The IS the Avatar you're looking for
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| Art Director: Crystal Strode |
When season one of the live action version of Avatar The Last Airbender arrived on Netflix in 2024 it was to great fanfare, a huge (for Netflix anyway) marketing budget and a big piece of internet culture war. More than that, many ‘fans’ wanted a shot for shot remake of the original as they’d loved it in their heads and given the different constraints on live action television, a sizeable and loud minority simply couldn’t get over themselves long enough to watch this version and judge it based on its own merits.
As a result it had a very mixed reception and didn’t take off the way perhaps people anticipated. None of this is particularly surprising. The original show was a creeping cult hit, beloved of people who found it by word of mouth, sometimes years after the original show (first aired in 2005) came to screens.
Additionally, Netflix generally have no idea how to promote content on their streaming service; it always feels like actually letting people know what they’re making is an afterthought. Given their propensity for cancelling shows rather than sticking with them, it’s hard to see their business model as one which thinks about the shows themselves rather than focussing entirely on how to charge for subscriptions.
Netflix’s basic failure to see that being a television company involves actually making television rather than exclusively looking at how to make more money from content aside, we come to season two of Avatar The Last Airbender.
And I’m delighted to say that it is great. The show, based on the original by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko (who also wrote the original animated show) delivers on the promises they laid down in the first season. What’s especially fantastic about this adaptation is that they manage to capture the beating heart of Aang, Katara and Sokka that made the original so emotionally powerful. Add to that the wonderful addition of Toph, our belovedly fierce Earth bending mentor and inventor of metal bending and it brings to season 2 a fantastic set of stories that build on season one while also developing the story towards its conclusion in the confirmed (yay!) season three.
That the show improves in its second season might be a surprise depending on your age. I’m old enough to remember when television shows found their feet in season two (or even three), when they were allowed to have time to breathe long enough that the writers and cast found the heart of what they were making. My children who are both adults now find this astonishing – we watched the show together and they found the idea of season two being better than season one precisely because the characters grew and the story telling matured as shocking as it was puzzling.
What’s remarkable here though is the emotional depth living breathing actors can bring to a role. Look, I love anime and animation but I experienced the exact same thing when I went to watch the stage adaptation of My Neighbour Totoro, the film of which I must have watched thirty times over the years. The stage show reduced me to tears in a way the animation never did despite me loving it with all my heart. The reason being that there’s something about humans expressing emotion that short circuits our brains much more directly than facsimiles of them.
This is also true for the live action version of Avatar. The actors playing Aang, Katara, Sokka and Toph (Gordon Cormier, Kiawentiio, Ian Ousley and Miyako) bring a physicality that carried weight and pathos. Add to that the two-parter of the deeply moving relationship between Uncle Iroh and his nephew, Zuko (played by Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Dallas Liu respectively) and you have a recipe not simply for a coming of age story of a young Avatar but a series of stories about family, abuse, trauma, coming of age, triumph over adversity, the meaning of friendship, hope, survival, the nature of failure, justice, forgiveness and more.
The story itself cleaves close enough to the original that this is very definitely Avatar The Last Airbender but it also knows how to cut and trim for live action. It knows how to pause for emotional beats that land and make a difference. It also knows how to make the audience suffer alongside their struggling heroes.
This show is great and it really deserves to be seen both for what it is and as the kind of show that Netflix (and Disney) has entirely walked away from making more of. It is diverse, it is concerned with who we are, it is concerned with how we make community and get along and like all great epics of this kind it also wants to establish how people who’ve chosen harm might just be able to come back from the roads they’ve travelled.
Avatar never takes the easy road emotionally and if there’s one show I wished I could convince all my friends with children hitting double digits to watch it would be this one. Yes, you have the animation and the question is why remake it?
The honest truth is many people don’t watch animation. You can argue that Disney remakes of classic animations have, at best, been no worse than the originals (none of them have been better) but that is, honestly, as much a financial decision to extend copyrights as it is one about creativity.
For me this adaptation into live action of Avatar lacks that cynicism, caring about its characters and bringing something new to the screen – a deepening of the emotional heart of the animation. It isn’t better – the original series is a masterpiece of creativity and self-awareness – but it is different and in that difference something new is revealed.
Please search it up and give it your time – you will be rewarded.
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The Math
Highlights:
- Funny and emotional story
- Netflix have committed to finishing the show!
Reference: Avatar The Last Airbender [Netflix, 2024-2026].
STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.