Don't see The Last Airbender.

[feuervogel]

It opens this weekend. Much has been said around the web, about the whitewashing of the characters and the changes they've made to the story.

Supporting this film, by giving the studios money when you go see it, will only encourage them to continue making racist casting decisions. (Did you know that 83% of Paramount's planned films for this decade have white, male leads?)

I'll leave you with a comic by Gene Luen Yang, author of American Born Chinese, on why he won't be watching the movie.

(Hint: it has to do with the casting call for Aang's role: "12-15, male, Caucasian or any other ethnicity." If you don't see how this wording expresses a preference for a white actor, there's little I can do to convince you. But go read the extensive information at Racebending.com anyway.)

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

Your title gave me a moment of confusion. See, I just started watching the cartoon. I have no intention of seeing the movie, but I just started watching the cartoon, so seeing the title was weird. But yes, I've heard about the whitewashing and I do not intend to see it. Plus, this is done by oh his name is hard to spell without looking up Shamalan... something like that. He's the guy who did Unbreakable and Signs right? I really liked Unbreakable, but then I saw Signs and I lost all respect for him. Not only was the movie unbearably stupid, but it was unbearably stupid while trying to force a bad point. It made me figure he's likely to try to shoehorn his beliefs into future movies as well. And he did it so badly. I'm not interested in giving him another chance. And it doesn't hurt that this movie already has other reasons to avoid it.

[feuervogel]

Watch the cartoon. It's AMAZING. I love it and adore it and would have its babies.

Shyamalan is turning the amazing cartoon into something horrible.

(Thanks to James Cameron's Dances With the Last Samurai in Ferngully, MNS had to drop Avatar from the title. Which makes it easier to say "watch Avatar: the Last Airbender, but avoid The Last Airbender.")

[leora.livejournal.com]

Alright then. That's easy enough to do.

I do like it. I think my favorite character might technically be evil, but he values tea (ginseng is his favorite).

I do wish Aang weren't quite so immature though. I get that he's young, but I find that the fun, playfulness that is hyped in the write-up comes across more as annoying to me. I'm fine with having some of it, it's important for character info. But the degree to which episodes just stop the story to put in action sequences of kids playing just bores me so very, very much. I put it down to the show being written for a young audience. But it makes it very hard for me to mentally think of Aang as 12, when he seems more like around 8. And I have trouble watching it without thinking that they're trying to hook a young audience by giving them a kid mentality to identify with and pretending he's older, because young kids admire older kids.

I'm hoping he grows up a bit as this progresses, or at least they cut down a bit on the cute play sequences. They're not ~bad~, but that combined with the "Previously on" means that each short episode has a significant chunk of time that is somewhere between dull and annoying.

On the other hand, sometimes the writing is quite clever, and I appreciate that.

I'm not too far into it yet, so I'll learn more as it goes. Darch really likes it, which is why he's having me watch it.

I don't find the races of all of the characters to be obvious in the cartoon. But Sokka is pretty clearly not white. I find I have difficulty telling race and this definitely seems linked to vision loss. And Aang looks to me like he could be either Asian or Caucasian. I don't really see him as distinctly either. But culturally he certainly is Asian. And Sokka is clearly not Caucasian, so I can see a degree of white-washing. But mainly what annoys me is the casting call. There was ~no~ reason to prefer a Caucasian actor for a part that was not in any way inherently Caucasian. That's hard to justify as anything but racism. To not even give equal weight to Asian actors when the part would make more sense with one... yeah, that's a problem. And the fact that Asians have difficulty getting roles already makes it worse. This is a role that should have been playable by an Asian boy.

meh

[feuervogel]

Iroh is awesome. I won't spoil you for his plot, but he's totally awesome.

Aang grows up a good bit, but he's still a goofy kid. (I liked penguin sledding! Especially when Katara says, "I haven't done this since I was a kid," and Aang replies, "You still *are* a kid." I get the sniffles thinking about it.)

[leora.livejournal.com]

It just seemed so cruel to the penguins. But darch says they are sledding penguins, so it's okay. Mainly though my issue is how much time is taken up with goofy kidness that I find dull. But I chalk it up to the show being aimed at kids, and I like that it does a lot of good things. I really hate the tendency of shows to think that writing for kids means writing crap. So, I do appreciate when a show realizes you can aim complex and good content at kids.

I've been thinking about the race changes, and really there are two things that bother me most. One is the casting call specifically trying for Caucasians in a story that in no way justifies that, and second casting good primary characters as white and secondary characters or evil characters as not-white.

They could have done some radical race changes that I think would have been fine. Let's say that they cast all of the water tribe as Indians (people of descent from India). That would be a change, but it'd keep a consistent race for the water tribe. It wouldn't make much sense on our Earth to have Indians living at the poles, but given that it's a fantasy setting and not our Earth, I would be okay with that. I'd assume they cast the siblings first and then kept that as the water tribe ethnicity.

It's the deliberate aiming to whiten plus allowing a net effect of whiter characters being better that bothers me far more than any changes in race. Plus the idea of caucasian or any other race... as if there are white people and then there are other people. I actually did have a view of race as binary at one point, although it was that there are white people and there are black people and everyone was one or the other. However, I was in Elementary School at the time, these are adults. (I considered Asians, Hispanics, and many other people to be White, which is part of why I can tell you how many Black kids were in my classes but I have difficulty knowing what the distribution between Caucasian and Asian was.)

[feuervogel]

A:TLA is, essentially, about genocide and hegemony and imperialism. Aimed at 12-year-old boys. (And there are a lot of things that many people wonder how they got past the censors.) I liked a lot of the humor, because it took what could be a heavy, gloom and doom story and lightens it up. Gives a few glimmers of hope.

The factors you point out are the two biggest ones that racebending focuses on. There are set photos and stills of Our White Heroes standing in front of a group of Inuit. Which just... no.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

I managed to catch a couple scraps of the cartoon on Youtube, and I think I need to figure out how to see the rest of it now. It looks really fascinating!
...shame about the movie being crap.

[feuervogel]

Netflix has it, I think. I don't have Netflix, so I can't check.

Or you can buy the DVDs. Amazon has them for $30 per season (3 seasons). There's a new collector's edition out, which (according to sources) is the same as the complete season collections, but with an extra disc of goodies.