Avatar: The Last Airbender- Reminding Us It's Okay to be a Kid

With only a few hours until the midnight premiere of The Last Airbender, I took some time this afternoon to rewatch a couple episodes from the first season of the cartoon from which the movie is based on. I was reminded how Avatar: The Last Airbender, which airs on Nickelodeon, is one of the most well crafted shows playing on television. Not just cartoons, but of all television shows. Whether the audience is under 12, or has been holding down a full time job for years, there is just something immediately engaging about Avatar.

The show tells great stories that impart morals to its younger audiences, while entertaining its older viewers by broadcasting terrifically animated fight scenes. (With the desire to entertain older audiences, the producers consulted with authorities on several forms of martial arts, and used fighters trained in these styles for motion capture to illustrate the battle sequences.) But the heart of the show derives from its ability to return its viewers to their childhood, making the troubles of the world seem less pressing. It was with this child-like wonder that I lost myself in Avatar and was eagerly anticipating the production of a live action version.

That was until I began seeing the most recent trailers.



I understand that some programs need to be retooled to work in our modern entertainment world. Sometimes a franchise needs a reboot to please a contemporary audience. But it feels like that ever since The Dark Knight, studio execs believe that everything needs to be dark and gloomy. It’s with this attitude that it appears that The Last Airbender was created. The cartoon premiered with scenes of “penguin slesding” and bathroom jokes. The closest humor to that in any of the trailers is the boy from Slumdog Millionaire looking moody. I had hopes for the movie when I saw that they included Appa, the flying buffalo that the characters ride in the cartoon. But I bet they are going to tweak his back-story to have murdered buffalo parents or something.



Why do many in Hollywood believe that it is it not acceptable to be a kid when going to the movies anymore? Toy Story 3, which opened only two weeks ago, has grossed $244 mil. domestically as of June 29th. There is a market for lighthearted fare at the box office, and Hollywood needs to recognize that. Batman lends himself to brooding; a twelve-year-old boy flying around of a buffalo does not. Our entertainment industry forces us to grow up faster than we should, somethings the creators of Avatar seem to know. In a scene where the two leads, Aang and Katara, are sledding down a hill on two penguins, Katara exlcaims "I haven't down this since I was a kid!" to which Aang simply replies- "You still are a kid!"