As always, you can get the original article here, so you can see this travesty for yourself. Now, I'm always critical whenever animation goes the live-action route, and with good reason. Just look at some of the epic failures of the past: He-Man, Super Mario Bros., Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children, and the list goes on. Also, don't forget the new Dragonball movie.
Naturally, when I first heard that Avatar was going live-action, I figured it would be a flop. Nickelodeon is kind of known for its habbit of disowning anything that extends beyond their target group of kids aged 6-12. For some strange reason, people seemed to be thinking that they'd get an awesome PG-13 Avatar film instead of what Shyamalan seems to be doing.
First of all, the cast. There's been a lot of people who are genuinely angry over the fact that so far all of the actors have been white. Now, I'll move on to that in the future, but I have to say that their insistence of an all-Asian cast is a bit of a stretch. Not all of the characters look Asian, although the bulk of them should probably be, like Toph!
To start off, I'm going to actually defend Jesse McCartney. I thought I'd never ever do that, but I've heard that he's actually not a bad actor when he isn't swooning preteen girls. Perhaps he's trying to break out of his type-casting problem by playing Zuko. Now, I don't want him to play Zuko. I'd rather have all unknowns for the various roles, but if he's really good, I won't complain.
My biggest complaint with McCartney would be that if he lands the role, it will probably be because the casting director realized that the Zuko character has a very large following of freakish fangirls (no offense to you girls, you're awfully entertaining in the forums), and casting McCartney would pretty much be screaming, "Hey pre-adolescent girls, we've made sure this year's hottest young actor is playing the character you all love!" That's not a very good reason to cast someone, but I could be wrong.
Now, this is when I start to bash the apparently racist casting decisions. Check it out!
Now look at these actors and tell me they even slightly resemble the character. They don't have to be perfect, but at least they should look kind of like Eskimos. Really, this is a travesty, a crime against humanity, and every other bad thing they could have done. At least Justin Chatwin tries to look like Goku in the new Dragonball Evolution movie, but these people don't even slightly resemble their respective characters!
I'm afraid that it might all go downhill from here. Well, it started going downhill the minute it was decided to do a live-action film, but you get the point. Avatar is an insanely detailed show; you can tell that a lot of time and research went into making it, and I don't just mean from a martial arts standpoint. They not only used Chinese calligraphy but they also get even the mannerisms right, from specific hand guestures to bows. It's those little details that help bring each culture to life, not just the different scenery, although that's also incredibly detailed.
Avatar feels more like a peice of history, much like Lord of the Rings, but this film looks more like a teen flick out to make some bucks.
The actual show is also swimming with political undertones and deals with things that other shows either ignore completely or force down your throat in a very preachy sort of way. Avatar manages to deal with death, suffering, hope, honor, compassion, vengeance, and obligations without doing any of that.
On a more positive note, since it seems that even I was mistaken in that I thought they'd actually put some effort into casting this film, this presents an amazing window of opportunity for me. Maybe I can play a character, since race and other appearances make no difference, apparently. I don't know who I want to play (maybe Jeong-Jeong), but it apparently makes no difference that I'm 22 years old and only 4'10". See y'all on the big screen!
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