This Week in Anime

But Is it Anime? The Last Airbender Edition

Chris
We're no strangers to lines getting blurry on TWIA, and Fire Lord knows Avatar has come up here in conversation plenty of times. I may disagree, but the standards are pretty clear-cut on this one:

Avatar: The Last Airbender received a middling live-action Netflix adaptation. Therefore, it's an anime.

Is there anything more anime than a misunderstood adaptation full of mispronounced names?
It's been a solid 20 years since Aang and the Gaang first burst out of an iceberg and into our hearts. Regardless of whether it's "anime" or not, Avatar, similar to Scott Pilgrim, has long been an honorary inclusion in weeb fandom.

It makes sense, as whether or not it is anime (spoiler alert, but I don't consider it to be) Avatar was absolutely one of the first, most visible cartoons to tap into the appeal of the medium at the time of its 2000s zeitgeist.

So the story goes that Avatar series creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael DiMartino (who are returning for that new Seven Havens series) were at least partially influenced by the works of Hayao Miyazaki and the likes of Cowboy Bebop in their conception of Avatar. Cultural influence is a big factor as anime and anime-inspired works go on in the world, and we'll probably come back to that point later.

The thing is, this wasn't a new inspiration. We'd had creators like Craig McCracken and Genndy Tartakovsky around for years whose works could be clocked as "anime-inspired." Still, even something like Samurai Jack didn't feel on the same level of "just making their own anime" the way Avatar did.

Yeah, Avatar nailed down serialized storytelling in a way that clicked with an audience of kids and teens that was primed to be receptive to it from years of Dragon Ball and Naruto. You'd get chapter-based entries in ongoing arcs, nicely paced out with side stories about the villains going to the beach.

Avatar also has a Beach Episode. One more piece of evidence in the "Is Anime" column, I'll concede.

My co-workers at my day job bring up Avatar regularly! I cracked-wise about the Netflix adaptation, but that really speaks to the level of pop-cultural penetration we're dealing with here.

The general solidity of the show, I think, also indicates why Avatar was so welcomingly lumped in with the actual anime loved by the otaku of that burgeoning generation: we weren't coming at anime specifically, necessarily for its exotic import value. Rather, this was just an audience looking for an animated series with a sense of seriousness and ongoing story progression. Avatar fit the bill, and the fact that it was noticeably anime-styled didn't hurt in all that, either.

Exactly. It was "anime enough" in an era when there was less direct imitation of the medium, more mild influences, or even pure parodies in places.

It's also worth noting that Avatar primarily represented anime's style starting to cross over mainly in the American part of the Western world. The influence was felt elsewhere in the 2000s with anime-style shows like Totally Spies and Wakfu from France. Franime, if you will.

All this to say that, yes, I think Avatar hitting was a "Right place, right time" situation.

This gets back into that cultural cross-pollination aspect I alluded to. Those listed contemporaries clarify what was happening with Avatar: the generation of cartoon creators had also come up with anime just like their audience, and were naturally referencing it in their works the same way they would any other influences.

As Avatar's robust fandom indicated, this was also around the time the internet was causing tastes to become more globalized. People were watching both these shows and the anime that influenced them, which means those influences were only going to become more integral and pronounced as creators continued through the eras.

That's the point I've been considering and driving at with Avatar. It's not anime, but it was ahead of the curve in terms of how anime-inspired so many Western cartoons are these days.

We take it for granted, and I wonder if that might cause younger, modern audiences to not realize how novel Avatar was at the time.

I'm a fan of Panty & Stocking. I believe anime is anime no matter what other cultural sub-styles it's biting.

This swings back to my point about cultural cross-pollination, just in the other direction. Just as Western cartoons have borrowed more and more from anime up through the present day, you have examples of anime creators like Studio Trigger and their visible love of Western sensibilities informing their own animation. Golden Kamuy and Dragon Ball may be inspired and influenced by those other art forms, but they're still manga and anime first—you wouldn't think of officially filing them as Spaghetti Westerns or Chinese myths.

There are edge cases, to be sure, such as projects that weren't Japanese in origin that had their animation contracted out to Japanese studios. So you get weird situations where a bunch of those direct-to-video DC animated movies could technically be considered "anime," while the much more conventionally anime-styled My Adventures with Superman isn't.

That's not even getting into the times that Japanese studios provided guest spots for Western cartoons like Science Saru doing episodes of shows like Adventure Time.

Cultural exchange! It's cool! And potentially confusing when it comes to concrete categorization!

That's what I've been getting at with Avatar and the animated series that followed in its wake. Shows like The Owl House crib a bunch from anime (it's an isekai and a magic school series!), but that's not because the people behind them are trying to make something that can be passed off as anime. It's just that anime has been one of the dominant art forms that this generation of creators grew up inspired by.

It's just normal now, and results in the odd situation where a show like The Owl House is arguably even more anime-styled than Avatar, but no one's trying to argue that it counts as an "anime" the same way people did for Avatar back in the day. It's just what cartoons are like nowadays.

You can chart that through Avatar's direct and indirect descendants, from Legend of Korra to The Dragon Prince to Voltron Legendary Defender—that last one itself a bizarre case of recursive Japanese/Western adaptational cross-pollination.

As a pioneering progenitor of this approach, I can admit that Avatar belongs in the anime conversation. It does; we're having that conversation here right now!

A question that can be rough but fascinating to answer.