GQ interviews Casey for a feature on Hollywood adaptations of Japanese manga

Dr Casey Brienza is quoted extensively in a feature published this week by the UK edition of the men’s interest magazine GQ. In the wake of the announcement that Scarlett Johansson would be starring in a highly-anticipated live-action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, Casey enumerates some of the aesthetic, thematic, and narrative links between Japanese manga and Hollywood film:

“No one was working in a vacuum;  the artist who drew  Ghost in the Shell was heavily influenced by Star Wars and the walking robots in The Empire Strikes Back,” says Brienza.  “There is definitely a lot of exchange in both directions.

 

“A lot of  movies that have done well aren’t straight adaptations, but borrow from a Japanese aesthetic, like  Blade Runner  or  The Matrix“, says Brienza. “The scene in the very beginning of  The Matrix, where Trinity, the female character, leaps and she’s frozen  in mid-air and the image pans around her in a circle – that’s right out of anime.”

She also explains some of the untapped potential of the manga medium for Hollywood. When asked which manga she would most like to see adapted in the future, Casey chose Fumi Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery, a four-volume series about four unusual men who open up a Western-style bakery which she first read and enjoyed back when she was an undergraduate.