Let’s watch the Netflix Avatar trailer

I haven’t been feeling well enough to consume much content recently, hence the lack of blog posts. To make up for it, here’s a rambling post about a 90-second teaser trailer for a TV series I’m only mildly interested in, FEEL THE EXCITEMENT.

So Avatar: The Last Airbender is kind of a weird property. People roughly my age have a startling level of nostalgia for the series, to the point where it’s not uncommon to hear nerdy white guys in their thirties refer to it as one of the greatest television shows of all time. I would count myself as an Avatar fan, but not nearly to that extent; I watched it as it was originally airing, enjoyed it quite a bit and retain fond memories of it, but I never formed the kind of long-lasting fandom for the world or characters that a lot of other people seem to have, and I never revisited it once the last episode came out.

See, the thing with Avatar is that it was very much riding the anime wave that was washing over western pop culture in the mid-2000s, taking the serialized storytelling and somewhat more mature tone that kids were getting from their Dragonballs and their Gundams and injecting that into the family-friendly Saturday morning cartoon formula of Nickelodeon. And certainly, compared to what else was airing on Nickolodeon in 2005, Avatar seemed extremely sophisticated and ambitious. But compared to actual anime, even including a lot of actual anime that was also aimed primarily at children, it was…not really either of those things. By the time the series started airing I had already begun torrenting anime from the endless treasure trove of the internet, so I didn’t need to turn to a second-rate western imitator to get my fix. Maybe some of the intense love towards the show comes from people a few years younger than me for whom that wasn’t the case.

(Also real quick, the claim that Avatar was “anime-inspired” has always pretty tenuous, in my opinion–apart from some very superficial aesthetic choices and an “Asian” setting that was always kind of shallow and theme-park-esque, the show really doesn’t borrow any tropes, storytelling conventions or cinematography techniques from anime. It’s far more influenced by western fantasy novels than anything else)

But anyway, the show was popular so back in 2010 it got a disastrous live-action adaptation which temporarily ended M. Night Shyamalan’s career and seemingly put paid to any hopes of more Avatar adaptations. The franchise would live on in the form of the Legend Of Korra sequel series (of which I have only seen the first season) and some comics that are apparently well-regarded by the fandom, but no more live-action projects. Until 2017, when Netflix decided to give it another go, this time with no white people.

And now we have a teaser trailer for that Netflix series, which is due out in February. Behold:

I’m going to be honest, pretty much the only reason I’m interested in this at all is because I ended up liking the One Piece series way more than I was expecting to. I know that sharing a streaming platform doesn’t actually make it any likelier that this will be as good, but I’m still holding out hope that one of the Netflix executives is some kind of wizard who can turn unlikely cartoon adaptations into gold. Stranger things have happened.

(Get it, stranger things? Because it’s Netflix? That was a complete accident)

My first impressions are…broadly positive. It looks good. They’re apparently spending $15 million per episode on this, and you can tell. Granted, most of that seems to have gone to CGI instead of building huge practical sets like with One Piece, but constructing an entire terrestrial fantasy setting is obviously a much taller order than making a few ships.

One thing that immediately stands out is how much brighter and more faithful to the original cartoon the visual design is here when compared to the 2010 movie, which went with a “grounded” and “ realistic” aesthetic. I don’t think that’s necessarily a positive; I actually thought the movie’s visual choices looked pretty good, at least during the scenes before they ran out of money and had to shoot in abandoned buildings in Pennsylvania. Trying to directly port animated costumes and environments into live-action can cause the kinds of problems you see in a lot of Japanese live-action anime adaptations, where the actors all look like they’re cosplaying.

One instructive example on this point is Aang’s tattoo. In the cartoon the protagonist, Aang, has an arrow tattoo that goes along his limbs and over his forehead. It’s the sort of thing that you would look at in animation and barely even notice, but translating it to live action without making it look goofy might be difficult. Here’s how the movie handled it:

I actually like this a lot. The arrow shape is still there, but breaking it into a pattern of smaller tattoos makes it look a lot more realistic.

Here’s the tattoo in the Netflix show:

At first glance it looks like the show has decided to just bring the tattoo over with zero change, results be damned, which in my opinion would be kind of a bad omen in terms of where the creative staff’s heads are at in terms of how they’re handling the adaptation. But if you look close you can see that the live-action tattoo actually has a lot of texture and subtle linework not present in the cartoon, which achieves a similar effect as what the movie’s tattoo did while remaining more faithful to the source material.

This seems to be the general strategy that the Netflix series is using when it comes to the visuals. The colours of the character’s costumes are bright and cartoony, but with added patterning and detail in order to break up the solid blocks of colour that might otherwise look too fake. Does it still kind of look like a cheap costume rather than real clothing that real people would wear? Sort of, but the CGI used to depict the environments is also brighter and more stylized, so it all blends together quite well.

Speaking of environments, they’re noticeably a lot more lush and fantastical than what was seen in the movie. Here’s how the movie depicted Aang’s frozen hiding place at the beginning of the story, clearly going for a realistic look:

And here’s the Netflix version:

The Netflix version is less realistic and more cartoony, but for my money I think it looks a lot more visually striking.

I’ve been talking mainly about the visuals because that’s really all this trailer shows us. We don’t hear any of the main characters speaking, so it’s impossible to get any idea what the acting will be like. Obviously there isn’t nearly enough here to get a handle on the writing. 

There is one telling part of the trailer, which is that it seems to be directly depicting the massacre of the Air Nomads by the Fire Nation. This is an event that you only see the aftermath of in the cartoon, but even that was a shade darker than you would generally expect to see in a western children’s cartoon of the time. The fact that they’re showing it directly now maybe implies that this adaptation will try to grow up a bit with the fanbase, which is definitely a good idea because if there’s one aspect of Avatar that was never going to translate well into live-action, it’s the kiddy Saturday morning cartoon elements that were especially prominent in the first season (so yes, they’re probably steering well clear of The Great Divide episode).

Still kept in Momo though, even though they shouldn’t have because he’s annoying and I hate him.

Anyway that’s it for my takes on the trailer. Writing this has made me kind of curious to go back and see if the original cartoon holds up now that I’m thirty-six years old, so possibly look forward to a blog about that sometime in the next six years, migraines permitting. 

Before I go, while checking some facts on the Avatar wikipedia page I noticed this little gem:

Sure, dude. Whatever you say.