This review was previously published for supporters at Buy Me A Coffee on March 12.
I didn’t have much access to Nickelodeon in 2005. It’s a circumstance that certainly made getting on the Avatar: The Last Airbender hype train all the more challenging at the time, although I had other matters of interest in film I was tending to on a blog I started with similar inspirations echoed on this one.
Alas, it’s 2024 and little did I know that as someone centrally known to cover this genre amid the near two-decade-long fame of the show, at least one good way to get chewed out by your friends is to not have seen it, and admitting it publicly. Oof. Thus, at the behest of a few of my mutuals in light of the recent live-action exploits from showrunner Albert Kim for Netflix, I did my homework.
For this, I can totally understand the brouhaha behind some attitudes when it comes to live-action adaptations. Sometimes, it’s well warranted, while other times, I’d say folks tend to jump the gun, and I’ve seen reactions on both sides of the first season’s release date which have been mixed, from people complaining about unnecessary character rewrites and how “they did [their] boy Aang dirty,” to how Avatar isn’t “real wuxia”.
I can only imagine the convos get worse from there, but I rather enjoyed what the series had to offer in comparison to what the animated series brought to the table. I thought the show teetered a bit anomalously by the third episode, although it began culminating the more I watched and observed how Kim and his team managed to weave the show together.
Indeed, the first season of the animated series has twenty episodes, so there’s a lot of material to play with. Oddly, there are some redundancies that still occur (a symptom of just about any live-action drama), particularly with Aang and his constant regressive reminders of how he failed by hiding from the world for a century. Of course, it’s an inflection point meant to embolden the stakes as he is increasingly convinced to believe he’s destined to walk a lonely path in order to be mankind’s savior, ultimately until he learns that saving the world doesn’t always mean regressing to old, archaic traditions and stoic ideations.
I particularly enjoyed how Kim and his team managed to eke out a place for this show in weaving together these themes, in addition to crafting an eight-episode show based on a twenty-episode season one anime. It meant ample material for Kim, his writers and the execs to play with, in order to create a show that delivers something fresh, instead of a rehash.
Obviously, it also meant a creative trajectory that allowed for select alterations, as well as the dismissal of certain aspects and elements, and for a number of reasons. Some of these changes didn’t bother me in the course of my viewing. There are areas of the show where omissions are noticeable and, in my view, don’t really hinder the show at all.
The same goes for specific character and situational rewrites. One point of ire for fans is the lack of Sokka’s sexism which gradually becomes a platform for his own evolution in the anime. In Kim’s series, actor Ian Ousley’s portrayal is still as boastful as he is plucky when the moment calls for it, although his arc is modified as a coming of age tale as a tribal leader-to-be, venturing to protect his people while burdened with the fear of his own vulnerability, and fear of failure.
Actress Kiawentiio’s Katara lends an admirable resilience to her portrayal of a character that becomes more than her own. The same goes for Elizabeth Yu in the role of Fire Nation princess Azula who gets more screentime here than in the animation, allowing for a more fleshed out adjacent story pertaining the Fire Nation politics and espionage with in, and its effects by the brewing rivalry between her and the exiled prince, Zuko, played by actor and martial artist Dallas Liu.
The show’s tighter weaving also meant the dismissal of a few epic battles. That means among others, there’s no one-on-one between Appa and the Shirshu, the odor-driven hunter ridden by bounty hunter June – played here by actress Arden Cho. Still, the show is not without its perks and worthwhile entertainment value, and with a noteworthy performance by Gordon Cormier that rightly earns its place as the chosen lead for this show, in addition to the spectacular airbending fight scenes. These moments are one to watch, most particularly with Liu front and center.
I can’t fathom why some fans would be so disappointed as some of them have expressed. Furthermore, at least one notion I caught from some critics about how the show has no “heart” kind of baffles me. No doubt this will continue to bewilder me until I’m blue in the face.
That said, I can maybe closely imagine more why the animated show’s original creators Michael Dante DiMartino Bryan Konietzko walked away from Netflix’s treatment. Creative differences will always be a lynchpin for some folks. I get it. Nonetheless, the show’s greenlight for the second and third season adaptation lend handily how essential it is for fans to provide feedback, as is their right to.
Personally, I’m excited to see more, and I hope we get to see Aang and Katara go penguin sliding next time ’round. Until then, I still have two more seasons of the animated show as well as Legend Of Korra to catch up on, and plenty of time to do so as we await “ATLA: Book II – Earth.”
