Folks who grew up watching Avatar: The Last Airbender have high-key been in distress since its series finale aired in 2008. Unlike other notable pop cultural phenomenons like HBO’s Game of Thrones, whose divisive ending dampened viewers’ affinity with the prestige TV show, the basis of Avatar viewers’ discontent comes from how spectacular the show was. Like a picturesque illustration of a stallion mid-stride, Avatar’s journey from daring pilot to emotionally climactic finale left a void in viewers’ spirits that they’ve yet to fill with another show of its caliber. And who can blame them? Avatar: The Last Airbender hit differently.
Avatar: The Last Airbender was, by all accounts, a formative cartoon brimming with fantastical element-bending action; fallible heroes; gripping, complex, and nuanced villains; and enthralling world-building. What’s more, Avatar accomplished all this while exploring grown-up topics like genocide, sexism, ableism, propaganda, mental health, apartheid, bigotry, and geopolitics, without talking down to its Y7 audience. Avatar’s myriad themes spoke to the kind of X-factor plot points seasoned anime fans would cherry-pick when recommending top-shelf shows to unversed friends.
Before Avatar, kids could only find this type of programming on Nickelodeon’s competitor, Cartoon Network, with equally popular shows like Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, and Teen Titans. Like those Cartoon Network shows, a huge, unique component of Avatar’s staying power among die-hard viewers is how its creators seamlessly wove some of anime’s greatest stories and iconography into the fabric of the show.
Anime influences in mid-aughts Western cartoons have a bit of a complicated history for anime fans. Although piecemeal references to touchstone anime moments like the Akira slide have populated countless times in cartoons over the years to elicit its cool factor, other cartoons of the time — like Codename: Kids Next Door, The Fairly OddParents, and the entirety of Kappa Mikey — were made to mock how eccentric and madcap anime cliches were in comparison to Western cartoons. Avatar, on the other hand, felt like a departure from the norm in how its meticulous borrowing from anime’s je ne sais quoi made it feel more in line with anime than traditional Western animation.
There are some ways this correlation is a clear line: a series about a mystical superpowered boy on a globe-trotting adventure picking up new skills and making friends along the way to aid him in his inevitable showdown with a world-ending big bad is the narrative outline for countless shonen anime. Correspondingly, the trajectory of Avatar’s commercial success yielding a cute but short-lived chibi parody series, an over-hated sequel series, and a universally abhorred live-action Hollywood film is virtually a rite of passage for certified classic anime series.
But while Japanese audiences view any animated film as anime, whether it’s Minions or Akira — the Japanese term “anime” is borrowed from the English “animation,” after all — fans overseas rigidly distinguish anime as media that originates in Japan. And yet, the unique atmosphere stemming out of Avatar evoked a common refrain from a subset of its viewership saying it wasn’t just another Nickelodeon cartoon, it was an anime. While a large majority of fans are still entrenched in online debates over whether Avatar’s anime-esque qualities justify it being considered an honorary anime, what’s undeniable is the fact that its creators, Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, had anime on the brain while conceptualizing Avatar. In Avatar: The Last Airbender — The Art of the Animated Series, Konietzko and DiMartino revealed that works from prolific anime studios like Neon Genesis Evangelion maker Gainax and Studio Ghibli influenced many of the design choices made in Avatar’s early development.
“Mike and I wanted to make an American show that took its stylistic cues from the sensibilities of Japanese anime,” Konietzko said. “There is such a keen sense of observation in much of the animation out of Japan, in the study of movement, cloth, perspective, optics, lighting, and effects. But like most of my American colleagues, I was no expert at drawing this style either. I had struggled every day for two years to capture the essence at the heart of what I loved in designs from studios like Gainax and Studio Ghibli.”
Image: Gainax
Image: Nickelodeon Animation Studio
Konietzko and DiMartino took Avatar’s action choreography seriously. During a Q&A segment at the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con, Konietzko revealed that some of his favorite fights in anime come from acclaimed director Shinichirō Watanabe’s Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, more specifically Spike’s bout against Asimov Solensan in Cowboy Bebop’s pilot episode, “Asteroid Blues,” and Mugen’s battle with Sara in Samurai Champloo’s 21st episode, “Elegy of Entrapment (Verse 2).” At the same event, Avatar director Giancarlo Volpe recounted a time when the staff was “all ordered to buy FLCL and watch every single episode of it.”
Although DiMartino and Konietzko had a clear vision for how to go about crafting an Avatar pilot episode depicting its heroes trekking out on a grand adventure against the Fire Nation in 2003, the former illustrators on shows like King of the Hill, Invader Zim, and Family Guy faced a hurdle when it came to finding the right studio to animate the show.
“Because we were paying homage to the anime style and were huge fans of studios like Gainax, we really loved the idea of doing a coproduction with a Japanese studio. However, after many unreturned phone calls, we realized that the Japanese studios didn’t love the idea of doing a coproduction with us,” DiMartino said.
Fortunately, after meeting with Tin House, the Korean studio behind Wonderful Days, the duo found the animation team that could streamline Avatar’s initial designs and deliver the “anime-inspired look” DiMartino and Konietzko were looking for.
While evoking the action, humor, and emotion of anime was paramount for the duo, Konietzko stressed that he was wary of copying a particular studio’s designs and art styles when drafting conceptual illustrations of its characters. It’s not enough to call something anime when all you’ve done is copy a famous artist’s techniques with no regard for the creative intent behind them. Like a skilled magician, you’ve got to know when to execute artistic cues effectively without drawing attention to your sleight of hand. (“There are some flashy sensibilities in anime that attract hardcore fans, but that can be off-putting to people who are less familiar with the aesthetic,” Konietzko said, adding that some of the “lizard-like nostrils and nonexistent noses” in his favorite anime personally freaked him out.)
This, in part, is why the show’s discretion in implementing anime’s intense fisheye close-ups — typically used in anime when characters are experiencing a psychotic break — was so effectively off-putting to the average Nickelodeon viewer who saw the Joo Dee brainwashing scene under Lake Laogai. Folks who’ve watched popular anime like Naruto, Berserk, or Steins;Gate have grown accustomed to the extremely wide-angle visual technique as shorthand for something menacing or traumatic transpiring with a character. Likewise, uninitiated viewers can extrapolate the effect as a means of communicating the extreme lengths Ba Sing Se’s Dai Li agents resort to — forcefully warping the perspectives of its public servants — to perpetuate an air of fabricated peace. All in all, its use effectively informed the story beat it was entrusted to visualize, even if the reference might’ve gone over some viewers’ heads.
Avatar’s titular hybrid animal designs were also influenced by Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films. Arguably, the most overt homage Avatar pays to anime is Aang’s loveable flying bison, Appa, which was inspired by Studio Ghibli’s beloved 1988 animated film My Neighbor Totoro.
“I found myself unconsciously drawing fanciful hybrid animals, something I used to do when I was young. Mike and I are big fans of Hayao Miyazaki, and my sketches from this time were heavily influenced by his sensibilities,” Konietzko said. “I started drawing the bald, arrow-tattooed boy herding some bison-manatee creatures in the sky. Wasn’t sure how the wingless creatures could fly, but I didn’t get in the way of the ideas and just let them flow onto the paper.”
Shades of Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke can be found in Avatar characters like Koh the Face Stealer (No-Face from Spirited Away) and La the ocean spirit (Princess Mononoke’s Forest Spirit). The art book also mentions that the design of Avatar’s ghoulish spirit Hei Bai was inspired by Evangelion’s Angels and that Jet’s character design pays homage to Cowboy Bebop’s Spike Spiegel.
The contrast between Konietzko and DiMartino’s fanciful Ghibli hybrid animals and their Gainax-inspired nightmare-fuel Spirit World counterparts communicates an air of whimsy and menace viewers can easily recognize as a part of Avatar’s iconography rather than being a pastiche of its inspirations. And in a 2020 interview with Polygon, Konietzko revealed the Ghibli connection pushed them further, with Princess Mononoke inspiring how they went about depicting moral ambiguity with Zaheer, the primary antagonist in the third season of Avatar’s sequel series, The Legend of Korra.
“One of the things that resonated with me so deeply about Princess Mononoke was how there weren’t any villains, but rather people with competing interests,” Konietzko said. “That wasn’t a perspective I was seeing in Western animation at that time, but that struck a chord with me and the kinds of stories I wanted to tell.”
The nuance of characterization Avatar devotes to its cast, namely antagonists Zuko, Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee, feels uniquely informed by anime. Throughout Avatar’s 61-episode run, viewers are drip-fed meaningful narrative beats that humanize the Gaang’s narrative foils as more than one-dimensional villains, but dynamic and textured characters equally swept up in the drama of the Fire Nation’s war campaign. These eye-opening moments — which culminate in fan-favorite episodes like “Zuko Alone” and “The Beach” — don’t insult viewers’ intelligence by presenting a tearful backstory that vindicates the harm they inflict on others. Instead, Avatar employs these events to enlighten viewers as to why these children act the way they do. Avatar’s concerted effort to flesh out its heroes and villains alike was something American cartoons seldom explored.
In an ironic twist of fate, Avatar’s distinct East-meets-West style eventually earned it similar levels of online clout among the anime studios that inspired it. Now, whenever shows like My Adventures With Superman, Voltron: Legendary Defender, and Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts — all animated by Legend of Korra’s Studio Mir — crop up on the scene, fans praise the shows for how their visual style is “like Avatar” as a good omen for the quality of the show.
Suffice it to say, Avatar’s anime influences led to an influx of other Western animation, like Owl House, Steven Universe, and Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to unabashedly wear their anime influences — from sources as varied as Tenchi Muyo, End of Evangelion, and Studio Trigger — on their artistic sleeves while crafting their own distinctive stories. And the industry is all the better for it.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is now streaming on Netflix.