Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Complete Book 1 DVD Review - IGN (original) (raw)

Avatar: The Last Airbender

built up a hefty cult following over its three-season run on Nickelodeon, and a lot of those folks have spent the last year or two loudly complaining about the upcoming movie version. Exactly why, well, you can learn about that from somebody else if you really, really want to. We bring it up here because angry fans should know that there's at least one up side to the widely-condemned adaptation. It means we get this extra-schnazzy DVD re-release of the original cartoon show, with a big fancy box and new bonus material.
This is Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Complete Book 1 Collector's Edition, which is not to be confused (if you can help it, anyway) with Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Complete Book 1 Collection. It includes the exact same discs as in the previous box set (in the exact same fold-out case, for that matter), but adds some new packaging around it to encompass another disc of extras, among other things.
About the series itself, well, most people have probably already made up their minds. The previous edition of this season has been and gone for nearly four years. In case you missed it, though, a primer.

People from the Fire Nation can firebend, or manipulate fire. The Earth Kingdom can earthbend. The Water Tribe can waterbend, and the Air Nomads can airbend, or they could if there had been any Air Nomads for a hundred years or so. Back in the day, the Avatar could do all of the above, and thereby kept everybody else more or less in line. But the last Avatar disappeared that same hundred years ago, inspiring the supremely humorless goons of the Fire Nation to take a crack at ruling the world.

If this sounds like a cast-of-thousands epic, well, it doesn't exactly start that way. After the momentous introduction, the story settles down to a very personal scale. Two young kids from a depleted Water Tribe (since all the grown folks have gone off to fight the Fire Nation) find another youngster frozen in a giant block of ice, not very far from their village by the south pole.

This is Aang, who, it turns out, would have become the next Avatar if he hadn't accidentally wound up in the deep freeze. Obviously, his training hit a snag – he can airbend, as the title suggests, but he never got around to the other three arts. So it's off on a trip around the world, with the Fire Nation in hot pursuit, in the hope that Aang can someday establish the peace he was meant to keep.

A lot of hay has been made over what influence Japanese animation has or hasn't had on Avatar. Certainly there's some superficial visual resemblance – Aang's great big googly eyes, for one thing. The best thing the series has in common with Japanese action cartoons, though, is that it has a destination in mind. It's not the sort of episodic show that's meant to run in place and sell toys for as long as possible. Every episode moves the series forward somehow: the plot develops, the characters evolve, and we see more of what gradually becomes a detailed, fleshed-out fictional landscape. You can tell a lot of design work went into crafting the background for this series, and it gives a nifty travelogue feel to Aang's trip from one end of the world to the other.

If there's any international influence to the action scenes, it comes from Chinese and Hong Kong martial-arts pictures. There's some great fight choreography here – after all, in a cartoon, you don't have to bother with stringing the actors up on wires. It's especially cool to see how the directors mix classic kung-fu fists-and-feet action with the elemental powers they've come up with for different characters. They don't alternate between using martial arts and magic. It all flows together very smoothly.

The tone and the dialogue, meanwhile, are very American. Avatar has a shockingly smart sense of humor, and the writers find room to fit funny gags and quips in the places where you'd least expect them. There's a constant snarky back-and-forth between Sokka and Katara, the two kids from the Water Tribe, and the nominal villain, Zuko, makes a hilarious straight man. (He tries very, very hard to always be very, very serious, while most of the rest of the cast, especially his wizened uncle Iroh, keeps cutting his legs out from under him.)

This isn't to say it's funny all the time, though. Avatar eventually becomes the epic that it felt like it might, and it manages to hold up under some heavy dramatic weight. If you happened to spot the Nickelodeon logo and figured that this was just kids' stuff, give it a second look. In more ways than one, Avatar might surprise you.

Score: 8 out of 10

Presentation and Video

The first season of Avatar, 20 episodes altogether, comes here on five discs, in the original 4:3 aspect ratio. (Unfortunately, America hasn't quite caught up to Japan when it comes to producing action animation in widescreen.) It looks quite good, on the whole. The colors stand out, the outlines are very sharp, and there aren't many visible flaws in the picture. You might notice some broken-up lines that give a few characters a pixelated-ish look, but that could as easily be a flaw in the original production as the DVD.

Score: 7 out of 10

Languages and Audio

Just like the old set, these discs feature English, French, and Spanish language tracks in Dolby Digital stereo (although there aren't any subtitles to go with them, unfortunately). The sound design has a lot going for it – Avatar's action scenes tend to cover a lot of ground, since Aang's abilities let him whoosh all over the place, and the sound effects definitely convey a feeling of how everything's moving around in space.

Score: 6 out of 10

Packaging and Extras

The Collector's Edition comes in a fancy new slipcase, styled to look like a hardcover book with embossed artwork on the front cover. Inside, there's the familiar Complete Book 1 Collection set, plus an "Exclusive Bonus Disc" of extras for this set and a 48-page color booklet, a "preview edition" of the hardcover Art of the Animated Series book from Dark Horse Comics.

If you already have the previous Book 1 set, most of the extras should be familiar to you. Those break down like so:

The audio commentary is quite well-done, too. Episodes 18 through 20 feature the show's original creators and cover general topics, but episode 17 focuses on sound design and music with the show's music composers and sound effects creators, which makes for an interesting change of pace.

On the new extras disc exclusive to this set, there's a very well-produced half-hour featurette (in widescreen, even) covering the making of the series, which also takes a look at the way Avatar has evolved as a property since its run on Nickelodeon has come and gone. (There are some sequences of the producers visiting fan conventions, which wobble between funny, surprising, and kind of scary.) It covers some ground that the previous set already did, but there's more than enough new material to make it worth seeing as well.

8 out of 10

The Bottom Line

If you've already got the original Avatar first-season set, there's not so much here that you should feel compelled to replace it with this new version. The truly die-hard may want the new extra material, but the average fan can probably live without it. It's a great deal for newcomers to the series, though, and if you like a good action-adventure cartoon, this is certainly a show that you want to get to know.