The Other Avatar: Why You Should Care About The Last Airbender
Aang fans, we give you: the Superbowl spot for The Last Airbender. Go ahead. Take a moment. We needed one too. We cannot express our feelings about this in this shoddy medium of language and electrons. We watched it here at a table full of other interns who had no idea what’s going on, and couldn’t keep the big doofy grin off our face. We don’t want to talk about whether it will be good or not, we just want to appreciate this.
So in lieu of trying to shoehorn overused terms like “awesome,” “incredible,” or “speechless” into some run on sentences, we will use the rest of this post to try and explain to people who have not watched Nickelodeon‘s Avatar: The Last Airbender why they should stop associating “avatar” with ten-foot-tall people with arrows and bows, and start associating it with a twelve-year old monk with arrow tattoos.
Avatar ran for a complete three seasons on two different Nickelodeon channels from 2005 to 2008. On the surface, it admittedly appears to be another in a long line of American attempts to create an anime show, and we didn’t see its merit until we were forced to watch an entire episode by people who knew better.
Then we wound up purchasing the show so that we could watch it in its entire. Put simply, Avatar takes place in a world where humanity is divided into four nations, one for each element. Each person born has the potential to become a bender, with telekinetic powers over the element they belong to, although many don’t. Every generation has an Avatar, a person who can bend all four elements, whose role is to police the balance. When the story begins, the balance is off, the Fire Nation is taking over the world, and our hero Aang, the new avatar, has to master the elements, defeat the Fire Lord, and return peace to the blah blah blah.
This is the simple story at the core of Avatar, the one that gets summed up in the opening sequence every episode. However, a simple story doesn’t mean lackluster over all. It just usually does. Avatar bucked our expectations, and now that you’re clued in we’ll try to briefly pull out what makes Avatar so unique, and worth watching if you have any sense of the “epic.”
World Detail
The world of Avatar is one of the most richly detailed settings we’ve seen in children’s animation. An example? Well, do you see the arrows on Aang’s skin?
- They are traditional Air monk tattoos identical to the markings of the sky bison…
- a species of enormous animals who air bend in order to fly.
- The sky bison taught the Air nomads to bend at the beginning of civilization.
- When Aang sits in meditation, all of his arrows point inward towards his stomach…
- which is mentioned in the show as the physical source of your qi.
More? There are no less that three complete in-canon folk songs sung by characters at some point in the series.
Character Depth and Content Gamma
The series starts out relatively light, other than the threat of the characters being hunted down and roasted to death by the first major antagonist, Prince Zucco. (Voiced by the guy who played Rufio in Hook, 80’s babies!) Starting about halfway through the first season, we get our first hints that it’s not all going to be standard kids adventure show fare, when it is revealed that Zucco has only ever known two people worth his trust: one unexpectedly disappeared from his life when he was about six, and the other is widely considered to be a fool and a coward by Fire nation society. As the series goes on, the story becomes deeper and more serious. Consequences become worse, and the origins of the current conflict are shown have their root in the very human inclinations of two powerful men.
As writers, we also deeply appreciate the character of Sokka, who somehow manages to be the squib, the tactical genius, the idiot, the guy who’s always right, the comic relief, and the guy who every girl falls for. We love Sokka.
And Finally: It’s Pretty
However you feel about the “anime style,” Avatar‘s visuals are superb. If the sheer variety of geography covered in the series wasn’t enough, the cultural architecture and clothing of each nation is given just as much consideration, and then there’s the beauty of bending itself. A very conscious choice was made to marry each bending style to a different martial art, and the characters’ movements give an incredible weight to what otherwise might just be finger wiggling and gestures.
Well, we could go on, but would rather stop before your eyes glaze over. If you’ve gotten this far, we highly recommend that you check out the series. If you’re already a fan, you should know that if you look really close you can see Appa in the above video. More on that here.
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