I definitely think it’s a bit silly to say that the original animation is, and definitely a bit of an exaggeration. “Avatar: The Last Airbender” Is a perfect exhibit.This is a excellent The show, in a colonialist way, feels surprisingly solid, both because it’s a children’s show (and also a American Children’s shows produced in the 2000s, as well). Not to mention a stellar cast, an interesting and polished concept, and narrative momentum that will keep you coming back for more.
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Most importantly, though, this is an animated series that really plays to the strengths of the medium – I just don’t think Netflix’s live-action adaptation understands why animation works.
In recent years, it has become an industry trend to adapt classic TV series or movies that were originally animated into live-action versions. We’ve seen Disney do this multiple times, and recently the anime world has followed suit, with shows like One Piece (the live-action adaptation of Netflix) getting this treatment. But by and large, these news stories told beloved stories, but they never fully understood the original’s appeal. This is because they are animated.
Avatar: The Last Airbender final trailer | Netflix
It’s frustrating, mostly because Hollywood executives think people only care about the story, and the visuals are probably secondary (because let’s be honest, neither One Piece or Avatar look that good or that interesting ). Yes, everyone loves Avatar because of its storyline that evolved over the course of three seasons, but they also love it because of how expressive it is. Take airbenders for example.
How to represent something as invisible as air? That’s a hard thing to do if you’re doing a live-action movie. Sure, you might be able to do things like dust, sand, little specks of this and that, but sometimes you might really just want air. In animation, it’s easy! You can simply draw it as a white line, like a cloud ribbon. Who cares if it’s realistic; your sense of disbelief has been suspended because it’s active. However, in Netflix’s Avatar, it never really comes into play. You can’t see air in real life, and in all eight episodes it rarely looks that natural unless there’s a cloud of dirt or something similar.
To make matters worse, for airbenders and all other genres, the actors’ physical movements are never that good either. You can tell they don’t really move anything, there’s no weight to their movements, which is always a problem with CGI – this can still go wrong in 2D animation, but it’s less likely.
But aside from the bending itself, one of my biggest issues with Netflix’s Avatar is the acting. For the most part, the casting is pretty good – really, it’s never that bad – I even thought Dallas Liu’s Prince Zuko and Paul Sunhyung Lee’s Uncle Iroh actually worked well It’s nice, especially as a couple.
Unfortunately, the problem comes from the three main characters: Aang, Katara, and Sokka.I want to emphasize again that they are not terrible, but they are also human beings, and real human beings can only be so Expressive. Animated characters, on the other hand, can push their faces into reality, which is what the original Avatar often did, which adds to the show’s comedic moments.
This makes the main cast in the new version feel less engaging, which is a shame because it was a big reason why people loved the original. The characters are animated in two literal senses: drawn frame by frame, and moving in a larger-than-life way.
Netflix’s Avatar, then, feels like a failure because it’s actually no better than the original, it actively makes some elements worse, and others are downright uninteresting. Ultimately, the show did really well and debuted even more strongly than the hugely successful One Piece , so I can only imagine we’ll get a second season.
But personally, I wouldn’t be watching it if it did come out – why bother when the original still exists and is available on Netflix? But I wish the team behind it would take some time to really understand what makes this classic series so successful and figure out a way of doing it.