Fanboi

One nice thing about being the kind of geek that I am is I can tell if the furor comes from someone who's read the source material or not.

Scarlett Johansson is just fine to play Major Kusanagi Motoko.

Why?

Because The Major is fully cyberized.  She can look like anyone.  She looks specifically like a generic and popular female model precisely so she'll blend in.  In manga and anime it's often very difficult to get racial cues from the facial structures, but in the manga she's got blue eyes.

How many Japanese have natural blue eyes?

In the anime she's got purple eyes.

Well, I guess we need to fire Scarlett and hire a Targaryen, huh?  Wait hair color is all wrong.

It's pretty clear from the anime that the fully cyberized members of Section 9 don't look a thing like they did when they were still baseline human.  The manga is less certain because the character "bible" is less rigid.

I'm actually a lot more concerned about the actor they've named to play Batou.  He seems way too scrawny.

And another thing... WHICH Ghost in the Shell are we talking about?  There's at least four independent GITS universes.  It appears that they're doing The Laughing Man from Stand Alone Complex and not the original Puppeteer or Arise storylines.