally not an issue in this story that making such a huge deal about the race of the actors seems, to me, counter-intuitive. now, this show is about culture, so i can see where some casting issues might rise on that score. but, again, my earlier point about talented child actors being few and far between still stands. so, on that note, i think that, if m night shyamalan and his casting director are very careful about who they cast in the adult roles, it's much less of a problem than it's made out to be.

so, that's my two cents. please don't hurt me.

i'm gonna add two more cents now <.<;;
another problem with racially appropriate casting is the simple fact that there aren't that many asian actors who have crossed over into american/western film. most of those are adult men. i can't think of any children. which makes the whole thing much more difficult.
that's all.