Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender picks up thirteen years following the defeat of Fire Lord Ozai and the end of the Hundred Year War. Avatar Aang discovers a surviving airbender named Tagah and learns of a powerful staff that could restore his culture. With the help of his friends, they embark on a global quest to find the relic before a group called The Denied can claim it and upend the peace they fought to achieve.
No one can deny that the animation and art style have drastically improved, clearly putting that film budget to work. It has been almost 19 years since the Avatar: The Last Airbender animated series finale, and almost 13 years since The Legend of Korra wrapped up. Both brought some of the most beautiful anime-inspired animation to the Western world, all while telling a story enriched with East Asian traditions and cultures. The wait was worth it for the vibrant colouring and modern animation film techniques baked into this reunion movie.
The newly-improved and aged-up main cast looked like characters out of Netflix’s Castlevania mixed with the character design of The Legend of Vox Machina/ The Mighty Nein and The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. There were even cute moments when the animation style shifted into a semi-chibi style, which I adored.
“The wait was worth it for the vibrant colouring and modern animation film techniques baked into this reunion movie.”
The cinematography and camera work used in Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender added layer upon layer, from characters just talking to one another to the major action set pieces. I truly felt like I was wading through the skies, whether it was Appa flying everyone, Zuko steering his airship, or Aang sailing through the clouds. The camera movements tracked every piece of action from top-down views and close-ups to ultra-wide shots. Every wide landscape shot made me think: “That’s a wallpaper, right there!”
The fight scenes in Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender were also where the cinematography shone, matching the choreography’s energy with the exhilarating bending by multiple masters of their respective elements. The camera almost moved in and out of the bending cast at one another, as if it were on a drone. This added a whole new dimension to a typical Avatar: The Last Airbender or The Legend of Korra skirmish.
The dialogue and voice acting in this sequel film were the beginning of where the cracks started to appear. Even though I enjoyed Erin Nam’s Aang because he kept some lightheartedness despite being an older Aang, some of the other characters’ lines landed flat. For example, Toph Beifong primarily made jokes about her “being the best Earthbender in the world” and said nothing more substantial.
“Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender was great to see Team Avatar back together as adults in a fresh, exuberantly drawn animation style that meshed with the nostalgia.”
Katara and Zuko had very few lines, with Zuko not even responding to some of the insults Tagah threw his way. On Tagah, Dave Bautista did a decent job in his role as this mighty, tough-looking airbender. Román Zaragoza as Sokka had the strongest voice performance and voice lines, sounding the most characteristic and lively of the bunch.
On top of the lacklustre dialogue writing in Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, the story was almost all inconsequential and felt like a small pocket of lore that could have probably been a small miniseries arc instead of a movie. Again, the story was well-animated and produced, but it was predictable from start to finish. By the time the credits rolled, I thought to myself, ‘Was this story necessary, or good enough to make this reunion worth it?’ The conclusion I reached was ‘not really.’
One small detail that was made to retcon something in The Legend of Korra. Fans were a bit upset that this detail came out of nowhere in The Legend of Korra, which made them question the show’s lazy writing at the time. I would not say the writing for Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender was lazy per se, but that it was fairly linear—without more abstract conflicts to keep me reeled in or surprised.
Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender was great to see Team Avatar back together as adults in a fresh, exuberantly drawn animation style that meshed with the nostalgia. The voice acting had its ups and downs, and the narrative was lackadaisical. Yes, it built out some lore for Aang, but nothing truly riveting or groundbreaking. The main issue was that this film did not bring out anything genuinely new.
Even though the original creators were attached to this project, I could not help but think that studio executives at Paramount might have had the writers on a tight leash—showing through the lack of a creative narrative arc in this movie. The fact that the studio made a last-minute decision to release the film in two theatres across from each other in the United States says it all—the elements were not balanced for Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender.
