Avatar Gets Bent

The Whitewashing of Avatar: The Last Airbender

By Rachel Edidin
March 16, 2009

Since its pilot first aired in February of 2005, Avatar: The Last Airbender has become a sensation in its own right, amassing over a dozen awards and nominations, and charming fans and critics alike with its breathtakingly well-realized world, appealing characters, and compelling story. In an age when the majority of children's programming comes across as little more than culturally homogenous toy commercials with unusually large production budgets, Avatar: The Last Airbender flew in and reminded us all of what children's media could be: beautiful, smart, epic, and, above all, genuine.

Avatar was remarkable, too, for the depth, breadth, and diversity of its characters and cultures. Creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko drew on influences spanning centuries and continents in a glorious remix of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polynesian, and Inuit cultures, dress, and cityscapes. The cast reflects the diversity of its world, making Avatar one of very, very few American children's shows in which non-Western, non-white characters are presented as the default rather than as exceptions to an otherwise overwhelmingly white status quo, and the same ethnic and cultural diversity is reflected in both protagonists and background characters. The inclusiveness of Avatar extends to gender and ability, as well, and its vibrant diversity has been a major factor in the show's phenomenal cross-demographic success.

But somehow, somewhere, in the bureaucratic and human tangle of entertainment licensing, there has been a critical disconnect. As the show moves to other media, its licensors seem determined to winnow a concept whose breadth is one of its greatest strengths down to the narrowest possible interpretations.

First came the action figures. Despite the fact that half of the protagonists and many major supporting characters — including the series' main villain — are female, and the show has a substantial female fanbase, Mattel has categorically refused to release action figures of any of the female characters, instead working their way to through the male protagonists, bit characters, and even extras — as well as their alternate costumes — without even a nod to two of the four leads and countless members of the supporting cast.

But action figures are a peripheral spin-off, intended to reach existing fans of a property. Not so a feature film, which will introduce countless more to the world of Avatar — or, at least, to one version of it. While the action figures reflect the versions of character and story established in the animated series, the movie will define or redefine Avatar for millions of viewers.

Last December, M. Night Shyamalan announced that four leading roles had been cast for the first of a trilogy of Avatar feature films. The actors who had been chosen were young and pretty and excited about helping to bring the world of Avatar to the big screen.

They were also all white.

Fans were livid. For the first time, a show had bucked the status quo and soared to phenomenal popularity — the series finale was the number one broadcast on telecast and basic cable, and the show's success led one Nickelodeon executive to describe it as "... our Harry Potter" — and Asian and other nonwhite fans had seen themselves reflected not on the periphery but in the forefront of American popular culture. With the live-action casting, all that was swept away, sacrificed perhaps to the imagined racism of potential audiences, perhaps to the ignorant, intractable inertia of Hollywood tradition.

Whatever Paramount's reasoning, the whitewashing of Avatar was not accidental. The casting call for each of the four main characters called for an actor who was "Caucasian or any other race"; especially in light of the final decisions, it's hard to read "or any other race" as more than an afterthought, insultingly transparent lip service to diversity. Casting calls for extras, on the other hand, had no race specified and asked actors "to dress casually or in the traditional costume of your family's ethnic background." There was room for non-white actors in the film, the casting calls seemed to say — as long as they stayed in the background.

What does it mean to cast Avatar with white actors? One blogger of Asian ethnicity told the heart-wrenching story of her seven year-old nephew, who, after hearing about the casting, had "asked whether this meant that he couldn’t be Aang when he played Avatar with his friends from now on." Cartoonist Derek Kirk Kim, one of the most outspoken and eloquent opponents of the live-action cast, recalled wishing he were white as a teenager so that he could pursue acting as a career without being relegated to the margins, "pretending to be Long Duk Dong, or a Chinese food delivery boy with one line, or a Kato to some Green Hornet." For Kim and countless others, the casting of Avatar fits an insidious pattern, one so prevalent that it has its own entry at tvtropes.org: the habit of reserving for white actors not only the best white roles, but the best non-white roles as well. Kim and many others have cited the shameful history of yellowface in cinema — an astute allusion, considering actor Jackson Rathbone's flippant dismissal of fans' concerns with the assurance that "I think it's one of those things where I pull my hair up, shave the sides, and I definitely need a tan."

This is not color-blind casting — as if the racial specifications in the casting call left room for any lingering doubt on that count. It is casting that privileges one race as the default, at the expense of the dreams of kids on the playground and teens in drama clubs, that fetishizes the trappings of cultures while obscuring the people within — the Harlem Renaissance on the silver screen. And why should the casting of Avatar, which consists largely of homage to Asian and Inuit cultures, and whose animated protagonists are decidedly non-white, be colorblind at all? American Book Award nominee Gene Luen Yang described Avatar as "like a white Asian fetishist's wet dream. All the Asian culture they want, without any of the Asian people."

Since then, one of the four characters has been recast, nominally due to a schedule conflict. It's an bitterly ironic twist worth of O. Henry that his replacement, Dev Patel — the lone Asian actor in Avatar — will be playing its villain.

On the wall of my office, there's a quote from artist Tony Millionaire, which reads, "You've got to give kids really beautiful children's books in order to turn them into revolutionaries. Because if they see these beautiful things when they're young, when they grow up they'll see the real world and say, 'Why is the world so ugly?! I remember when the world was beautiful.' And then they'll fight, and they'll have a revolution. They'll fight against all of our corruption in the world, they'll fight to try to make the world more beautiful. That's the job of a good children's book illustrator." As a cartoon, Avatar: The Last Airbender showed a generation of kids a genuinely diverse world, one in which their race wouldn't bar them from being protagonists. But the feature film has pulled that world away — and when kids fork over their money to see Avatar on the big screen, all that will look back is a reflection of an ugly, racist status quo.

New day in politics, same old racist world on the silver screen — Derek Kirk Kim addresses the casting of the Avatar live-action film, whom it affects, and why it matters. If you read one article, read this one.
Diggin' — Shedding light on the original casting calls
Bent Out of Shape — SFGate columnist Jeff Yang takes a look at the Avatar cast and compares it to another recent instance of white actors cast in originally Asian roles
Racebending.com — Hubsite for the protest movement and official petition, with exhaustive documentation, information, and resources
Aang Ain't White - Saving the World With Postage — A livejournal community and letter-writing campaign against the whitewashing of Avatar