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The battles and powers all ramp up to staggering levels in this final season. |
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The Avatar: The Last Airbender series launched with two young members of the Water Tribe finding an iceberg containing a 12-year-old boy named Aang, the last of a tribe of "airbending" nomads with elemental power over air. It turned out that he was the Avatar, a figure with the potential to control all the elements and the responsibility to keep them in balance. But while he'd been frozen for a century, the Fire Nation had taken over much of the world, and Aang had to begin a quest to master water, earth and fire and fight the Fire Nation's megalomaniacal leader, Fire Lord Ozai.
Avatar: The Last Airbender season two ended with Aang betrayed and nearly killed. Season three begins with him regaining consciousness after a long convalescence on a Fire Nation warship. Over the course of the season, he must come to terms with his fear of fire and failure. He must find a firebending tutor, learn control over the dangerous element, come to terms with his unwillingness to deliberately take a human life and finally face the Fire Lord, who has gone from militaristic tyrant to genocidal madman. Meanwhile, his friends and enemies—particularly Ozai's exiled son, the frustrated Prince Zuko—have their own fears to master and their own battles to fight.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is the best American animated series ever
The South Korean animation in Avatar: The Last Airbender is nothing short of remarkable: the backgrounds are vivid and dense, and the characters are fluid and beautifully modeled. The elemental "bending" techniques are all based on specific martial arts, and special care is taken to make each movement crisp and meaningful. While a great deal of fire, water, earth and air get thrown around in combat, characters rarely use their powers in the same way twice: They're constantly coming up with amazing new techniques, which keeps every single fight exciting. And the battles and powers all ramp up to staggering levels in this final season.
So does the drama. While Avatar: The Last Airbender is often a funny show—and this season features one of the funnier episodes, "The Ember Island Players," in which the protagonists see a play that (sort of) sums up their adventures—it's always been a coming-of-age story, full of self-discovery and complicated choices. Season three focuses on a number of questions, particularly whether the protagonists can, or even should, trust a seemingly repenting Zuko; whether there's a point to revenge; whether Aang can come to terms with his conviction that he's going to let down the world; whether it's acceptable to kill one person in order to save many more. While the series is aimed at children, it's often satisfyingly adult.
And the characterizations are satisfyingly adult and nuanced as well. One of the best things about the Avatar: The Last Airbender series from the start has been the way it subverts kiddie-series clichés, particularly with Aang's friend Sokka, who started off as a typical arrogant, loudmouthed comic-relief character but rapidly proved to have a lot of depth as a brave fighter, a military strategist and even the lighthearted spirit that kept his team going. And Zuko, who started out as a typical baddie, rapidly became the series' most complicated and conflicted character. The great advantage of DiMartino and Konietzko's three-year plan was that it took all these characters through a series of developments, then wrapped up their stories completely, in ways that were simultaneously hugely cosmic and very personal. They did what they set out to do, and they did it admirably.
Since seeing the finale, I've been suggesting to people that Avatar: The Last Airbender is quite probably the best American animated series ever made. Other people have suggested some solid, worthy rivals—Gargoyles, The Maxx, Batman: The Animated Series and its various cousins, Aeon Flux, Venture Brothers, The Simpsons and so on ... but for me, none of them rivals Avatar in terms of sweep, grandeur, ambition, storytelling and sheer accomplishment. I can't wait to see what DiMartino and Konietzko get up to next.
—Tasha
