PicoBlog

If you’ve been reading me for any amount of time you know I’m not a cartoon guy. I’ve watched them, but I’m not the kind of person who is deeply into animation or who thinks the fact that animated movies rarely get nominated for Best Picture is some kind of enormous problem. Actually I kind of think there may be too many cartoons these days; when did family-centered sitcoms stop being live action and start being animated all the time?

Early in my relationship with my wife she convinced me to give Avatar: the Last Airbender a shot. This was only accomplished because I was so head-over-heels in love with her; the other thing that longtime readers know is that I am no friend of anime. The show isn’t anime, but it’s heavily influenced by the stuff in terms of design, and I’m highly allergic to that aesthetic. But she was my dream woman and so I agreed to give the show a shot. We ended up watching one episode a day, usually over dinner, and by the end of the first week I was actually deeply into the show. At one point, back when we all took COVID very seriously, I had an exposure and she had to stay away from the house for a few days. We still watched Avatar together every day, we just did it over Zoom.

By the time we finished the series I was fully sold. This show was a terrific work that exists in a space that is rarely occupied - it’s a show fit for, and aimed at kids, but with sensibilities, storytelling prowess, themes and characters who can appeal to adults. It’s the space the original Star Wars defined, more or less - and it’s probably on coincidence that Avatar is the show from which George Lucas poached Dave Filoni to run his Clone Wars show.

Now, this was not technically my first go-round with Avatar: the Last Airbender. Brittany had a double hurdle to overcome; not only am I not a cartoon guy, I had seen the M Night Shyamalan live action adaptation in theaters. My sense of what this show was had been formed by that movie, which is absolutely one of the worst films ever made - and I don’t say that lightly. I’m not one of those guys who would create a list of “Worst of the Year” and stock it with blockbusters because I know all too well how many truly incompetent lower budget movies get released. But The Last Airbender is a monstrosity of a film, a disaster all the way through, and it is boring and painful to watch. I checked this by watching the film after we had finished the series, just to get a sense of perspective.

In case you don’t know Avatar: The Last Airbender (from now on called ATLA), here’s the basic outline - the show takes place in a fantasy Asian world (think Middle-Earth but Asia), which is made up of four different kingdoms defined by the elements. But get this - there are people in these kingdoms who can control the element for which they are named. They’re called benders, and it’s like a martial arts thing. So there are airbenders, waterbenders, earthbenders and firebenders. The firebenders are the big aggressive folks, and they have been conquering the other kingdoms for some time. In this world there is a Dalai Lama-like figure, who is reincarnated again and again. Each time this figure, known as the Avatar, is reborn they are reborn in a different nation, and there’s a standard rotation. So when the airbender Avatar dies, the next Avatar is born to the waterbenders. The Avatar is incredibly powerful and can bend all four elements.

In the show the last Avatar disappeared a hundred years ago. The Fire Nation has put a big hurt on the world, and they want to make sure the Avatar never comes back and stops their conquest. But the last Avatar - a kid named Aang - ended up frozen in ice a century ago and is now thawed out, and he and his new friends begin an adventure to stop the Fire Nation.

That’s the basic outline, but it doesn’t capture the fun of the show, the actually excellent action and most of all it doesn’t capture the characters you fall in love with and who grow and change over the course of the story. If the world of ATLA is analogous to Middle-Earth, the growth of the main characters is perhaps analogous to the hobbits in Lord of the RIngs, who we follow as they go from country bumpkins to warriors and historical figures without ever losing the core of who they are. So it is for Aang and his friends Kitara and Sokka and eventually Toph, the blind earthbender. As they show neared its end - creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko had a real, close-ended narrative in mind as they made the series - one of the stakes on the table was the question of how these wonderful, fun kids would keep themselves and their spirits intact despite how intense and dangerous things got.

Netflix is lately in the market of doing live action adaptations of animated properties; recently One Piece was a huge hit. I found the show unwatchable and tapped out after fifteen minutes of the first episode, but it looked expensive! Now they’re doing ATLA, and I’ll say that the imagery looks incredible so far. One big improvement over Shyamalan's film is that they didn’t hire white kids to play these non-white roles. Kind of wild that it was only fourteen years ago that you could whitewash explicitly Asian characters and be met with only the slightest cultural pushback.

I was always going to be a tough sell on this live action adaptation, especially because the circumstances of me watching ATLA were so personal and poignant, but I was willing to give the show a shot. Why not? Again, the released pics and footage looked pretty good. I like the story of ATLA, so why not have it retold? Could be fun.

I gotta say, I am so used to adaptations of geek properties not respecting the visuals of the property that I still get excited when the adaptation looks correct, as the ATLA adaptation does. But looks are just one part of it - whats the value of it looking right if it's missing the point? That's where things get dicey with this new show.

When the people who made the live action show started talking about it I began feeling very, very unsure about what I was hearing. First it started with an interview a week or two back where one of the cast said that the story of Sokka, one of Aang’s companions, had been altered. See, they said, back when ATLA was on originally it was okay for Sokka to be sexist, but that doesn’t fly today, so they removed it.

First of all, it was a children’s show that aired in 2005. It’s not like this is some pre-women’s lib property. Second of all, Sokka’s character arc is explicitly about him starting out as a pretty bog standard sexist (ie, boys are better than girls, fitting with the children’s show aspect of the whole thing) and not only learning he’s wrong but becoming a huge support for the powerful women in his life. It’s growth! It’s not even a particularly hard to follow storyline, and it’s bizarre to me that the folks adapting the cartoon might not have understood this about him.

Then there were vague discussions of changing aspects of Kitara’s character. She’s Sokka’s sister, and Aang’s right-hand woman. What those changes are we don’t know; producer Albert Kim has said it was gender issues. This has led folks to guess that it has something to do with the largely maternal role Kitara has among the companions, but if they’re getting rid of that it feels like a bummer. Kitara was maternal and an ass-kicker, and I’m not sure why one would preclude the other.

But it was when Kim said they were changing Aang that I truly began to lose hope. According to Kim, a problem with the cartoon is that there are too many little side adventures, and that Aang is “kind of going from place to place looking for adventures. He even says, ‘First, we've got to go and ride the elephant koi.’” This refers to an episode where they find giant fish and that leads them to the Kyoshi Warriors, a tribe of fierce female fighters. The Kyoshi Warriors are fan faves, and they actually play a key role in the story of Sokka overcoming his sexism. That makes this all a very weird example to use.

But more than that it displays a disconnect from the source material not unlike the disconnect they have with Sokka - Aang is a 12 year old boy who does not want to get into a battle for the fate of the world. His arc is coming to commit himself to the big battle, and it’s about him growing up. They’re just cutting that out of the show. From Kim: “We essentially give him this vision of what's going to happen and he says, ‘I have to get to the Northern Water Tribe to stop this from happening.’ That gives him much more narrative compulsion going forward, as opposed to, ‘Let's make a detour and go ride the elephant koi,’ that type of thing.”

(Kim quotes from this IGN interview)

One thing they have added to the show: they’re depicting the genocide of Aang’s airbender tribe, which happened offscreen in the cartoon. No time for character arcs, plenty of time for genocide.

Hey, maybe the show will still be good! I hope so, because I’m watching it. But this stuff… it bums me out, and it’s crazy that this is how they’re trying to sell the series. It seems counterintuitive, as well - in my experience ATLA is like Star Wars to 20/30somethings. They grew up with this show.

Of all these red flags maybe the reddest is that the original creators of ATLA were involved in this show and left before it was finished. Was this because what was being made sucked? Maybe, but they stuck it out with Shyamalan. They did leave to start working on new shows and movies set in the universe of ATLA (they already did one sequel series, The Legend of Korra, which takes place a generation after the events of ATLA. It’s good but it’s no ATLA), so it could have just been timing. I’m glad they’re going back to that world; it feels rare in this day and age that something should be as popular as ATLA was only to kind of fade away. Shades of Star Wars in the late 80s and early 90s, to be honest.

I’ve been around this fandom neighborhood a long, long time. I’ve seen plenty of things that looked awful and felt like bad ideas turn out to be great and become beloved, and then everybody forgot they were ever complaining about it in advance. God willing so it shall be with Netflix’s Avatar. It would be nice for the live action show to be good and tell the full story of the cartoon. But I guess even if it shits the bed, we have new ATLA universe stuff in the works from the OG folks, and no amount of terrible live action can take that away from us.

Thank you for reading Cinema Sangha. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

ncG1vNJzZmibmaOyrq3SmqWgoJFjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89oq6GdXaWysLzLnmSbnZieu6V5zZ6rn6SZrcBurdWaq5qq