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By Kambole CampbellFeatures Correspondent
netflix/alamyThe new live-action adaptation of the popular animated fantasy exists to exploit people’s nostalgia, rather than working on its own terms.
Watching the Netflix-produced live-action remake of the popular 2000s animation Avatar: The Last Airbender reminds me of a astute recent piece by Dazed writer James Greig, who posits that pop culture is pandering to people’s desire to remain in perpetual childhood. At their worst, remakes of beloved works satisfy this infantilizing impulse, satisfying the need to make everything old (that audiences loved when they were younger) new again. Based on the show created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko for Nickelodeon, which imagined an intricate fantasy world with different nations named after the elements fire, earth, water and air, and selected people with the ability to “bend” them, The Last Airbender is a rather unholy combination of this cheap nostalgic impulse and the worst vices of live-action animated remakes.
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Although remakes in general aren’t always a bad or ignoble idea, live-action animation remakes often seem doomed to fail from the start. Right away, there’s a specific tension that comes from replicating drawings in live action. Animation has visual flexibility; Characters can transform in countless ways as the scene requires. Therefore, the same scenes or character design choices won’t necessarily work in the same way, because there are two types of expression at play; the animation should be adapted, not simply removed.
netflix/alamyIt’s unfortunate, then, that this Airbender seems designed simply to be “that show you remember, but what if it was real?”, trading the visual expressiveness of the original for harsher settings while highlighting the harshness of its war story: a story which could have a greater impact if everything didn’t seem so distant. All the lavish visual effects in the world can’t undo boring direction, its action sequences delivered with a confusing sense of space, its long conversations filled with listless shots against blurry and unconvincing backgrounds, its lines delivered with a rather subdued energy that the camera work. t compensate or emphasize in a meaningful way. Even at its most expensive and polished, the show lacks the sense of visual character that the animation had in abundance. It feels like someone has transported Airbender to some sort of generic “Netflix World,” and this isn’t the first time that’s happened with beloved animations.
The streamer has made it a business practice to buy licenses for popular animation and turn them into live-action series, with a Mobile Suit Gundam adaptation still on the way. But the 2021 version of Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop anime, for example, felt like it was using the original as a worksheet, rather than charting its influences (film noir, westerns, and yakuza films, among them) and adding some of its own. Like Airbender, it constantly and aggressively recalled its animated predecessor without actually interacting with it, failing in its attempt to distill the original’s larger characters into what has become the streamer’s modus operandi: a mash-up of color palettes. muted with flat lighting and composition, and the assumption that familiar images will evoke the same feeling, regardless of style.
Airbender barely attempts to reevaluate the material he’s recreating. In some respects, he retreats. The second episode, Warrior, is the most egregious example, as it replicates a story from the animation but avoids depicting the Water tribe warrior, Sokka, as sexist. It removes the challenge to their belief system and gives the impression that the writers do not trust that the older audience, which they seem to address through their harsher tone, can understand the nuances of the story being told. .
It’s representative of the show’s approach, stylizing itself visually and tonally as a more mature version of the same material, while resisting anything resembling moral ambiguity. As a result, this version has little justification. Does it exist to attract a new audience? However, the original is already hugely popular (it still comfortably sits at number seven on IMDb’s 250 Best TV Shows Everaccording to the evaluation of the site’s users) and available in the same service.
The live action remakes that got it right
When it comes to live-action remakes of popular animations, a handful of people got it right. The 2008 film version of the Manga Speed Racer series, although a commercial failure, was artistically rich. It continued with the anime styles. in your own visual languageand Lana and Lily Wachowski said in interviews that they requested the principles of cubist art in his approach. It had a sense of what Speed Racer is and used strong stylization to bridge that gap between the cartoonish and the real that proves fatal to so many animated and live-action remakes.
netflix/alamyEven Netflix has gotten it right on occasion. Last year’s One Piece, based on the pirate-themed manga series, allowed itself to embrace the seriousness of the original and the cartoonish aesthetic of writer Eiichiro Oda, and the show has been well received by new and old fans alike. He felt sincere, while Airbender feels cynical.
In fact, as much as critics and the general public often deride remakes in general, the remake does not necessarily have to be the product of dying nostalgia. This is true across media: Next week, the second installment of the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, will launch on PlayStation 5. Game remakes have different motivations: the promise of improved graphics and mechanics, and the poor accessibility of the originals among them. But the Final Fantasy VII Remake games’ narrative invention and admirably wild twists stand out against the dull facsimile of the live-action Airbender. The characters in the FFVII Remake installments struggle with the idea that their path is predetermined, and so the games grapple with the idea of the remake itself. Why retread old land? he asks. If you already know where a story’s path leads, wouldn’t it be more exciting to see a new one?
There is a place for both remakes and animated live-action versions, but only if they have a clear vision of because the thing exists, beyond giving people more of what they like. The new version of Avatar: The Last Airbender does not function as its own entity, not only because of its strange and forced visual appropriation of the animated ship, but also because of its refusal to leave the past behind; in other words. , is a show that has decidedly failed to grow.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is streaming on Netflix internationally now
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