So lots of brouhaha over the casting for the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie (the actual movie is dropping the “Avatar” part of the name), largely because it’s all a bunch of white kids.
I am so mixed on this. My first reaction is some dismay, but reading some of the comments shows some wild hyperbole, to wit, The movie is ruined! Ruined, I tell you! (Which reaction would have been heard regardless of the casting.)
The argument boils down to The Four Nations are all Asian. Well, yeah, they’re actually different Asian groups. No, that’s never stated, but here are my guesses. No, wait, the Water Tribe are Inuit. Are they Asian? Anyway, the movie is ruined by the racist choosing of a bunch of shallow non-martial-artisty non-Asians. Which is a bit racist of an evaluation itself.
The main young characters in the cartoon do not strike me as being distinctively ethnic in their design, and it is all set in an odd fantasy world after all. On the other hand, many/most of the supporting characters, not to mention the costumes, architecture, cultures, and magic / martial arts styles, are clearly Asian-flavored — which, if the leads are all white, will feel more than a bit off, even at best.
So on the one hand, I don’t know that I feel like the movie needed to be cast all with Asians actors or Inuit actors or whatever to maintain some sort of artistic ethnic integrity — but, on the other hand, casting all the leads with guelos is … goofy.
That said — unless this is designed to be a series of movies (which it’s not), I’m not sure how M Night Shyamalan is going to possibly do justice to the multi-seasoned, multi-faceted saga of Avatar. I mean, it would sort of be like trying to distill down Lord of the Rings into a single 2-hour film. That, I think, is going to be a bigger problem than this (yes, problematic) set of casting decisions.
I’m looking more forward to watch the 3rd Season DVDs with Katherine after I give them to her for Christmas.
Actually, from every other bit of pre-filming hypse I’ve read, they’re attempting to do the series as a “film-in-a-chunk” trilogy, roughly one book/season per film.
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The news about Avatar’s film adaptation sparked earlier this year when Paramount Pictures’ MTV Films and Nick Movies announced that they have signed M. Night Shyamalan to write, direct and produce a trilogy of live-action films based on the series, in which the first part will encompass the main characters’ adventures of book one
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Of course, this is all dependent on the performance of the first film (Goodbye Subtle Knife!). So, umm, feel free to freak out over the casting. . .I guess. . . .
Okay, well it’s good they’re trying to do a trilogy — that’s not how I recalled it, but my memory is far from perfect in such things. Fitting a whole season into a single movie is still problematic, but more doable. We’ll just miss a lot.
I think the casting is a bit disappointing and may not bode well for the final product — but my other hesitation in getting too freaked out over it is that I’ve stopped trusting the wisdom of the crowds over casting since people originally freaked on Michael Keaton being tapped for Batman by Tim Burton, and the ethnic/racial issue is not quite as clear-cut as some of the commenters have made it.
In other words, I’m willing to wait and see.
Considering what I saw of TV show, the all guelo cast is more than fitting for the movie.