Netflix
For fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender, we have tried to Eternal Sunshine-style erase the live-action M. Night Shayamalan movie from our minds. So now when Netflix is making a live-action series in the same vein, it’s bringing up flashbacks to that nightmare.
And yet, uh, wow, this is one accurate-looking cast.
At Netflix’s TUDUM event (I hate that), they revealed a short teaser but here we can also see the in-costume photos of the four main character of Avatar, Aang, Katara, Sokka and Zuko.
Netflix
They are…almost pitch perfect to the point where I’d argue that Aang and Sokka in particular practically look like AI-generations to be humans as close to the cartoons as possible.
Instead, no, they are real actors. They are relative unknowns who are about to be a lot less unknown after this. Aang is Gordon Cormier, Sokka is Ian Ousley, Katara is Kiawentiio, Zuko is Dallas Liu. The cast also has some more known names and faces like LOST’s Daniel Dae Kim as Fire Lord Ozai, and what I would argue is another bit of brilliant casting, Kim’s Convenience’s Paul Sun-Hyung Lee as Uncle Iroh.
However, as good as the cast looks, there is an enormous level of skepticism as to how all this is going to go. Back in 2020, the original creators of the animated Avatar: The Last Airbender, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko left the project after saying they lost creative direction of the series. They have now returned to start making more animated Avatar content once again, as a flurry of new projects have been announced.
Netflix has done a whole lot of adaptations of anime series into live-action, most of which have had mixed-to-bad results. A lot of it tends to come down to fans going…why…would you do this, exactly? When they already love the original and there’s nothing to really “improve” on from there, there does not seem to be a real point. As beloved as Avatar is, it feels like a risk, even if it does end up being better than Shayamalan’s weirdly whitewashed version (as it can’t really be worse).
Even a trailer, with cool elemental special effects and all, won’t really be much of a reassurance. We’ll need to see the final product to truly believe they can pull this off. The show is coming some time in 2024, barring any delays, and we’ll have to see how things go. Expectations are kind of in the floor, so maybe it will surprise everyone. Hopefully…
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
