Avatar: The Last Airbender was more of a love letter to anime than an actual anime.
Avatar: The Last Airbender will definitely go down in history as one of the most popular animated series of all time. Although the series does feel like an anime at many points, it cannot be considered as an anime technically.
However, despite it not actually being an anime, the creators of the series have appeared in multiple interviews in the past and talked about how Avatar: The Last Airbender was inspired by Japanese anime.
The creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender revealed they did not want to just copy the anime art style
Avatar: The Last Airbender was an animated series created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko that aired from 2005 to 2008. The series revolved around the story of Aang, the last Airbender who would bring an end to 100 years of war and establish an era of peace.
Although the series was heavily influenced by Asian cultures, Michael Dante DiMartino once revealed that they were not looking to just copy the anime art style when they were creating Avatar: The Last Airbender. In Nickelodeon’s Avatar: Braving the Elements podcast, DiMartino opened up about the same and said,
“We wanted to do a love letter to anime. Not just copy it. In some ways I know it would have looked better if I had just copied stuff, but I was trying to do our little crummy version.”
Bryan Konietzko also weighed in on the conversation and talked about how the world of Avatar is multicultural in itself. He said,
“Even the Avatar world isn’t monolithic. It is very multicultural. We are two white American dudes, but there isn’t one person who could represent the entire Avatar world. It’s very much about these different cultures coexisting, and the beauty and the pain that comes out of that. It’s just about a world that’s trying to find balance and trying to coexist. That’s our default attitudes anyway.”
Although Avatar: The Last Airbender was produced by Nickelodeon Animation Studios, Michael Dante DiMartino once revealed in an interview that they wanted to create the series with a Japanese studio.
The Japanese studios had the chance to create one of the best anime series of all time
Avatar: The Last Airbender was more of an anime-inspired series than an actual anime since it was made by two American creators in association with an American studio. However, that does not mean the series was not influenced by anime and Asian culture.
Many elements of the series including the art style and plot details definitely did give off an anime vibes at times. In his book, The Art Of The Animated Series, Michael Dante DiMartino went on to explain that he and Konietzko were initially trying to get a Japanese studio to co-produce the series with Nickelodeon Animation Studios. He said,
“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.”
It turned out to be a bigger loss for the Japanese studios than it did for Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, as Avatar: The Last Airbender went on to become a massive critical success. The series has a 100% rating score on Rotten Tomatoes and has even been hailed as one of the greatest animated series of all time by fans and critics.
All 3 seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender are currently streaming on Netflix.
