The original animation is Avatar: The Last Airbender is perfection show.it is can’t believe it A show that feels surprisingly solid in its approach to colonialism, both for being a children’s show and for being a children’s show. American Plus, it’s a children’s show made in the 2000s). Not to mention a great cast of characters, a fun and well-developed concept, and a story that will keep you coming back.
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But most importantly, it was an animated series that really played to the strengths of its medium – and I don’t think Netflix’s live-action adaptation really understands why animation works. .
Over the past few years, there’s been a bit of a trend in the industry to create live-action adaptations of classic series and movies that were originally animated. We’ve seen Disney do something similar many times, and recently the anime world has followed suit, giving works like One Piece (also a live-action version from Netflix) the same treatment. I am receiving it. But overall, these news stories feature beloved stories whose original appeal is never quite understood. And that’s because it’s animation.
Avatar: The Last Airbender | Final Trailer | Netflix
It’s frustrating, mainly because Hollywood executives seem to think that people only care about the story and the visuals are secondary (because the live-action One Piece and Avatar aren’t that great). (Because it doesn’t look good or interesting.) Yes, everyone loves Avatar for the story that unfolds over his three seasons, but they also love it for its expressiveness. Let’s take airbending as an example.
How do we express something invisible like air? When it comes to shooting live-action shots, that’s difficult. Sure, you could use things like dust, sand, little bits of this or that, but sometimes you literally just need air. Animation is easy! You can simply draw it as a white line, like a cloud ribbon. No one cares if it’s realistic or not. It’s animated, so your disbelief is already suspended. But with Netflix’s Avatar, that just doesn’t work. In reality, you can’t see the air. Throughout all eight episodes, the air rarely looks all that natural unless there’s something like a dust cloud present.
What’s worse is that the actors’ physical movements never land well, even when it comes to airbending and all that kind of stuff. It turns out that he is actually not moving at all, and there is no weight to his movements. This is always a problem when you need to use CGI. This can still be a problem with 2D animation, but it’s less likely.
But besides the bending itself, one of my biggest issues with Netflix’s Avatar is the acting. For the most part, the cast was great and it really wasn’t that bad. I even think that Dallas Ryu as Prince Zuko and Paul Seung-Hyun Lee as Uncle Iroh work really well as a pair.
Unfortunately, the problem stems from the main three: Aang, Katara, and Sokka. Again, I’d like to emphasize that they’re not terrible, but they’re human too, and real humans can only do so much. So Expressive. Animated humans, on the other hand, can push their faces beyond the real thing. This is something the original Avatar often did, and it adds to the show’s comedic moments.
It feels like the main cast is much less appealing in the new version, which is a shame because that’s a big part of why people love the original. These characters are made to be animated, both in the literal sense of being drawn frame by frame, and in his double sense of moving larger than life.
Netflix’s Avatar feels like a failure because it does very little better than the original, makes some elements aggressively bad, and makes others just plain uninteresting. After all, this show is doing so well and having a stronger debut than the incredibly successful One Piece that we can only imagine that there will be a second season.
However, personally, I have no intention of watching it even if it is released. Why bother watching it when the original version still exists and is on Netflix? However, I hope the team behind it takes a hard look at what made the classic series work and figures out how to do something unique.
