- Oh my god!
Oh, he looks like an alien.
(bouncy piano music)
- Rest of world, not like Okinawa.
- [Voiceover] Wait, is that him?
- World filled with delightful variation.
Example...
- (bleep)
(laughter)
- My stomach is turning, watching this.
- Oh my god.
- "My name is Marlon Brando."
- Actors, in themselves, aren't funny things.
It's somebody trying to learn a new language.
- [Voiceover] Is that all it takes
to make yourself look Asian?
- Just looks like a white dude doing a shitty accent.
- Marlon Brando is also one of the greatest
American actors and seeing this,
you're like "No, you're not."
- Watching this feels really dehumanizing.
- [Voiceover] Oh, that's painful.
(angry yelling)
- Now, this is really racist.
- This guy could have been an Orc in Lord of the Rings.
That's how much makeup he has on right now.
- Literally, a political cartoon.
- The Asian guy is not human.
- He's clearly not supposed to be human.
- An early example of the way Asian men
are portrayed as gross.
- Oh, Audrey Hepburn, she's so gorgeous and graceful
and then all of a sudden you get Mickey Rooney.
Like rawwwr, rawwwr, rawwwr.
- It's like a kick in the nuts.
(bouncy music)
(movie dialogue) - [Voiceover] Whoa!
- Oh my god!
- He looks like a (bleep) alien.
- Just because they break all the rules
and have everybody race-bend doesn't
mean that it's still okay to do yellowface.
- With this kind of makeup you don't transcend time,
you just look really bad.
- The actors did a great job,
but you just cannot make a white man look Asian.
- Level of discomfort is not like diarrhea discomfort,
like before, but more like mild indigestion.
- Asian men are either portrayed as dweeby children
or like a scary, alien, cold monk.
- Can you teach me how to do that?
- No, I retired from teaching long ago.
- I am Alyson Hannigan.
- The problem with this is the term "Orientalism".
- Yep.
- [Voiceover] It's not homage anymore when
you start playing someone else's race.
- It just makes me feel so exoticized.
- It kind of just reads, "We're gonna take a
hodgepodge of Asian influences."
- You could have easily done an homage,
where you exist in that universe of the "Far East"
but you're still a white character.
- Could you have imagined if How I Met Your Mother
decided to do a whole episode where they did
the same thing, but it was blackness?
We would not have accepted that.
- [Voiceover] It's so tough because I love the show,
I watched it every day.
For them to do this, really breaks my heart.
- I think that people confuse interest in another
culture with understanding for that culture.
- You get to a point where you're just like "I don't expect
"anything better from my media, than what I've been given."
- Yellowface, you can't get past the damn makeup!
- I think it's sort of like "Oh, well the Asians
"are louder now and they'll get mad at us if
"we do straight up yellowface."
- There are no Asian, bankable stars
because no Asian has been cast in a role where
they've been allowed to become a bankable star.
- The blame should not be on the actors
it should be on the directors and the casting.
- Hollywood doesn't have as much of an excuse
to say "I can't cast an Asian actor."
because there are Asian actors.
- [Voiceover] I'm sure the people making these
decisions think the media has gotten better.
If you ask an Asian person,
I feel like they would tell you a very different...
Hey, do you think the media has gotten better?
- To be honest, yes.
But, better doesn't mean it's good enough.