Some people just love watching the crashes more than the race…
Comment on Avatar (the one with the blue aliens) is such a weird franchise
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 3 weeks agoOddly enough, the Shyalaman movie is my favorite version of that whole franchise.
Zorque@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
Ok I’m trying to be as open minded as possible here, but…how?
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 3 weeks ago
I didn't like the art style of the cartoon, that's a big part of it. I also appreciated the story being condensed - the movie cut out what amounts to about 11 hours of padding. The only thing I saw as being questionable was the Earthbender section (I watched that episode just for Sulu voicing the bad guy), but I think the point of their spirits being broken is even more pronounced when they're literally on ground, rather than trapped in the water.
So basically, the animation and the time.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
Hard to say much about that. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. Personally, with the exception of a few moments where it goes “all anime” (because personally, I cannot stand anime, and have never found a single anime show that I could stand to watch for very long, in part because of the preponderance of ridiculous over-the-top reactions)
Three screenshots from Avatar showing over-the-top anime-style reactions
I find Avatar to be one of the most beautifully-animated shows out there. Especially in moments like the climax of Crossroads of Destiny or during the Last Agni Kai.
This I could not disagree with more strongly. And I don’t think this is opinion, but pretty solid fact. There’s a little padding for sure, but on the whole Avatar is an incredible example of how to do serialised storytelling well. With very little exception, every episode makes some major steps towards advancing the main story, deepening the characters, or deepening the worldbuilding to help heighten the stakes. Usually at least 2 of the 3. The first season is definitely the worst in this regard with episodes like The King of Omashu (which adds some worldbuilding that is important later, but is otherwise not a brilliantly-utilised episode), The Great Divide (an infamous joke within the community), and The Fortuneteller (whose only real redeeming quality is its role in effectively kicking off the romance arc). But in a 20-episode season, and for a show where this is the worst season, that’s a pretty damn good record.
That’s something that could be a good point, but the movie doesn’t really do anything to show why their spirits are broken.
The episode does a great job of this, by showing that even once Aang provides them with coal to earthbend, they are too broken to take it up right away. In the movie the prisoners outnumber their guards, and always have done, and there’s nothing stopping them using their powers whatsoever, either in theory or in the narrative.
And in fact, I think when it’s one smallish scene within a much larger movie, it’s always inevitably going to be hard to adequately “show, don’t tell” why the prison is able to break their spirits despite being surrounded by earth. So ironically, this is something that, if they wanted to do it, a longer runtime in a show is what could have made it work.
It really does have a spectacular voice cast. Outside the core cast, Mark Hamill, René Auberjonois, Jason Isaacs, and Clancy Brown are also among those really worth mentioning.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 3 weeks ago
I guess that's another part of my issue - the setting really never grabbed me or seemed worth the investment that others were putting into it. So that might be why you saw world building and I just saw padding. l only saw "generic anti-authoritarian fantasypunk #367", you saw something else. Because really, that's how I see it. It's fantasypunk, bordering on religious deconstruction. Heck, it's even messianic, and the core concept is an unwilling messiah accepting his role and the chaos of the world left without a connection to the divine - a deconstruction that was already trite a century before ATLA.
The movie sticks to the beats of the core narrative and the modified Hero's Journey. The show tries to meander and present multiple heroes - but when the narrative is messianic, you have to get to the point of the messiah saving the world and then departing in some way, leaving the world secure in the knowledge that the divine presence is both with them and apart from them, giving them free will but bearing judgement.