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.
If you only accept Japanese animation as anime then no it is not, it will be a cartoon. In Japan, all animated television is Anime. So, yes, by definition, Avatar is an anime.
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.
— Bryan Konietzko about the creation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Avatar: The Last Airbender, also known as Avatar: The Legend of Aang in some PAL regions, is an Emmy award-winning American animated television series that aired for three seasons on Nickelodeon and the Nicktoons Network.
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.