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.
Even though Avatar: The Last Airbender has many characteristics with anime, it is not an anime. It possesses all of the characteristics of a single: action and art, character development, and travel. Anime, on the other hand, is more than an art form; it is an industry. Avatar The Last Airbender was not produced by anime industry insiders.
Avatar: The Last Airbender: Created by Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko. With Dee Bradley Baker, Zach Tyler Eisen, Mae Whitman, Jack De Sena. In a war-torn world of elemental magic, a young boy reawakens to undertake a dangerous mystic quest to fulfill his destiny as the Avatar, and bring peace to the world.
The setting of 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' is the Four Nations, fictional lands inspired by various moments in Chinese and Japanese history.
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.
The art style of Avatar shows a heavy influence in the drawing and art style and the portrayal of various characters from anime. The way if the eyes of the character are squintier or tapering to the end, it signifies the evil character while good characters tend to have bigger and rounder eyes. Very close to and influenced by anime.
What is Anime? In Japan, the word ‘anime’ is anything that is animated Japanese or not. So, any media that involves hand drawing or computer animation is considered to be an anime in Japan. So, if you are Japanese, you will refer to this epic piece of art as an anime.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the greatest, most complex, intriguing masterpieces made by the Nickelodeon Animation Studios . This seemingly straight forward story about a superhero not only gives us the childlike excitement of watching a cartoon but also has a number of tricks under its sleeves which it hides impeccably.
For the rest of the world, the word ‘anime’ is used as a colloquial term for any Japanese animated media. The grave, serious and often complex themes of the greyness of human kind, morality of war and a lot of other heavy themes depicted in this series are very similar to the ones depicted in a lots of anime.
Avatar on the other hand, does have a journey, a build up to the final battle and needs the commitment to actually be able to understand what is going on in the series as a whole with the introduction of a bunch or side characters and arcs that do come in as references later.
Though it does retain it’s episodic nature in some episodes like the Secret Tunnel or the Serpent ’s Pass . A lot of similarity to anime but also retains its cartoonic nature.
Well, Zuko is a character that starts of as a villain. He starts off as a character who is misguided, who only and only wants to be accepted. He is a character that has the one of best, if not THE best redemption arcs in the entirety of cartoon industry!
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).