Recently the live action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender came out. I am done watching it, and I enjoyed it. It is, of course, not exactly the same as the animated version. That makes sense. But I still love it.
I first fully encountered ATLA when my child was a toddler. I came out to the living room and found my husband and child watching this show. I asked my husband what this was, and he explained. I wasn’t sure about it. It looked too much like anime, a genre I couldn’t get myself into at the time. I knew I was hooked when the one night my husband put kiddo to bed, and I HAD to keep watching to find out what happened next.
The show instantly became my favorite. To this day, it is something I watch when I need to decompress, when life is too hard, or to have something familiar going on in the background. Why is it my favorite? One reason was that the show was willing to express difficult targets on a show that was targeting children in an authentic way. That wasn’t common when I was growing up. For me, it was like shoving a square topic into a circular hole so a cartoon could check the ‘educational’ button. ATLA wasn’t afraid to show how ugly the world can be, and also how beautiful it can be as well.
The amazing voice acting definitely pulled me in. When I was watching the show initially, I was a music teacher. I didn’t dare to chase the dream of voice acting until much later. When instructed to watch and listen to animation to learn from the voice acting, ATLA was the top pick. The actors sounded authentic and always elicited an emotional response from me.
Though I knew casting directors were vital to a show, I didn’t realize how much they brought the acting team together. During the pandemic, there was a virtual ATLA reunion. Joining the actors was Andrea Romano, their casting director. The room just glowed around her, and it was an interesting outsiders view to see what the whole team could be like.
What are your views of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender? Is there a cartoon, casting director, or actor that inspired you?