Avatar: The Last Airbender

Why a kiddie cartoon show is worth watching

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
9/18/06
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/avatar.htm

Kevin McDonough, television critic for the Sacramento Bee, was wildly effusive. He wrote, “I can’t say I understand the appeal of the cartoon series ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender,’ but it has definitely found a faithful audience. In this epic tale, the world is in peril because the four forces of nature are out of balance. The Fire Nation has become dominant and destructive. Two impish kids discover the Avatar in some kind of frozen glacier and hope that he can set things right. The dialog and action bounces between typical teenage high jinks and deadly serious combat, with the world itself in the balance.”

Oh, wait. That wasn’t effusive. In fact, it was the sort of thing a critic who hates a show might write because his editor has told him the paper will get complaints if he doesn’t mention that a new season starts tonight. I could hear his teeth grinding between each line.

Nor did he write anything about the show that couldn’t be discerned from the opening credits. I’m surprised he didn’t complain that the Avatar rides a giant flying bison and has a pet lemur. (I’m happy to report that neither animal talks, and indeed they have the communication skills of an average house cat). My wife and I, already planning to watch the cartoon, were amused at McDonough’s sour review. He couldn’t have watched more than a few minutes from an episode chosen at random.

I know this, because I caught a few minutes of the show at random almost a year ago. It was Thanksgiving, and the weather was rotten. The turkey was in the oven slowly desiccating, the cats and dogs were antsy because something delicious was being destroyed by my cooking skills, and my wife had retired to her den to do some beadwork. I was feeling antsy myself, due to the prospect of four days pretty much stuck inside because the weather wasn’t going to cooperate. I didn’t feel like writing, I didn’t feel like reading, I didn’t feel like surfing the web. I was in a pet. So I did something I hardly ever do: I started clicking the TV remote, looking to see if there was anything even vaguely interesting on.

The fourth law of thermodynamics states that there is an inverse relationship between anything worthwhile being on TV, and your need to find something worthwhile on TV. In a burst of scientific agnosticism, I started hitting channels at random, hoping against hope.

Nickelodeon. Cartoon came up. Nick has sucky cartoons, except for maybe Spongebob Squarepants, and a little of that goes a long way. Three kids, exploring a deserted temple. One of the kids, bald-headed with a blue arrow where he should have had hair, had been a member of that temple, but something had happened and everyone else was dead. Attacked by something called “Fire Warriors.” I reached out with the clicker, and realized that the only channels I hadn’t checked out yet were Home Shopping and the Christian channels. There is a fine line between desperation and intellectual suicide, and I was about to cross it. I slumped in my chair, resigned to my fate, and let the tv paint images on my eyes. It wasn’t the Homeric Simpson state of divine drool, but I was aiming in that general direction.

Through the miracle of osmosis, I learned that the central character didn’t sell air: he was an Air - BENDER. That meant he could manipulate air, creating breezes to exert his will or carry out his needs. His name is Aang, and he is 112 years old, although he spent the first digit in suspended animation, ageless and unconscious. The two other children, both early adolescents, were from a tribe known as “water benders” who could use water the way Ang used air. The girl could; her brother was a drone. They were, respectively, Katara and Sokka. Further details from tv.com appear at the bottom of this essay.

I found myself watching a bit closer. The episodes had a richness of detail that you don’t see in much animation outside of Disney and the top-end Japanese anime. The dialog, while uneven, rang true and was often amusing. The characters, unlike so many in animation, had distinct and very human personalities. Aang might potentially be the most powerful being on the planet, but he was still a 12 year old kid and acted like it.

Another episode came on. Apparently Nick was doing what cable stations love to do on holiday weekends and run episodes of the same series in sequence (the SF channel devotes one entire three day weekend to nothing but reruns of “The Twilight Zone”). This one was about a hot tempered admiral from the Fire Nation who is baited by the Avatar into torching his own fleet. (The cultures are fairly low tech, with the remnants of the Water Tribe mostly reduced to hunter-gatherer, and the Earth Tribe at a roughly mediaeval level. The Fire Nation alone can work with metals, and so has technology that roughly equates to the early 1900s.) At the end of the episode, I went to my wife and told her there was something on that she might want to check out. By an hour and two episodes later, we were hooked.

The show is engaging, and that explains its immense popularity. But it also is unexpectedly profound, and often quite subtle.

Aang, for example, enters the series learning that not only is everyone he knew and loved dead, but that his entire people has been wiped out. This comes in addition to having recently learned that he is to be the next Avatar, a distinction that immediately alienates his friends. That’s quite a lot for a twelve year old kid to assimilate, but dealing with the grief and guilt and rage isn’t really the stuff for a children’s cartoon. So the writers work around the edges, and Aang shows only hints at the inner turmoil, with episodes of anxiety and separation anxiety. It’s pretty impressive writing, actually.

The four cultures – Air, Earth, Water and Fire – are all vaguely correlated to cultures of our world. Air is Tibetan, Earth Chinese, Fire Japanese, and Water a strange blend of Polynesian and Eskimo. The fighting and elemental bending styles are magnificently choreographed from four different styles of Asian combat, and the philosophies of the four nations reflect the nature of the substances their benders can control. According to Wikipedia, “Waterbending is based on the ‘Ku’ style of Tai Chi, which originated in the Ku Yu Cheong lineage; Earthbending on the Hung Gar style of Kung Fu, which features heavily rooted stances and strong kicks and punches that evoke the mass and power of earth; Firebending is based on the Northern Shaolin style of Kung Fu. This martial art features quick, ferocious attacks that evoke the uncompromising danger of fire; and Airbending is based on the Ba Gua style of Kung Fu. This martial art features swift, evasive maneuvers that evoke the intangibility of wind. Only one person can master all four elements, and that is the Avatar.”

The antagonists in the series are also multilayered and fully realized personalities. Zuko, the obsessed Fire Prince who would be Aang’s nemesis, is disgraced and banned from the Fire Nation, and believes he can achieve redemption only through capturing the Avatar, who, legend has it, is the only thing that can stop the Fire Nation from destroying the rest of the world. Zuko was disgraced arguing with a general in counsel over using troops as cannon fodder in a diversionary tactic, and is told he must settle the matter in a fire duel. He accepts, imagining he will fight the general, not realizing that by speaking out in counsel, he has offended the Fire Lord – his father. He refuses to fire upon his father, and is fire-scarred and accused of cowardice, and exiled.

He is accompanied by his Uncle, who is also disgraced for having failed in a siege against the Earth Nation capital city of Ba Sing Se, during which his son was killed. General Iroh, memorably voiced by the remarkable late actor Mako, is perhaps the most intriguing character in the series, capable of great wisdom and buffoonery, but a man who despite his grief strives to repair the damage to his nephew’s soul. In one remarkable sequence, he is attempting to teach Zuko to control lightning. Finally, after numerous fizzles, he tells Zuko, “You cannot control your anger until you have dealt with your shame,” to which Zuko retorts, “I am not ashamed. I have never been more proud of who I am than now.” Iroh replies, “You think that pride is the opposite of shame. It is not. It is the source of shame.”

And therein lies the key to why Avatar is important. Yes, it is well-written and incredibly well animated. The art is beautiful, the details and the complexities of the four cultures and the characters embedded in those cultures ring true.

But what really makes Avatar important is that it understands that kids are a lot more capable of assimilating Big Truths than adults give them credit for. People die, and others grieve. The bad guys sometimes have noble motives, and the good guys are sometimes base. The characters are alternatively self-destructive and reach above themselves (nor are those necessarily opposites, either). And just as chi and ying-yang express the nature of the universe, emotions are often complements and corollaries, rather than polarities.

The series will end after 40 episodes. It was planned that way from the start, and I understand that Mako had completed his voice work before he died. The episode I watched this weekend was number 31, so the series will end in about three months (Fridays, 8pm). Much of the first half of the series (which is divided into two books – “Water” and “Earth”, each of twenty episodes) is on DVD, and Nickelodeon will begin broadcasting the series each weeknight beginning September 25th – hopefully they’ll show more sense than they seem to have and do it sequentially.

RIP Mako Iwamatsu 21 July 2006 Somis, California, USA. (esophageal cancer)

Zeppnote:  Since this was written, it was announced that the series would be at least 66 episodes, rather than 40.  It's unknown what effect Mako's death had on this decision, or how they will handle the necessary demise of the character Iroh.  (In a recent episode, "Tales of Ba Sing Se", they included a beautifully touching tribute to Mako. 

In a lost age, the world is divided into four nations: the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Fire Nation, and the Air Nomads. Within each nation, there is a remarkable order of men and women called the "benders" who can learn to harness their inborn talent and manipulate their native element. Bending is a powerful form combining martial art and elemental magic.

In each generation, only one bender is solely capable of controlling all four elements. That bender is the Avatar. The Avatar is the spirit of the world manifests in human form. When the Avatar dies, it reincarnates into the next nation in the cycle. Starting with the mastery of his or her native element, the Avatar learns to bend all four elements. Throughout the ages, the countless incarnations of the Avatar have served to keep the four nations in harmony.

Then, the firebenders attacked. Just as the world needed the Avatar the most, he mysteriously vanished. A hundred years later, the Fire Nation is near final victory in its ruthless war of world domination. The Air Nomads were destroyed, the Air Temples ravished, and all airbender monks eradicated. The Water Tribes were raided and driven to the brink of extinction. The Earth Kingdom remains and fights a hopeless war against the Fire Nation. Many believe the Avatar was never reborn into the Air Nomads and the cycle is broken.

In the desolated South Pole, a lone Water tribe struggles to survive. It is here that the village's last remaining waterbender Katara and her warrior brother Sokka rescue a strange 12-year-old boy named Aang who has been suspended in hibernation in an iceberg. The tribe soon discovers that Aang is not only an Airbender--the extinct race no one has seen in a century--but also the long lost Avatar. Now Katara and Sokka must safeguard the child Avatar in his journey to master all four elements and save the world from the Fire Nation.