history also pretty much chill with the depiction of Mr. Yunioshi by Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffanny's.
Maybe this was true at the time the movie was released, but 60(!) years later (I would hope that) most reasonable people would agree not only that the yellowface is (now) unacceptable, but also that the 'yerrow-pelil' caricature
itself is squirmingly outdated and embarrassingly tone-deaf — and it wouldn't be at all improved even if a genuine Asian/ Japanese actor were to play the role (in a hypothetical remake, or a stage-play).
I also use an example of how a supposed to be Singaporean Faye Valentine been cast by a white actor as a disturbance to me, it's even racist if their reasoning is there are not enough good Asian Talent.
Not having a dig at you here, but if that's how you feel about Faye, then I'm curious how do you feel about Jet being played by a Black actor?
From my own perspective (as someone who just finished watching the
Cowboy Bebop anime, for the first time ever), I'd had no idea that Faye was supposed to be Singaporean, basically because of my own ignorance: I didn't know that the merlion from her time-capsule videotape was essentially Singapore's trademark — until you made that assertion, and I wondered how you knew, and I looked it up.
If anyone had asked me before that, I would mostly likely have assumed all four of the Bebop's human crew to be caucasian based on their skin-tone (and Faye's lovely green eyes) — which is partly due to my own inherent bias, sure, but also the anime-industry's tendency to use that visual trope for a lot of characters, regardless of their
actual in-story origin (e.g. in
Black Lagoon,
Rokuro "Rock" Okajima is clearly Japanese — but his character-design is also caucasian).
Just to be clear, though, I don't see any problem with the new live-action series "re"-casting (scare-quotes because, you know, fictional
and animated characters!) an Asian actor and a Black actor as Spike and Jet, respectively — and I similarly don't have a problem with Faye being played by a Latina actor, either.