Problem with Avatar adaptations is that even a really good one will be bad in context of a series that has 100% rating (99% audience score!) on Rotten Tomatoes.
You simply cannot improve on perfection.
I hate how Hollywood thinks live action is the highest form of visual media. Like you want remake avatar? Up the budget for animators, pay the shit out of your voice actors, and pay some writers to add some darker themes. Would be better than any of the live action have been.
This adaption, while not perfect due to nothing coming close to the show in terms of perfection, is not bad at all. It's shorter than the show so of course they had to make things flow quicker and things were cut out. But for a 7 episode take on season 1 I was impressed.
I like that in the netflix version they added scenes that weren't in the original. My favorite is the scene of Lu Ten's funeral. Iroh is just sitting there silent but you can see on his face that is he is broken inside but everyone comes up to him and congratulates him that his son died a hero. No one says it but for me it felt like in the fire nation culture you're not allowed to mourn the death of those who died in battle, which is a crazy concepts but fits with the Fire Nations fascist ideology.
I couldn't find the whole scene, but here is the last part of it (https://yewtu.be/watch?v=hwPn2gJ1B_U). For context, Zuko has gone up to Iroh and said that Lu Ten's death is great honor. But when he was about to leave he comes back and thats when the above video starts.
These scenes add so much to the character of Iroh, Zuko, Lu Ten (whose character we did know anything about in the original) and to war-time Fire Nation culture. It's amazing!
For a fraction of the cost, Netflix could have instead just frame remastered the original show into 16:9 (not lazy cropping) and spent most of the effort into marketing it properly to gain a much wider audience.
But that would involve talent, critical thinking, and accepting that animation is a format not a genre. So naturally they just bought the rights so they could have their version of Star Wars/Harry Potter.
I could go on an entire rant about how even thinking making an animated show into a live action is a stupid idea, no matter how much money you throw at it, but I think I'll just wait for E;R's 2 hour youtube special instead lmao.
Haha as a German I am lucky and can just switch to the German synchro. The voice acting is directly 300% better... Still that leaves the bad visual acting... As a bonus I get the old voices though. Somehow they where able to get the original voice actors for katara, sokka, suko, azula, Ty lee, Zhao, jet (I think), and suki
I enjoyed Netflix' Avatar so much that I finally started the anime. The acting from basically all the children actors is atrocious but I just love the realism and animation of the worldbuilding that an anime just can't give me. Any plot points with minor characters are great and with the exception of Azula, the fire nation actors are great.
Slight difference between a tongue-in-cheek self-aware parody of your own creation, and an earnest and serious attempt at an adaptation that falls flat...
I really enjoyed the live action. Imo, it cut a lot of the filler from the animated show. I dislike wasting my time watching an episode that adds nothing to the plot.
I really think they should have just continued the story, rather than try to reboot it. I really hope they continue it though.
it works pretty well as a recap episode, and as a teaching moment.
covers, broadly, the events of the show up to that point (which, remember, is several years of airing and you might have missed a chunk of it), all while coating it in propaganda for the characters to reflect on and for the viewer to learn about.
i remember being a kid and being outraged that the events were being portrayed wrongly, and it was a big learning point for me.
One thing I kept thinking about while watching this new show is how much you end up missing Toph. You still get interactions with Zuko, which I thought were fine, but something is still missing, and it's Toph.