- Joined
- Jan 19, 2020
At the time a lesbian relationship would've been pretty well impossible to get on network television, but they knew the last season was going online. Even so, the decision to make them a couple seems like an extremely last-minute attempt at cultural relevancy. As I said, Bryke themselves waited to confirm it until it was not only 'safe' to do so, but the conversation around Korra was all but dead. Even fans weren't shipping Korasami until Bryke told them to.
If Nickelodeon didn't want it to go through, they, they could've easily pulled the plug. Animation episodes need to go through multiple revision passes and edit checks before they hit the airwaves. If a Nickeldeon executive didn't want it done, they'd have demanded an alteration orjust had them pull the scene entirely; it was an online distribution, they didn't need to feel beholden to commercial time slots.
well that was certainly a piece of animation
The general consensus seems pretty on-target-- not enough time to flesh out its ideas, major 'shonen movie' energy, the voice actors weren't great. I'm going to disagree with the consensus about the action scenes, though, which folds mostly into my complaints about the animation as a whole.
Immediate impression: the guy they got to do Aang sounds like a fourteen year old waiting for his balls to drop. Threw me off every single time.
The pacing is a mess. Way too breakneck trying to get to the next action setpiece. Every emotional beat felt like it was aching for just a few more seconds to actually process but we gotta go go go to the next big explosion!
I'm confounded that right out the gate Aang seems confused by the name "the Denied" but all of his friends are like oh my god, the Denied, of course. Do they or do they not know about this group? When they did form? They seem upset about the Hundred Year War-- were they a resistance pocket during that time? Did they only spring up recently, and if so, why are they pissed off at the guy that stopped the Fire Nation?
Absolutely tickled that the first major event has Aaang almost getting crushed by a tower, then the next major event is Aang almost getting crushed by a mountain. Way to vary the pacing guys. Even better when the 'crushed by a mountain' had a moment straight out of Promethes, where a huge rock is falling toward Aang and he just keeps running straight away from instead of like, throwing himself to the side. When the tower was collapsing not moving made sense, as he was trying to preserve an Air Temple, but the mountain? Just get out of the way you dingus.
The movie is demanding a lot more emotional investment than it's actually willing to work for. The whole beat in th emiddle about Aang finally finding another Airbender with whom he could share his culture could have been really powerful, but we know Tagah for about ten minutes before he betrays Aang, and Aang knows him for about three before he's willing to throw his friends aside and put all of his trust behind this dude he met yesterday. I get that the point is Aang finally sees a connection to his culture that he's been denied since his childhood but the movie is riding a line wehre it wants this connection to feel organic ("we could have been brothers") but simultaneously desperate (he's the only connection Aang has) and fails to commit to either of them enough to make Aang's decisions feel in-correct, or for Tagah's betrayal to really land.
"You ran away" becomes an ongoing taunt that Aang has to overcome, but since we didn't actually see him bond with Tagah I have no ida why Tagah knows about this, or why Aang would admit to it so immediately. A similar problem occurs with Tagah yelling about 'your precious Republic City'. He's never been to Republic City and we don't see the characters explain the concept, and we can't necessarily take for granted that tehy just told him all this stuff, especially given how violent his response to it all is. Seeing this conversation, seeing his pushback, seeing him go quiet and think... that would go a long way to establishing his character and laying a foundation for the inevitable betrayal.
I kind of love the cut between 'Tagah gets the staff' and then 'the Denied airbenders'. I guess we don't really need to see how that actually works.
Related, but the Denied instantly knowing how to airbend and combat-capable levels is bullshit. I know it's a short movie and we can't dwell on these kinds of things but it would've made more sense for how much it actually impacted the movie for Tagah to not have had an opportunity to actually impart these powers and they're fighting for that opening. Their airbending was largely perfunctory special effects; the weapons they were using earlier could have fulfilled the same function.
Marvel-ass 'laser portal in the sky' finale.
Most of the Gaang was completely unnecessary here and actively complicated the story being told. That whole bit driving through the eternal storm while the Gaang has to recover the airship is conceptually exciting but extremely hard to follow (what were Toph and Zuko actually doing?). Or maybe I just spaced out. Anyway their presence was really very ancillary other than Katara bringing everybody back to life (an unnecessary beat) and kinda the climax against the Denied, although the Denied themselves are so poorly developed and explained this could have just been about Aang finding a map to Tagah, they didn't need thes others bozos cluttering up the screen.
The most emotionally meaningful moment was finding the herd of bison at the end. That actually made me smile. Somebody said it upthread but you could've had a whole movie about finding the air bison, and you still open up for a villain who wants to exploit them or something. Aang's statement that they're "the original air benders' could have, in a different universe, facilitated people actually re-learning airbending, but Korra fucked up not just the storytelling possibility but how humans gained bending so forget that.
Some people have mentioned that the animation isn't that great. Others say the fight scenes are exciting. I'm going to fall on the side of 'it's not that great', and for my fellows who were rubbed the wrong way by it, I can help explain what's going on:
The animation is using 3D puppets and rendering to a 2D style. The effect is actually really beautiful moment to moment, but when the characters are moving you can see that there's an unnatural fluidity between their frames, which is a result of using spline interpolation to fill in the tweens. It seems to me that the level of prowess the individual scene animators had was a little choppy, because some scenes really mimic the flow of the original 2D style in respect to how the characters move, like slowing down and speeding up at different parts of an action to mimic how a human body actually build and released energy, while others were flat movements with no acceleration or deceleration-- a limb would start moving and just hard stop when it reached its key pose. It's a relatively minor thing, but if you're picking up on it, it drives the action animation right into the uncanny valley. The sequence in the Spirit World is maybe the most egregious, where everything feels like it's moving just for the sake of moving and whoever storyboarded that needs to have their coffee taken away from them. (Also going into the Spirit Realm for, what, ninety seconds? Waste of time and effort, the movie accomplished nothing that it couldn't have done anywhere else.)
The real problem, though, is actually in the camera. Most 2D animation has very limited camera movements-- panoramic shots, shoulder cuts, holding on establishing shots. In 2D it's because you have to paint a new background every time you change shots, in addition to having to make sure the chracters are kept in good perspective, so while you sometimes get some really unuusal camera movements and perspective shots they are limited to special occasions. Because the camera is in a 3D space, you are no longer tethered by that restriction. It lets you get away with more dynamic camera work, and used in moderation can be very effective for panning, continuous shots, circling a focal point.
The camera in this movie is flying all over the fucking place, just constantly swimming back and forth, crawling to the side even when characters are static, flinging itself this way and that during fight scenes... even live-action movies don't use their cameras like this, and it suffers the same pacing problem as the animation, where the movement speed doesn't change so the camera just feels like its drunk for pretty much the entire movie. Like there are some shots where they were obviously feeling fancy (I don't think they worked but at least I understood the intent) and then others where it feels like they forgot to lock the camera and it's just drifting off because nobody could be assed to tell it to stop.
Aggravatingly, this isn't unsalvageable-- I mean it is now, there's no way they'd dismantle this and try again at this point, but there are some decent ideas in here and the rendering style they've got going is generally really impressive. The core story also has some honest potential, the idea of Aang bonding with an Air Nomad and finally having somebody who can share his culture and memories, only for that person to wind up betraying him is unironically compelling. I was actually really intrigued by the wording of 'the Air Nomads spread peace wherever they went', which sounds to ME like a really nice way of saying they were conquerors using unification and peace as an excuse to spread an Air Empire (as Tagah himself calls it). I was hoping that the missing Avatar was actually responsible for a legitimate attempt at an Air Empire, interpreting their duties to balance the world by forcing it under the heel of their moral framework and realizing only after whipping their followers into a fervor that it's not true harmony.
There are definitely possibilities here but a ninety minute throwaway movie isn't going to be the right medium for what (I think) they wanted. Especially discounting that, yeah, this is really just a rehash of S3 of Korra.
Immediate impression: the guy they got to do Aang sounds like a fourteen year old waiting for his balls to drop. Threw me off every single time.
The pacing is a mess. Way too breakneck trying to get to the next action setpiece. Every emotional beat felt like it was aching for just a few more seconds to actually process but we gotta go go go to the next big explosion!
I'm confounded that right out the gate Aang seems confused by the name "the Denied" but all of his friends are like oh my god, the Denied, of course. Do they or do they not know about this group? When they did form? They seem upset about the Hundred Year War-- were they a resistance pocket during that time? Did they only spring up recently, and if so, why are they pissed off at the guy that stopped the Fire Nation?
Absolutely tickled that the first major event has Aaang almost getting crushed by a tower, then the next major event is Aang almost getting crushed by a mountain. Way to vary the pacing guys. Even better when the 'crushed by a mountain' had a moment straight out of Promethes, where a huge rock is falling toward Aang and he just keeps running straight away from instead of like, throwing himself to the side. When the tower was collapsing not moving made sense, as he was trying to preserve an Air Temple, but the mountain? Just get out of the way you dingus.
The movie is demanding a lot more emotional investment than it's actually willing to work for. The whole beat in th emiddle about Aang finally finding another Airbender with whom he could share his culture could have been really powerful, but we know Tagah for about ten minutes before he betrays Aang, and Aang knows him for about three before he's willing to throw his friends aside and put all of his trust behind this dude he met yesterday. I get that the point is Aang finally sees a connection to his culture that he's been denied since his childhood but the movie is riding a line wehre it wants this connection to feel organic ("we could have been brothers") but simultaneously desperate (he's the only connection Aang has) and fails to commit to either of them enough to make Aang's decisions feel in-correct, or for Tagah's betrayal to really land.
"You ran away" becomes an ongoing taunt that Aang has to overcome, but since we didn't actually see him bond with Tagah I have no ida why Tagah knows about this, or why Aang would admit to it so immediately. A similar problem occurs with Tagah yelling about 'your precious Republic City'. He's never been to Republic City and we don't see the characters explain the concept, and we can't necessarily take for granted that tehy just told him all this stuff, especially given how violent his response to it all is. Seeing this conversation, seeing his pushback, seeing him go quiet and think... that would go a long way to establishing his character and laying a foundation for the inevitable betrayal.
I kind of love the cut between 'Tagah gets the staff' and then 'the Denied airbenders'. I guess we don't really need to see how that actually works.
Related, but the Denied instantly knowing how to airbend and combat-capable levels is bullshit. I know it's a short movie and we can't dwell on these kinds of things but it would've made more sense for how much it actually impacted the movie for Tagah to not have had an opportunity to actually impart these powers and they're fighting for that opening. Their airbending was largely perfunctory special effects; the weapons they were using earlier could have fulfilled the same function.
Marvel-ass 'laser portal in the sky' finale.
Most of the Gaang was completely unnecessary here and actively complicated the story being told. That whole bit driving through the eternal storm while the Gaang has to recover the airship is conceptually exciting but extremely hard to follow (what were Toph and Zuko actually doing?). Or maybe I just spaced out. Anyway their presence was really very ancillary other than Katara bringing everybody back to life (an unnecessary beat) and kinda the climax against the Denied, although the Denied themselves are so poorly developed and explained this could have just been about Aang finding a map to Tagah, they didn't need thes others bozos cluttering up the screen.
The most emotionally meaningful moment was finding the herd of bison at the end. That actually made me smile. Somebody said it upthread but you could've had a whole movie about finding the air bison, and you still open up for a villain who wants to exploit them or something. Aang's statement that they're "the original air benders' could have, in a different universe, facilitated people actually re-learning airbending, but Korra fucked up not just the storytelling possibility but how humans gained bending so forget that.
Some people have mentioned that the animation isn't that great. Others say the fight scenes are exciting. I'm going to fall on the side of 'it's not that great', and for my fellows who were rubbed the wrong way by it, I can help explain what's going on:
The animation is using 3D puppets and rendering to a 2D style. The effect is actually really beautiful moment to moment, but when the characters are moving you can see that there's an unnatural fluidity between their frames, which is a result of using spline interpolation to fill in the tweens. It seems to me that the level of prowess the individual scene animators had was a little choppy, because some scenes really mimic the flow of the original 2D style in respect to how the characters move, like slowing down and speeding up at different parts of an action to mimic how a human body actually build and released energy, while others were flat movements with no acceleration or deceleration-- a limb would start moving and just hard stop when it reached its key pose. It's a relatively minor thing, but if you're picking up on it, it drives the action animation right into the uncanny valley. The sequence in the Spirit World is maybe the most egregious, where everything feels like it's moving just for the sake of moving and whoever storyboarded that needs to have their coffee taken away from them. (Also going into the Spirit Realm for, what, ninety seconds? Waste of time and effort, the movie accomplished nothing that it couldn't have done anywhere else.)
The real problem, though, is actually in the camera. Most 2D animation has very limited camera movements-- panoramic shots, shoulder cuts, holding on establishing shots. In 2D it's because you have to paint a new background every time you change shots, in addition to having to make sure the chracters are kept in good perspective, so while you sometimes get some really unuusal camera movements and perspective shots they are limited to special occasions. Because the camera is in a 3D space, you are no longer tethered by that restriction. It lets you get away with more dynamic camera work, and used in moderation can be very effective for panning, continuous shots, circling a focal point.
The camera in this movie is flying all over the fucking place, just constantly swimming back and forth, crawling to the side even when characters are static, flinging itself this way and that during fight scenes... even live-action movies don't use their cameras like this, and it suffers the same pacing problem as the animation, where the movement speed doesn't change so the camera just feels like its drunk for pretty much the entire movie. Like there are some shots where they were obviously feeling fancy (I don't think they worked but at least I understood the intent) and then others where it feels like they forgot to lock the camera and it's just drifting off because nobody could be assed to tell it to stop.
Aggravatingly, this isn't unsalvageable-- I mean it is now, there's no way they'd dismantle this and try again at this point, but there are some decent ideas in here and the rendering style they've got going is generally really impressive. The core story also has some honest potential, the idea of Aang bonding with an Air Nomad and finally having somebody who can share his culture and memories, only for that person to wind up betraying him is unironically compelling. I was actually really intrigued by the wording of 'the Air Nomads spread peace wherever they went', which sounds to ME like a really nice way of saying they were conquerors using unification and peace as an excuse to spread an Air Empire (as Tagah himself calls it). I was hoping that the missing Avatar was actually responsible for a legitimate attempt at an Air Empire, interpreting their duties to balance the world by forcing it under the heel of their moral framework and realizing only after whipping their followers into a fervor that it's not true harmony.
There are definitely possibilities here but a ninety minute throwaway movie isn't going to be the right medium for what (I think) they wanted. Especially discounting that, yeah, this is really just a rehash of S3 of Korra.
