The Element of Change: Netflix’s Avatar the Last Airbender Live-Action – Bold Character Transformations
2 min read
The most awaited fantasy TV live adaption of Avatar the Last Airbender is finally coming to Netflix on February 27. The live-action retells the story of the young Aang and his friends. It is always tough to adapt anime to live action, and few shows successfully recapture or rekindle the original’s essence and development.
Netflix’s Avatar the Last Airbender Live-Action reimagines the fun, interesting, and immersive world of four nations with different bending styles. The producers even change the essence of the characters and make them more realistic and easy for the new audience.
So there should be calculated and impactful changes, changes in characters, changes in dialogues, and sometimes the addition to the original work is needed for the live action. So, some changes are done in the Avatar: The Last Airbender. In a recent interview by cast members Kiawentiio (Katara) and Ian Ousley (Sokka), they suggested the makers have toned down the sexism of the character Sokka.
The goofy, nonchalant ever ever-talking, sexist character is reworked for the live-action. The makers deliberately cut off this side of the character in the show.
“There’s more weight with realism in every way,” Ousley mentioned, to which Kiawentiio added: “I feel like we also took out the element of how sexist [Sokka] was. I feel like there were a lot of moments in the original show that were iffy.”
“Yeah, totally,” Ousley nods. “There are things that were redirected just because it might play a little differently [in live action].”
Albert Kim, the maker is aiming for the nuanced character of Sokka. He mentioned that this live-action will not start off like an animated series. He wants the heart of the story to be the same but wants to tell the story in his own way.
“That was a conscious decision to show people this is not the animated series,” Kim said. “We had to sometimes unravel storylines and remix them in a new way to make sense for a serialized drama. So I’m very curious to see what’ll happen in terms of reaction to that.”
“You’d have to be an idiot not to be intimidated a little bit,” Kim said. “My first reaction after ‘Hell yeah!’ was ‘Holy shit! Do I want to do this? Is there a way to improve upon the original?’ Whenever you tackle something that’s already beloved by millions of fans, you have to ask yourself those questions.”
