"Avatar: The Last Airbender" Review: Everything a Cartoon Can Be
Sixty-one episodes, four elements, and a magic system built out of four real Chinese martial arts. Avatar was sold as a children's cartoon and quietly turned into one of the best-constructed stories on television. On the bending, the animation, the voice cast, and why the ending lands.
I was sceptical going in. A Nickelodeon cartoon about a kid with an arrow on his head isn't a promising pitch, and I watched the first episode mostly so I could say I had.
Then I kept watching, and the world kept opening out, and somewhere in the first season I stopped treating it as a children's show and started treating it as one of the best-built stories I had come across. It is among the freshest things anyone has put on television.
The Characters
This is what the show is actually about, underneath the elements and the flying bison.
Everyone is flawed, and everyone is given room to be. The heroes are brave, and they are also frightened, selfish, and wrong at various points. The villains are cruel, and they are also comprehensible, and one of them spends three seasons becoming something else entirely.
Katara is my favourite. She is gutsy, independent, and stubborn to the point of being difficult, and the show never sands that down to make her easier to like. Aang has the harder arc: a child who would rather not be responsible for anything, having to grow into the person the world needs. Sokka holds the group together with no powers at all, which is its own kind of courage. Toph arrives in the second season and rearranges the dynamic in about ten minutes. And Zuko begins as a sulking antagonist and ends somewhere nobody watching the first episode would have predicted.
That is five characters given genuine interior lives across 61 episodes of a show aimed at children. Very little live-action drama manages the same.
The Bending Is Real
Here is the detail that explains why the fights feel so precise.
Each of the four bending styles is based on an actual Chinese martial art, choreographed by the show's consultant, Sifu Kisu of the Harmonious Fist Chinese Athletic Association, who took co-creator Bryan Konietzko on as a student before joining the production.
Waterbending is tai chi, chosen for its softness and redirection of force. Earthbending is Hung Gar, all deep-rooted stances and immovability. Firebending is Northern Shaolin, aggressive and acrobatic, with lightning generation drawn from a specific form. Airbending is Baguazhang, built on circular footwork and evasion.
Once you know this, the fights read differently. Every bender is doing a real thing with real body mechanics, which is why the movement looks simple and still holds up under close attention. The show even differentiates within a discipline: Toph fights in a close-range Southern Praying Mantis style because she is blind and needs to work from contact rather than distance.
The Animation and the Colour
The animation is crisp, detailed, and steadily better from the first season to the third. South Korean studios JM Animation, DR Movie, and MOI Animation produced it from Nickelodeon's Burbank studio, and it sits deliberately between anime and American cartooning rather than committing to either.
The colour design is what I would point anyone to. Book One is icy blue and muted grey, the palette of a polar winter. Book Two opens out into greens and flowering spring. Book Three is gold and red, high summer under an oppressive sun. The seasons of the year track the seasons of the show, and each book's palette leans toward its title element without ever announcing itself.
The Script and the Voices
The writing is genuinely funny, and it does not undercut the serious material sitting next to it. Aaron Ehasz ran the writers' room, and the tonal control across 61 episodes is remarkable.
The voice cast sells it all. Mae Whitman, Zach Tyler Eisen, Jack De Sena, Jessie Flower and Dante Basco give performances rather than cartoon voices, and you feel it when these characters are hurt.
One thing worth knowing. Iroh, the warmest character in the show, was voiced by the actor Mako, who died in July 2006 after recording the first two seasons. Greg Baldwin took the role for the third season, having studied Mako's delivery closely enough that most viewers do not notice the handover. The episode "The Tales of Ba Sing Se" carries a dedication to him, and Iroh's segment in it is the best five minutes the series ever produced.
Where It Came From
Konietzko had an old sketch of a balding middle-aged man. In early 2001, he redrew him as a child and put him in the sky herding bison, then showed it to Michael Dante DiMartino, who happened to be watching a documentary about explorers trapped at the South Pole. An air kid, a polar wasteland, people who live there. That was the seed.
They pitched it to Nickelodeon in 2003. It premiered on 21 February 2005 and finished on 19 July 2008, with a two-hour finale and 61 episodes in total.
Not Only for Children
The show was commissioned for a children's slot and then proceeded to be about genocide, imperialism, totalitarian government, and whether a person is obliged to kill. The Air Nomads are wiped out before the story starts, and the series never softens that.
It handles all of it without condescending in either direction, which is the hardest trick in family entertainment. The awards bear it out: a Peabody, a Primetime Emmy, five Annie Awards, and a Genesis Award, which is not a normal shelf for a Saturday morning cartoon.
The Verdict
Do not miss this one. It works for adults and for children, for different reasons and at the same time.
It also does the thing the best fantasy does, which is to make your imagination go off. I spent a good portion of three seasons quietly deciding I would have been a waterbender. It will be remembered for a long time, and it deserves to be.
