Finally catching Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix, and it feels like just what I've needed in this lockdown period.
I missed it the first time around, though I've been hearing people talk about it for years. I listened to Janet Varney's podcast, the JV Club, for a bunch of years, where she spoke to people about her role on the successor show, The Legend of Korra, and as I've gotten into ATLA I've come to understand about 20% more of the memes flying around the internet nowadays.
I'm not sure how much I love the animation style, as I'm generally iffy on Western artists using the Japanese anime/manga style, but because I like the style overall, I don't let it bother me too much. What I do love about it, though, is the fluidity with which they animate the action sequences - when characters are fighting you can see that they've taken advantage of actual martial arts consultants to depict the forms and movements. And on top of that, the frame rate is impressively smooth, more like a high-level Disney movie at times than a standard anime.
The other thing I love is the storytelling. The characters are impressively well-drawn, both the good guys and the bad guys, and some gain more depth as the series goes on. The best example here is Prince Zuko, who shows up in the first episode as The Baddie, but we soon learn that he's not enjoying the best reputation at home in the Fire Nation, and over time we see him make choices to become a much more complicated character.
And as I was telling my girlfriend, it benefits from surprising emotional resonance, such as when Aang has to grapple with the deaths a century earlier of his friends and mentors at the Air Temple, or in Iroh's Tale in season two, where we see Prince Zuko's Uncle Iroh grieving his son, who died years earlier in the Fire Nation's endless war of conquest.
The storytelling doesn't talk down to the kids who were meant to form its audience, and without being excessively mature it manages therefore to appeal to adults (at least, to this adult). In that it reminds me of some of the best episodes of Batman: The Animated Series or Justice League/Justice League Unlimited.
The other thing it has in common with those shows is its voice director, Andrea Romano, who reliably finds some great talents to voice the characters. One notable character that I've just started to encounter (I'm most of the way through Season 2) is Long Feng, who's voiced by Clancy Brown, channeling his role in the DCAU shows as Lex Luthor. The other notable thing is that, even though the main voice cast isn't Asian, the show does give a lot of great roles to Asian actors, most notably the late Mako in the role of Uncle Iroh.
I questioned the use of anime style for the animation earlier, but I do love the Asian influence overall, in the language, locales and general design. Reading the Wikipedia page I saw that the creators initially wanted to have the Fire Nation as stand-ins for the Japanese, but I'm glad they blended them more with other Asian cultures - both because of wanting to avoid the negative backlash from Japanese-American and Japanese viewers, but also because stories like this tend to resonate better when you're not trying to match each character, faction or style to a direct analogue from the real world.
By not basing the Fire Nation exactly on the Japanese, it became easier for the producers to take the characters, both individually and as a group, in directions that made sense for the narrative, rather than being locked into following actual Japanese history. And the same goes for all the other characters and factions, even when they look a lot like Chinese, Korean or Inuit cultures.
As I say, I'm a little more than halfway through. The show is so entertaining, and flows so well from episode to episode, that it's easy for me to binge several at a time, and therefore I expect to finish it pretty soon. I'm looking forward to seeing how Aang's quest ends, and I'm hoping that Netflix will make Korra available for streaming someday soon (bizarrely, the last time I checked there wasn't much of it available on DVD for rental).
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