The live-action adaptation of “Avatar – The Last Airbender” debuted on Netflix on February 22, 2024. Beforehand, I watched the original series again to refresh my memory. There was one thing that gave me a headache when I watched the series on linear TV on Nickelodeon as a teenager.
Just so we don’t misunderstand each other, “Avatar – The Lord of the Elements” is a truly fantastic children’s and young adult series that shows that even younger audiences can expect complex plots and layered characters. The animated series shows a very good sense of character shades. Because very few characters are consistently good or bad, and even the Avatar, the true savior and absolute shining light of the series, can make moral lapses from time to time – he too is just a hero in training, after all.
The structure of the world and the time told are incorrect
No, what bothered me when I first saw the series on TV was the narrative time and, closely related to that, the spatial structure of the world. Unfortunately, especially in the first season, the makers do not seem to have a precise idea of the distances to the individual locations and therefore do not convey this to the viewers. Aang and his friends flee repeatedly across the world map – but wherever they flee, Prince Zuko seems to have gotten wind of the matter just minutes later and lands his boat on the shore of the corresponding coast.
This becomes abundantly clear in the episode “The Warriors of Kyoshi”: a montage shows how news of the avatar’s arrival in Kyoshi travels from station to station: from a little girl to a fisherman, from the fisherman to the market vendor, from he becomes a crew member of Zuko’s ship and eventually the exiled prince. One might assume that this verbal transmission of the message would take many hours, perhaps even a few days, but on the evening of the Avatar’s arrival, Fire Nation forces land on the island to take the Avatar by force.
This series never gives a sense of the supposed size of this world. All the characters always seem to be just steps away from each other and have the ability to travel halfway across the world in a few hours. And the same applies to the narrated time.
Too much development in too little time
For the sake of simplicity, let’s stick with the episode “The Warriors of Kyoshi” – also because it is very popular with many fans. Here, Sokka the monkey is forced to put an end to some of his terribly backward gender stereotypes. Not only does he have to learn that girls can be warriors too, but he is also confronted with the fact that someone from what he considers the weaker sex exposes his boasting and is superior to him in fighting skills.
A beautiful and understandable lesson for young viewers. Afterwards, Sokka even asks Suki to learn the teachings of the ancient martial art from the avatar Kyoshi. At the same time, a romance seems to develop between Sokka and Suki.
Relief. Quite a lot of action for one afternoon. And at the end of this eventful day, the former rowdy warrior actually learned so much from the short training that he successfully applied what he learned in the fight against the Fire Nation? That’s hard to imagine. Suki would release training videos under the title “From Sleepy to Martial Arts Ace – in Just a Few Hours”.
At times “Avatar – The Lord of the Elements” just seems very rushed in its narrative style. And that even indirectly diminishes the value of individual episodes to the characters’ development arcs. Sokka’s development from a misogynistic airhead to an open-minded individual willing to learn an ancient martial art from a woman would have been good if the protagonists had spent at least two to three days on the island.
Can the Netflix series solve this problem?
Naturally, I hoped that the Netflix series could address some of these issues – and it does, if only indirectly. By combining multiple stories into one in the live-action adaptation, there’s no constant cat-and-mouse game with Zuko and his men, and we spend more time with the characters in one place.
Unfortunately, the episode ‘Warriors’, which is based on the aforementioned animated episode ‘The Warriors of Kyoshi’, is the episode in which the described problems are most clearly evident, because here too the plot moves at a rapid pace.
Of course, the live-action series is still doing a lot right. And the animated version “Avatar – The Lord of the Elements” is still one of the best productions for a younger audience of the past 20 years. Even small irregularities in the narrated space and the elapsed time cannot influence this.