Cast revealed for the live-action AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER…

…and, shockingly, they seem to have cast actors who look at least somewhat like the animated characters. Look, I don’t beat the representation drum overmuch, myself. But if you’re going to make a show that draws on Chinese/Japanese/Inuit/East Asian cultures as much as AVATAR did, the least you can do is not cast, you know, blonde people. I feel that this was a reasonable objection to make about the live-action movie. I am sympathetic to it.

Gordon Cormier in particular looks like a really good casting choice for Aang, and Dallas Liu should make a good Zuko. Kiawentiio and Ian Ousley aren’t bad, mind you (they’ll look better when they get proper haircuts and costumes), but the other two stand out to me. Put me down as ‘cautiously optimistic.’ But only cautiously. So, so many things can still go wrong…

12 thoughts on “Cast revealed for the live-action AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER…”

  1. Lets get this one out of the way now, cuz someone will say it….

    No black pepul? Das Racis.

  2. I’m skeptical. The casting is irrelevant, because they’ll never be able to do in live action what they did in the animated series without an Amazon Middle Earth budget. And I don’t think they have it. They also don’t have the original creators of the show. It’s going to suck, though probably not on the same level as the film. Somebody must have hit M. Night Shyamalan in the head with a brick before he started making that. I’ll bet he doesn’t even remember being on set.

    1. We haven’t even seen proof that Amazon can pull it off with an Amazon Middle Earth budget *yet*.

    2. Fugue states and blackouts aren’t an insurmountable obstacle to creating art – Kublai Khan, Cujo, and Man Down Under prove this – but they also don’t guarantee success – 99.999999% of drunk karaoke proves this.

    3. Yes, to pull off the anime effects in CGI would appear to be quite expensive .. but two things are true.
      .
      Moore’s law means the cost of good CGI has dropped at least 25% every year since Young Sherlock Holmes …(https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090357/).
      .
      Practical effects *with a good crew and editor* often look better than any CGI budget could create.
      .
      Put another way .. the real question here is going to be the ability of the writers to craft a story, and of the director to tell it ..
      .
      Mew

      1. Sure, they can do it maybe for a movie, and maybe for a single season of 8 episodes, but not three seasons of twenty or more episodes each, which is what it would take to tell the entire story. No way, no how.

        I’ll still give it a chance, but I will set my expectations at Dukes of Hazard level. And when I say that, I mean Vance and Coy, not Bo and Luke. We have to be realistic about these things.

  3. So… it’s nice that they’re not all just white people, sure. That *is* an important first step. At the same time, Sokka and Katara really don’t look at all related, and neither of them look like they’re particularly related to the original characters.

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