Delectable tea or deadly poison?

[sovay]

Rabbit, rabbit. In re M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender (2010), which opens today:

The first fatal decision was to make a live-action film out of material that was born to be anime. The animation of the Nickelodeon TV series drew on the bright colors and "clear line" style of such masters as Miyazaki, and was a pleasure to observe . . . After the miscalculation of making the movie as live action, there remained the challenge of casting it. Shyamalan has failed. His first inexplicable mistake was to change the races of the leading characters; on television Aang was clearly Asian, and so were Katara and Sokka, with perhaps Mongolian and Inuit genes. Here they're all whites. This casting makes no sense because (1) It's a distraction for fans of the hugely popular TV series, and (2) all three actors are pretty bad.

Thank you, Roger Ebert.

Now go and watch the original.

Comments

[alankria.livejournal.com]

It's quite baffling, on a business sense alone, why someone would take a hugely successful formula and... hack it to pieces. It's also sad.

Apparently it's extra fail-y on gender too.

[sovay]

It's quite baffling, on a business sense alone, why someone would take a hugely successful formula and... hack it to pieces.

Yes. I didn't understand it at the time and the finished product hasn't done much to help me. I genuinely don't know what happened.

Apparently it's extra fail-y on gender too.

I have heard this. And I'm sorry; I don't need M. Night Shyamalan to crash and burn—The Sixth Sense remains the only one of his films I really care about, but I'd much rather he'd done a faultless reworking of Aang's world for the big screen, because who knows what that might have turned into? (Even if it really wasn't designed for live-action. Oh, God, what if Miyazaki had done the film version? Stop me before I depress myself further.)

[alankria.livejournal.com]

Oh, God, what if Miyazaki had done the film version?

I'd have been overjoyed if the original creators had done an animated movie, but, man, Miyazaki. I'll, uh, join you in trying not to get depressed.