The problem with Avatar

It seems to me that Avatar is actually two totally separate shows that just happen to be about the same characters.

On the one hand there is the Kiddie Show, consisting of episodic encounters with villains of the day, or possibly misguided-people-of-the-day, which teaches simple moral lessons. These episodes have a lot of slapstick humor and situational comedy.

On the other hand, there is the Young Adult Show, full of functional and dysfunctional families, feuding nations and siblings, knotty questions of spiritual and emotional maturity and actual plot. It’s very Greek-drama, really.

This double threading is not terribly unusual for US animation. Unfortunately, Avatar’s two shows are very distinct from each other all through the first two seasons. Any given episode is either one or the other, with very few exceptions. It’s only in the third season that they merge into each other. This means that the character development necessary to serve the Young Adult Show is frequently either very rushed or else completely invisible, motivations and histories left entirely up to the viewer to imagine because the time they would have needed is taken up with Kiddie Show episodes that do not generally advance either plot or characterization.

I like the show a lot, mind you. I’m eagerly waiting for the last handful of episodes, especially since season three has managed to combine the two threads fairly gracefully. But this particular narrative flaw places Avatar firmly in the mid-range, for me. If the writers had made up their minds to present either one or the other, or if they had understood their own agenda sooner and combined the threads early on, as it’s clear they are capable of doing, then I would probably have been willing to put Avatar up there with Card Captor Sakura or Saiunkoku Monogatari. As is, I’d have to say it’s a handful of pegs below Batman Beyond, around, say, King of Bandit Jing. Fun to watch, probably a benchmark in production terms, but not something I’ll put on the frequently-rewatch list.