Fixing M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender

Two totally convincing Inuits, yesterday.

A lot of people have been on Twitter and the like outlining how they'd fix the Fant4stic movie. Well, that's weak sauce. Imma gonna fix The Last Airbender!

This sort of came up in conjunction with watching Fant4stic. My gentleman friend, whilst we were waiting for the screen to open, made a comment about how no matter how bad Fant4stic was it had to be better than The Last Airbender. I made my standard non-defence of the film in saying that I don't think there was any way to do it well given the constraints on time and content that came with making it a kid's film whilst trying to retain the epic sweep of the TV version of Water.

I still stand by that but I did end up, during that horrible middle act of Fant4stic, noodle out a way that M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender could have worked.

Before we begin, please take the following as read: in this alternate universe the film has better actors, a better screenplay, a better effects budget and the racebending was no more of thing than it absolutely had to be (pragmatically, there probably wasn't a huge number of teenage Inuit actors to source Sokka and Katara from even if they had tried).

Okay, let's begin. How to make this thing work.

One: forget that the Earth Kingdom and the Southern Water Tribe exist. Have the entire film take place in and around the North Pole. Have Sokka and Katara be from the Northern Water Tribe but from a remote village on the other side of the continent that the capital have just sort of left to fend for themselves and is too far away and not self-sufficient enough for the population to make it to the capital. The only reason that Sokka, Katara and Aang can make the journey is because they have a flying bison (God, I love this series).

The screenwriter then needs to do his damnedest to work out what needs to be retained from the Earth Kingdom sections of Water and what can be converted to being set in the North Pole.

For my money, the only trip into the Earth Kingdom that both needs to happen and needs to happen there is the trip to the first Air Temple, plus the Temple in the Fire Nation from The Winter Solstice. Aside from that, random coastal townships in the North Pole could be used for the events of such episodes as The Blue Spirit and the Earthbender prison camp can be a platform on the ocean again and therefore make sense rather than being a quarry and having a strangely racist, underwhelming ending.

Then the stuff in the Northern Water Tribe capital happens pretty much as it happens on TV.

The events in Omashu in Water can be folded in with the events of Return To Omashu in the Earth film (Aang saves the king only to discover it is his old childhood friend). The Gaang can meet Suki at the Serpent's Pass and Sokka can have the over-protective sexism beaten out of him as part of the storyline that has him offending Suki by trying to shield her from harm in the aftermath of losing Yue. Most of the Earth film should be the Ba Sing Se stuff.

Just to round out the Trilogy That Shall Never Be: Fire should start with The Headband but instead of all the “we're in disguise” stuff they should plunge straight into The Day Of Black Sun followed by however much of the Zuko episodes (probably just The Southern Raiders, The Boiling Rock if possible) they can fit in before doing Sozin's Comet.

I am aware that this theoretical Last Airbender trilogy is, in it's way, more brutal to the source material than Shyamalan was but I honestly feel that was the only way to go. Shyamalan's version tried to retain too much and ended up losing the entire spirit of the thing. It has been years and the memory cheats but I remember a film in which Aang never smiles, Katara never fights, Sokka never comes up with a plan and Zuko has not even a shade of grey about his character.

Anyway, that's my tuppeneth. 

10 years of Avatar: The Last Airbender

Broken internet didn't allow me to post this on the day but Saturday was the tenth anniversary of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of the best cartoons ever. I'll admit I was late to the party, only checking it out around the time the HERESY... ahem, I mean “film” was being advertised. There was a lot of buzz about how good the series was but I'd only vaguely heard of it (not a fandom I'm connected to, honestly) so I decided to check out a couple of episodes, one or two, just to try it...

I think I got all the way to Sozin's Comet in about a fortnight. It grabbed me, it really grabbed me in afew series do. Its a great piece of work on every level: the stories are well-structured and engaging; the animation is first rate; and, most of all, the characters are genuinely complex and fascinating. You could lecture on those characters. Even a few years down the line Azula is still one of my favourite villains ever and I think Sokka is right up there with Xander Harris as one of the best “everyman” fantasy sidekicks of all time.

Apropos of nothing, every time I re-watch the series I'm always surprised how little Suki is in Fire. The memory cheats and I do so love that character.

It takes a lot for a cartoon to impress me, quite simply because my generation always has Batman: The Animated Series to compare things to. One of the greatest legacies of the Batman series, as well as its fantastic writing and art direction, was its long history of getting away with shit. Time moves on, though, and every legacy will be bettered. Over a decade separates Batman and The Last Airbender so obviously the technical side improved: Avatar's animation was smoother, it was written more as a serial instead of an anthology, but most of all it got away with more shit than Batman could.

We're talking about a series here whose main character is the sole survivor of a genocide; where another was facially mutilated by his own father; and multiple characters suffers enduring emotional scars from bereavement. Hell, there's at least one pretty obvious gag about Sokka and Suki sneaking into each other's tents at night. Each and every villain has a solid, explicable motivation and none are irredeemable (except perhaps Ozai, who's less a character and more a force of nature in the narrative).

And that's all before going into Legend Of Korra, which actually managed to sneak in the development (even if not the actual culmination) of two of its principal female characters becoming a couple. Be quiet, they are, that's textbook walking off into the sunset, right there.

Why is getting away with stuff so important? Well, it ensures that art is remembered. As I say, my generation's go to example is Batman because nothing else we watched as kids had villains using actual guns or would make any of them as evil as the Joker, who actually killed and left the victims' corpses with horrible rictus grins. People who grew up in the Seventies still remember the golden age of Doctor Who when it was a horror series that delighted in scaring the pants off them. Pushing boundaries isn't the only reason these things are remembered but I do think it was an important factor in making a quality product with a traceable cultural legacy.

Pushing boundaries also respects the audience's intelligence. I have a lot of younger cousins and I have watched some absolute dreck aimed at their age bracket. I concede that I found some awful stuff entertaining when I was their age and there's no shame in that, kids are kids and critical taste develops with age and experience. I do think its important for children's fiction to respect their intelligence. Kids understand more than most adults think they do, subtext is not an alien concept to them because if it was then fairy tales and religious parables would be pointless as teaching tools.

The Last Airbender and Legend Of Korra are series about complex young characters inheriting a screwed up world from the older generation and using their creativity and fresh perspective to make a better world. Brilliantly, this is even true of Korra, where the characters are inheriting and fixing the world the Last Airbender kids inherited and fixed because progress should be continuous. Both series operate with an explicit spiritual dimension not to proselytise but to foreground individual personal development against the huge overarching plots of war and social unrest. Whole essays could be written on Korra's body type in light of her being the series lead; on Sokka's evolving attitudes towards women; on Zuko's morality; on how the series treats the concept of destiny; on Toph's spirituality; the glorious confidence trick of Varrick in Spirits; and any number of other subjects.

And you know what? I think I'm gonna. These are two of my favourite series of all time, I want to celebrate them for a while and a tenth anniversary seems as good an excuse as any.