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Delectable tea or deadly poison?
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.
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.
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I send my condolences in advance to your brain.
As soon as they announced a live-action film both the hubby and I groaned. Why mess with a faboo animated show, especially when you're not known for doing anything with/for children?
The worst part was that every single fan-casting I ran across on the internet would have resulted in a far more intriguing live-action view of the characters than what we got, even if (somehow) you can leave the racial issues aside. Dev Patel as Sokka, for example: a gift from the dramatic gods. And all the actors I'd never heard of before with wonderful faces, male and female. I'd at least have been interested to see how they interacted with the world.