I thought the characters in this thing were asians?
Superbowl trailer for "Last Airbender"
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That's been one of the main complaints among the fanbase. In the series, yes, the four nations were based on China (Earth Kingdom), Japan (Fire Nation), Tibet (Air Nomads), and the Inuit (Water Tribe), with occasional appearances by South Asian or Native Central/South American peoples. The movie is going about half and half; the Air and Water characters are Caucasian, the Fire Nation characters are South or Southwest Asian (or similarly dark-complexioned types, including a Maori actor and a few Latinos), and the Earth Kingdom characters are mostly Asian. However, since all three main good guys in the first film are Air and Water, it does come off as rather unbalanced.
They were based on Asian cultures, but that doesn't mean they were actually Asian.
To make a point I made on the Avatar boards, where there is a sizable group of Trek fans, to act like the characters in Avatar are actually physically from Asia is to act like the Ligonians from "Code of Honor" were actually from Africa, even though in-universe they said they were native to Ligon II.
So, unless the creators come out and say that it was set in Asia, and not an entirely fictional world which was based as much on Western cultural concepts as it was on Asian cultural concepts, I have no problem with the casting.
To make a point I made on the Avatar boards, where there is a sizable group of Trek fans, to act like the characters in Avatar are actually physically from Asia is to act like the Ligonians from "Code of Honor" were actually from Africa, even though in-universe they said they were native to Ligon II.
So, unless the creators come out and say that it was set in Asia, and not an entirely fictional world which was based as much on Western cultural concepts as it was on Asian cultural concepts, I have no problem with the casting.
Bingo!
Besides, Katara & Sokka have blue eyes.
It's not a Asian trait to have blue eyes unless they were of mixed race.
But the controversy have after all spawned the quite amusing "racebending"-issue, where a few people spam the commentary section of very every "Last Airbender" news report about how racist Hollywood is, and that you should boycott the movie. I have decided to see the movie at least three times in the theatre, despite how bad it is, just to annoy these people.. 
I think this is actually going to be cool. This could revive Shyamalan's career.
Also, I posed this question once on another board. How do you think Ron Moore would do if he had M. Night's writer/exec producer slot, though possibly with Michael Rhymer as director?
Not that I want that. It's just hypothetical.
Also, I posed this question once on another board. How do you think Ron Moore would do if he had M. Night's writer/exec producer slot, though possibly with Michael Rhymer as director?
Not that I want that. It's just hypothetical.
That's a spurious, straw-man argument. It has nothing remotely to do with the real issues here. Nobody's saying they actually come from Asia, because obviously they don't. The point is that there's a long history of racism in Hollywood and it has disturbing implications when three heroic characters who are visibly non-Western in appearance as well as culture in the original incarnation are all played by white actors. This isn't at all about the "actual" ethnicity of these fictional characters. It's about the ethnic politics of our world, about whether Hollywood is afraid of letting Asian actors headline a movie as its heroes.
^What's that got to do with anything? If one entity is doing something right, how does that excuse a totally different entity doing something wrong?
Besides, if you're talking about ST, its inclusion of Asians in "heroic roles" is only marginally better than tokenism. The human species is roughly 2/3 Asian, but nearly 2/3 of ST characters have names of British or Irish derivation and the vast majority of the rest are European. And of the five series, only three have had Asian regulars, all of them in supporting roles, and none has had more than a single Asian in its regular cast. (And that's being generous, since Sulu was actually only a recurring character, appearing in just 52 episodes.) So it's an overstatement to call that "routine."
Besides, if you're talking about ST, its inclusion of Asians in "heroic roles" is only marginally better than tokenism. The human species is roughly 2/3 Asian, but nearly 2/3 of ST characters have names of British or Irish derivation and the vast majority of the rest are European. And of the five series, only three have had Asian regulars, all of them in supporting roles, and none has had more than a single Asian in its regular cast. (And that's being generous, since Sulu was actually only a recurring character, appearing in just 52 episodes.) So it's an overstatement to call that "routine."
How is it Hollywood's fault if the mass public won't turn out for a film with an all Asian cast?
How many decades has it been now where there have been movies & TV shows with all Black & Latinos in the cast and the majority of White America doesn't watch them?
What I find curious about this race issue is this...
- How come most anime has main characters that do not look Japanese at all? (blue or green eyes, blond or red hair)
- And "Avatar: The Last Airbender" - being an american show - has asian characters?
There's nothing wrong with that - But it has always struck me as interesting.
- How come most anime has main characters that do not look Japanese at all? (blue or green eyes, blond or red hair)
- And "Avatar: The Last Airbender" - being an american show - has asian characters?
There's nothing wrong with that - But it has always struck me as interesting.
Hell, explain to me why anime has so many adults with the facial features of six year old children.
And it's even grosser with hentai - it's hard to imagine how anyone other than pedophiles could get off on that stuff.
It's the same reason Betty Boop, Disney princesses, and Bruce Timm-designed female characters have childlike facial features. It's human nature to find youthful appearance appealing, and cartoons exaggerate that, because caricature is what cartoons do. It's taking that caricature too literally to read it as pedophilia.
Visual variety.
The whole issue of race in Japanese animation is complicated by cultural differences. Both Japanese and Western audiences have default assumptions about race and the like; if you drew a stick-figure and asked people from each culture what race they pictured this person as being, the Japanese would say Japanese and Westerners (even most non-white Westerners) would say Caucasian.
So if Hayao Miyazaki directs a film starring a character with blue eyes and yellow hair, unless the character has explicit markings of being non-Japanese (things that Western audiences wouldn't pick up on), Japanese audiences will of course default to them being Japanese. However, when a Westerner sees a cartoon starring someone will blue eyes and yellow hair, they don't share the same racial/cultural assumptions, and so they see the character as white, because it doesn't conform to their own ideas of what Japanese people look like (missing the cultural markers we have to denote being Asian).
The creators were huge fans of eastern art/cultural products.
That's why the whole "but Sokka and Katara have blue eyes" thing is either disingenuous or misinformed. Everything about the world is Asian. The characters are supposed to be Asian/Inuit in 'real' terms, in the same way that the cast of Lord of the Rings is clearly supposd to be white, even though it's a fantasy world (technically, it's supposed to be a lost past of our own world).
Did they show Momo and/or Appa?!
Well, to me, the show's Aang looks just as "white" as the movie version.
They have blue eyes because water is blue and they're Water Tribe. Similarly, Earth Kingdom characters tend to have green eyes and Fire Nation characters tend to have vivid red-brown eyes. It's a bit of graphical color coding on the part of the character designers. It's certainly not supposed to mean they're Caucasian. It means they're fictional races/cultures primarily inspired by real Asian and Inuit cultures but with a few fictional tweaks (such as, ohh, I dunno, magic telekinetic power over the elements).
As CaptainCanada said, that's because that's what your cultural expectations condition you to see. Air Nomads as a whole are clearly based on Tibetan Buddhists; the adult Nomads we saw in flashbacks were distinctly Asian in appearance. Aang has rounder eyes, but that's a representation of youth in the visual language of animation, not of "whiteness." (The young Zuko and Azula in flashbacks had bigger eyes than they do in their adolescent forms.)
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