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

[stinger78.livejournal.com]

I for one can't understand why directors/producers think it's a good idea to go from the much more flexible medium of animation to film. (All right, I admit it; I can understand--they want to cash in. But that doesn't make me feel any better about their butchering something I enjoy.) And soon I'll have Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel and I may just throw up in my mouth a little bit.

[sovay]

(All right, I admit it; I can understand--they want to cash in. But that doesn't make me feel any better about their butchering something I enjoy.)

Is live-action cheaper? Or is it just seen as more authentically cinematic and therefore real art, as opposed to cartoons?

And soon I'll have Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel and I may just throw up in my mouth a little bit.

. . . What is this?

[stinger78.livejournal.com]

"Is live-action cheaper? Or is it just seen as more authentically cinematic and therefore real art, as opposed to cartoons?"
--Probably not. I only meant that they wished to cash in by making some sort of film and assume that those involved don't actually have the animation prowess to pull off what the original did.

As for my rant about Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel, that's all about news of a live-action Cowboy Bebop movie (which actually cropped up almost 2 years ago). I hope you are already familiar with Cowboy Bebop as it is easily my favorite anime ever. It's mind-blowingly good (which is not something I say lightly, and certainly not something I say about many anime--it's in good company with pretty just FLCL, Akira, and Grave of the Fireflies). But yeah, I'm not thrilled with the casting thus far.