With Avatar: The Last Airbender heading to Netflix later this month, fans are understandably cautious about how well the live-action series will adapt the beloved cartoon that ran on Nickelodeon. Avatar fans have already been burnt once by the M. Night Shyamalan movie, so their apprehension is well warranted. It also doesn’t help that the Avatar animated series is considered a masterpiece, so Netflix has its work cut out for them.
To allay those fan fears, Avatar showrunner Albert Kim recently opened to IGN about the ambitious remake and how the creative approached bringing the source material to Netflix.
“I’ve used the term that this is a remix, not a cover, in that you’ve got to hit a lot of familiar notes, but you can’t forget that this is supposed to be a new song,” Kim said. “So obviously, there are story points and characters that you have to do fairly faithfully from the original. But at the same time, you’re literally translating something from 2D to 3D, and that meant dimensionalizing the story, taking it into new places, filling in some of the gaps.”
Kim expanded on that thought by revealing how the Netflix series will showing battles and events that didn’t appear in the Nickelodeon cartoon.
Via IGN:
There are certain scenes that you never saw in the original, whether it’s the attack on the Southern Air Temple or the Agni Kai between Ozai and Zuko. And those are things that I knew we needed to see in order to make it feel much more grounded as a live-action show. So it was about feeling your way throughout the process. Where can we take the story into the new directions that still feels true to the spirit of the original? And that’s what it all comes down to, making sure it feels like it was Avatar in spirit.
Kim also said there will be changes from the first season, which had a lot of “adventure of the week” episodes that needed to be condensed from nearly two dozen 20 minute episodes down to eight hour long episodes.
“The first season of the animated show [has a lot of] standalone episodes,” Kim explained. “The second and third seasons become more serialized, but in the first season of the animated show, it’s very much adventure of the week. So a big part of the process in the writers’ room was kind of pulling apart all of those storylines and seeing how the narrative threads lay, and then weaving them together into much more of a serialized drama.”
Avatar: The Last Airbender premieres February 22 on Netflix.
(Via IGN)