Wednesday 13 March 2024

Avatar: The Last Airbender (Season 1) and YuYu Hakusho (Season 1)

Netflix live action adaptations.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

When the Fire nation decides to conquer the rest of the world it falls upon a recently returned child protagonist Aang (played by Gordon Cormier), to bring balance to the world. Hang on a minute, hasn't this already been made into live action?

Yes, but this series is better in that it has more time to develop characters, fix some pacing issues and show off more fight scenes. There's also some good martial arts in there behind all the "elemental bending" but overall I'd still rank this behind the live action One Piece series as the characters and script there are a clear step up.

YuYu Hakusho

A rough delinquent is given a second chance to defend the world against invading spirits, and holy hell is it super entertaining. Amazing wirework assists with the very physical confrontations in a no-filler plot that makes this five episode story (yep, that's all that's in season one) very binge worthy.

Just like Avatar (above) and One Piece I've not seen the source content but this is currently the clear winner among those three, even if some props are hilarious. Recommended!

2 comments:

  1. I only watched the original anime of LA a year ago and was positively surprised. I genuinely enjoyed the show and thought it had some interesting mature themes.
    The Netflix adaption however I had to give up on. it tries too hard to adapt the anime one-for-one and is very on the nose. It should also have abandoned some of the aspects and jokes that haven't aged well and should have tried to bring some fresh scenes to show imho.

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    1. Hi Syl! Hmm, I wonder if its because I haven't seen the source material that these are ok for me? Maybe Netflix is counting on that. Looks like they renewed the live action LA for two more seasons as well.

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