They remade Avatar: The Last Airbender as a live action TV show on Netflix. Unlike the original animated cartoon (it isn’t an anime apparently), the live action remake is broken into hour-long mega episodes spanning multiple story arcs at a time. I’ve only seen the first episode so far, but I can already tell the pacing will be rough. In order to check that I am not just nostalgia tripping, I went ahead and downloaded the original series as well and started watching that too.
The difference is night and day. The new series begins with the main story plot up front: we meet the fire lord, we see Aang run away from the air temple, and we even get to see the air nomads get genocided all before ever meeting the water tribe. In contrast, the worldly exposition in the original series is only a couple minutes long. Katara explains that 100 years ago the fire nation started a war with the other nations and screwed everything up. Quickly, the original series brings us to Sokka and Katara fishing together. The stakes are much lower at this point in the cartoon and the main trio meet up without having the baggage of war and genocide hanging over the scene. It takes the live action show over 20 minutes to reach the same point–the length of an entire animated ATLA episode!
This emphasis on story framing comes at the cost of character development. It seems like live-action Aang barely gets to have any quality time with his new water tribe friends before Prince Zuko shows up to steal Aang away. The interactions we do get are certainly a lot darker– Aang is informed of the loss of everything he knows, fights Zuko, and goes to see his dead family at the Southern Air Temple all in one episode. I imagine things will get a lot lighter as the adventure picks up, but this first episode is just a slog. Meanwhile in the animation, Aang is sneezing and flying up into the air and sledding on penguins and playing in the snow. Katara is dropping fish on Sokka’s head while trying to water bend, and she accidentally blows up an iceberg after Sokka tells her to go help out with woman chores in the village (that part’s gone in the live action too). While the movie is transparent about Aang being the Avatar and we get his whole backstory in the first 20 minutes, the animated show keeps this ambiguous. Katara even asks Aang if he knows anything about the Avatar, to which he sheepishly declines. He then has a nightmare sequence that alludes to his circumstances (stranded at sea during a storm), but Aang’s full backstory doesn’t completely unfold until the end of episode three.
The live action info-dumps in an unflattering way. Aang is made to seem sort of cruel in the way that he abandons his family just before they get cooked. And when the plot line is laid out like the exposition to a war movie, it seems kind of cheesy. This isn’t to say that ATLA is a deep show–it is literally an adventure story that takes place during a war–but it feels really extra flat when the guts are spilled right there in the first 20 minutes, cheesy big helmet fire lord and all!
The original ATLA is a fantastic piece of media (well planned, amazingly paced, oozing with original ideas and characters), so remakes are destined to fail by comparison. Even the change of medium is jarring! Animation suits Aang so well. He feels weightless in 2D, and all the characters can be extremely emotive thanks to the fact that they are drawings rather than physical humans that have to act like real people and magic cartoon characters at the same time. I won’t comment on the acting in the live action, it is fine I think. Hovering and soaring doesn’t look quite right in the live action series, though. It feels very computer generated. Sometimes the sets feel fake too, but other times the shimmering ice caught me.
If you haven’t ever watched ATLA, watch the original series. It is considered one of the best cartoons of all time for a reason. The live action has yet to wow me. I like live action Sokka.