When the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender series was first announced, Netflix heavily promoted the involvement of the original series' creators. In 2018, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko were signed on as showrunners and executive producers.
“Avatar: The Last Airbender” and “The Legend of Korra” were not made in Japan, thus they are not considered to be anime. They were made by USA, thus they are animated series.
While the creators made it clear that they were drawing on Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Inuit aesthetics — for the Fire Nation, Earth Kingdom, Air Nomads, and Water Tribes, respectively — the individual nations within the world of Avatar are generally not reduced to stereotypes. This is particularly true for the Fire Nation, built on a blend of identifiable aspects from the Meiji and Taishō eras of Japanese history.
The setting of 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' is the Four Nations, fictional lands inspired by various moments in Chinese and Japanese history.
By American standards, the show isn't an anime since the show was produced in the United States rather than Japan, and the term as we know it is associated with Japanese animation.
The Legend of Korra, also known as Avatar: The Legend of Korra, is an American anime-influenced animated television series created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko for Nickelodeon.
Anime refers to a specific style of cartoon produced or inspired by Japanese animation. Think of it this way: all anime shows are cartoons, but not all cartoons are anime. The art style associated with anime is very unique and recognizable.
The SpongeBob SquarePants Anime, simply referred to as SpongeBob SquarePants (Japanese: スポンジ・ボブ Hepburn: Suponji Bobu, pronounced Spongey Bobbu) is an ongoing Japanese anime television series produced by Neptune Studios to produce a quality fan series built around his and Narmak's ideas.
This. The Avatar State. This is the most anime thing ever. Also, you can totally see the inspiration the team got from Fullmetal Alchemist in the 2003 version. The Avatar State is used as a bending trump card of sorts, allowing the Avatar to tap into the knowledge of past Avatars and channel that energy into powerful attacks. It does drain the Avatar’s energy and despite the power associated with the Avatar State , leaves the Avatar pretty vulnerable.
Obviously, the art style lends itself to anime tropes. Avatar had the most realistic human designs for Nickelodeon by far. That’s not to discount other styles of 2D animation, but Western animation tends to have simplified designs that make complex animations easier to achieve with a standard budget.
0. Comment. Avatar: The Last Airbender is famous for popularizing the Western anime style. Created and run from Burbank, the show is a massive homage in art style and storytelling to popular anime.
To help save on budget due to more complex character designs (and save all that money for the epic fight scenes), many anime series will have long scenes of talking with a camera panning over a still frame. Avatar does this frequently and for good reason beyond budgetary constraints.
While Avatar didn’t have this problem airing in any English-speaking nation, their lip flaps more closely resemble those of anime, animated in a fast, more up-and-down pattern that’s typical of anime. You notice it more when the show goes through a longer talking scene.
Granted, this is a pretty standard television technique, but every anime has a clip episode at some point in time to save on the budget. It’s always completely pointless and meant to fill out the season lineup, but they’re usually done in somewhat amusing ways. Like in a sports anime, the team may be interviewed and the characters involved might interject with witty banter.
This is a subtle and recurring theme in a number of anime series, and Avatar certainly made the most of it. Many anime shows have fairly ordinary settings, but some organizations or nations in those shows have inexplicably advanced tech all to themselves, usually for visual appeal or as a convenient tool to explain how a villain's plan works.
From a Western perspective, 'anime' is a looser term, generally meaning animations from Japan, but sometimes it's applied to Western shows with the anime 'look', like RWBY or Avatar. There's no strict guideline on what qualifies as anime and what doesn't, and arguments arise frequently online by people with different opinions on this.
Anime-as-loanword is a somewhat fuzzy term, but generally refers specifically to the animation's origin, and not necessarily where it is produced. Much of what we would call anime is actually produced outside of Japan: it originates there, but the production is outsourced to studios in other countries.
Likewise, a surprising amount of animation that we wouldn't call anime originates outside Japan, but the animation work is outsourced to a Japanese company.
So someone speaking Japanese would call The Promise "manga" because that's the Japanese word for such works, like Calvin & Hobbes or X-Men.
Depending who you ask, it's a style of animation, probably including shows such as Avatar and RWBY but not the Simpsons, or it just means cartoons from Japan, in which case Avatar is definitely excluded. Because of this ambiguity, there isn't a simple, accepted answer to your question. Share. Improve this answer.
In regards to the 'manga' of Avatar, it seems to be commonly referred to as a comic rather than a manga. But the format of this should have no bearing on the animated production. The other answers are being unnecessarily noncommittal. The meaning of the word anime has different connotations in the West and in Japan.
ThunderCats is an example in both its incarnations: few people outside of Japan would call it anime, but the animation work was done there (the 1980s TV series was done by Pacific Animation , while the recent series was done by Studio 4C).
Avatar is not an anime but many critics tend to put Avatar in the category of anime due to the inspiration of Cowboy Bebop and Studio Ghibli.
Avatar is not entirely an anime but has mostly been referred to as such.
Avatar is called an anime because it comes from the anime industry. From a light novel to an anime television series.