The Avatar Movie Is Racist (And Doomed)

Last week, casting choices were announced for the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender movie that is to be directed by M. Knight Shyamalan, and the news isn't good.  In fact, it's so bad that it has the fans of the TV show starting up a letter writing campaign to get the casting choices changed.

 

The problem with the casting of the main characters?  The choices made appear to fans everywhere as racist.

 

The Avatar series is about a cast of multicultural characters as they travel around an ethnically diverse world that is heavily influenced by Asian culture.  The main character (The Avatar himself) is Asian.  His two closest friends are from an Inuit tribe at the South Pole.  They're being chased by an evil prince who also happens to be Asian.

 

So who gets casted to play this group of characters?  A bunch of white kids of course. 

 

So far, only the casting for the main four characters of the film have been announced.  Aang (The Avatar) will be played by an unknown martial arts student named Noah Ringer (who was discovered at a Texas casting call).

 



 

Aang's best friends Sokka and Kitara (the aforementioned Inuit people) will be played by Jackson Rathbone and Nicola Peltz respectively. 

 





 

And finally, the evil Prince Zuko will be played by Jesse McCartney.

 



 

Notice anything wrong with those casting choices?

 

How in the world M. Knight Shyamalan thinks he can make an Anime inspired show using an all white cast just completely blows my mind.  Do they really want this to turn out as badly as the Dragonball Z movie?  It's already a hard enough task you're setting yourself up for by trying to make a successful live-action adaptation of a beloved cartoon series, but when the very first step towards that action is completely panned by your core audience of fans...well I can only predict doom for this movie.

 

Fans of the show have already begun a revolt.  As mentioned earlier, a letter writing campaign (with the brilliant site name of "aang-aint-white")has been started to try to get the casting decisions changed, and fans are also flocking to message boards and fansites to vent their anger at the casting choices.

 

The article about this on IO9 has a number of excellent angry fan letters as examples of what kinds damning things the fans are saying.  Here's one example:

 

Acting ability aside, no it is NOT RIGHT. The Avatar animated series is mired with and 100% composed of Asian influences. The world, the cultures, the people, the costumes, the script, the belief systems, the references, the mythology - everything is Asian-or-Inuit based. Casting all-white actors to play roles that should go to fully capable Asian/PoC actors is insulting and discriminatory.

 

As for acting ability: I refuse - refuse - to believe that there are ZERO Asian and/or PoC and/or mixed-race actors to play these parts. It's a pathetic idea that only white kids were capable of acting and looking like all four main roles... I'm glad you think it's just a movie. Must be really nice to have such a life where you don't feel discrimination, and therefore cannot possibly conceive how it must feel to have something that clearly celebrates multiculturalism taken away from you. Great! Just don't tell me to 'chill out' because I'm angry. I can make my voice heard and I want to entreat others as well. So let us cute widdle PoCs make our cute little grr!fight and you can run along pretending racism is over, okay?

 

Way to go Paramount and Mr. Shyamalan.  In one fell swoop you've pissed off the vast majority of the built-in fanbase your movie would have had, and you've turn them against you.  Good job...idiots!