Avatar: The Last Airbender

I’m quite proud to say that I have to be amongst the very first people in the UK to have started watching Avatar. Indeed, I was amongst the earliest members of the fandom even counting the US crowd. As I recall, I started to watch the show shortly after the first season finished, after some artwork came up in an online discussion about Teen Titans and how American cartoons were increasingly influenced by anime.

Since then, my feelings have been mixed about Avatar. I was constantly frustrated with the way that everything I loved about the show seemed to be balanced by something annoying or badly-done. Its main problem was how it rushed through things, showing in half-episodes what needed three to explore, leaving an impression of real shallowness. I didn’t like Sokka’s humour and was frequently irked by how easy it seemed for main characters to learn difficult things, or for really contrived solutions to problems to present themselves, and seemed to swing from love to hate.

Having seen the grand finale, though, I have landed finally, though not unreservedly, on love.

Avatar was a bold move from the start. Successful American cartoons on Nickelodeon are things like Spongebob Squarepants and Fairly Odd Parents. Even Teen Titans was cancelled prematurely. And then here’s this grand epic, unashamedly anime-based, with some hugely impressive animated sequences.

I’m so pleased the risk was taken. This is really a step in the right direction, and after the big climax, much more is planned: a Shyamalan-directed live-action adaptation, probably several more short chibi specials from DVDs and who knows? Perhaps there can be another season to come.

Most importantly, though is the precedent set. Who knows what may come through doors now opened?

The story is good and solid: a cruel empire is spreading over the world, and the only one standing in the way of total conquest is the avatar, Aang, the only person capable of manipulating all four elements. This is an unoriginal magic system – powers derived from air, water, fire and earth – but the way each culture is developed (as well as the martial arts systems used to represent them) works excellently.

The other winning element is Zuko, the antagonist, initially bent on finding and killing the avatar to ‘restore his honour’, but later given a lot of complexity in his search for his own sense of morality. Why his father didn’t think his uncle was obviously going to shape his sense of the world, though, I can’t say.

A lot of minor parts about this show are badly thought-out, and in all honesty, I never thought Toph’s blindness worked very well (even though her character outside of that was always awesome). A lot of miniplots get resolved way too easily and the humour often grates and errs too far on the side of the postmodern, but these gripes are far outweighed by the positive elements. The art is superb, and some animation sequences are of excellent quality, especially in the character models. Aang, Katara, Toph, Zuko, Iroh, Bumi, Ty Lee – these are all outstanding characters I will always remember with fondness. The voice acting is outstanding, which only makes me sadder that dubbed anime gets such useless performers. And the relationships, the way they develop and all those warm, fuzzy moments – very well done.

If this is the future of western TV animation, count me very much in. Along with, of course, my anime.

(originally written 28.7.08)

Additional: first mention, Dec 12 2005

Saw a bit of new anime-influenced kids’ show Avatar, which looked fantastic in trailers, and has some beautiful animation. It looked like it might be a bit of a disappointment, though, but I shall wait until I’ve seen more before I pass judgement. Anime’s influence is getting more and more pervasive!

First impressions from Feb 2006

Watched the first episode of Nickelodeon’s leap onto the anime bandwagon, a series called Avatar: The Last Airbender (which is retitled Legend of Aang or something in the UK, though I’m not sure what they’ve done about the numerous references to ‘benders’ – someone clearly didn’t check UK slang when they wrote the series, but hey, Futurama does ok). It’s so close to being brilliant, but it just doesn’t quite work. It’s a shame, but it doesn’t have that certain charm and sincerity that makes anime so special.

The presentation is utterly outstanding – the character designs are superlative, the animation breathtaking and the anime influence very clear, from the characters’ faces to a creature with more than a passing resemblance to Totoro’s Catbus. The animation for the fight scenes in particular is stunning. The story in itself is a nice archetypal tale: teenagers find another mysterious kid, the kid turns out to have strange powers, bad guys appear chasing him, lots of angst as he’s chased out of the village he endangered etc. It reminded me of Tales of Symphonia, and was very similar in tone. Nothing at all wrong with the overall picture. The two main characters, Aang and Katara, are great – Aang is very sweet and childish, and Katara is an excellent everyman character. Their scenes together showed what this series COULD be.

But the problems are in the details. Katara’s brother Sokka encompasses much of the unappealing nature of the dialogue – he’s a typical American teenager, always being sarcastic or wisecracking or goofing around. It’s not just him – Aang was given a few annoying wisecracks in his combat scenes, and when the big bad guy Zuko came along, not only was he undercut by the eccentricities of his uncle (who alone has a strong Japanese accent), but he was soon rendered mere comic relief through pratfalls and silly sound effects. It wasn’t funny, and it ignored the fact that if you want someone of a serious temperament to be respected, you can’t make them the butt of far-fetched slapstick.

Well, these faults are only small cracks, and I don’t yet know whether or not they’ll be enough to bring the whole thing crashing down. It’s just a shame that in the US, writing for the 6-11 demographic seems to mean talking down to the audience and never letting yourself take them quite seriously enough for the story to work.

Wakfu: shorts and extras

Season 1 impressions here: http://adziu.blogspot.com/2011/03/wakfu-season-1.html

Goultard le Barbare
More a Dofus special than one for Wakfu really, this appears to be really where the whole Ankama animation effort begins. There’s next to no information on Goultard le Barbare’s inception online, but it seems to have first been screened at the 2007 Japan Expo in Paris. The animation style also looks like the iffy first previews of the Wakfu cast, especially in the lack of pupils in the eyes of iops, but somewhat to my surprise, there are some animated sequences in this 20-minute short that really show Flash used to its fullest.

Goultard tells the story of a character who features prominently in Dofus and its comic adaptation, and appears (with little explanation) in one episode of Wakfu, where he proves himself incredibly cool and powerful. Here, though, his story is just beginning, at first in Heracles-like scenes from his childhood and then in a big showdown. This early animation effort from Ankama is a little throwaway and ends just as it gets interesting (which makes sense as a tie-in), but ultimately doesn’t have anything of the polish or cuteness of the series it would prove possible. An interesting companion piece.

Wakfu Webisodes
From what I can tell, these showreels and little gags predate the main series’ release. The first two are impressive showcases of what Yugo and Ruel can do, respectively, and last only a minute or two each, while the rest are silly comedy pieces about the tofu birds. They are interesting little nuggets, and show that the remarkably smooth flash animation that sometimes it felt the series had to build up to (forgetting the first Nox/Grougal clash) was in place early on.

Mini Wakfu
Continuing the tradition of the webisodes was the little gag episode accompanying each main serving of Wakfu, in cutesy SD-style. Like Avatar’s similar attempts, the style doesn’t quite look right, the rhythms, fluidity and variable models of anime’s SD not quite captured. And honestly, while some raise a giggle and justify the rest, others are horribly unfunny…

Noximillian special
Now this is the reason I am giving the specials their own impressions. I was overwhelmed with a great sense of ‘wtf’ while I watched this – because the character background special was animated by Madhouse in the style of Kaiba – one of my top two or three anime of the past five years. This was rather mindblowing for me, being so unexpected. Not that many people have seen Kaiba and I’m sure still fewer have seen Wakfu, and I thought them worlds apart, so seeing them together was rather startling. I presume, based on little but a hunch, that the makers of Wakfu were impressed by Yuasa Masaaki’s work and requested he work on the special episode. He provided only character design, but it’s clear that the rest of the team could continue the thematic stylings of Kaiba, especially when the characters give such a strong aesthetic.

As a standalone piece, it’s unoriginal but functions well as the dark past of a primary antagonist, making him more sympathetic and comprehensible, even if it ends too abruptly and it would be better had Nox lived his loss, rather than simply hearing of it from another. But the look of the piece is striking and unsettling, and above all, it’s a clash between French and Japanese animation that has become very dear to me but I never expected to see melded in this way. That stuns me, and kept me in a state of near disbelief throughout. In so many ways, this was a stroke of genius.

Ogrest: La Legende special
Ogrest: La Legende is the second of Wakfu’s special episodes, telling a side-story separate from the main story arc. Ogrest is a major figure in the backstory of the Wakfu game, but thus far has had little impact on the series, until now. The special, framed by some adorable scenes of a sick Yugo being told a story by his father Alibert, tells of Ogrest’s birth and childhood adventure with a group of Ecaflips. It’s a cute and winsome story, and a long way from the tragedy that forms the backstory, although there are hints of darker themes here and there.

Ogrest is the second special animated in Japan, rather than in-house at Ankama. According to the credits, Madhouse were once again the major studio involved, but work was also undertaken by the Korean in-between powerhouse Dr Movie (who do a lot of work with Madhouse), and also by Ghibli. This is likely mostly token background work and perhaps some character animation, but it is nonetheless apt because Miyazaki’s work is here – and I don’t mean in some abstract, this-feels-a-bit-like-Ghibli-so-I’ll-namedrop way: there are character animations here taken more or less directly from Toei’s Doubutsu Takarajima – which Miyazaki worked on as key animator, and which more or less defined his signature chase style back in 1971. The homage is subtle, but they made it explicit in a recent Inside Ankama, juxtaposing the clips. It was a great little nod to an important but much-neglected piece of anime history, and I have to hope more Wakfu fans go and find the original, because it doesn’t seem like many people have ever heard of Animal Treasure Island.

And the plot is all more or less a reference back to that film, too: after his unusual birth story, adorable little Ogrest (une catastrophe ambulance) gets mixed up with three animal pirates looking for treasure. They ultimately find it, but Ogrest doesn’t find what he’s looking for – or does he? We get a happy ending, but with plenty of foreshadowing of what is to come.

Wakfu’s specials are getting more and more interesting. With more to come – as well as feature films – I am only getting more and more excited about what Ankama will come up with next.