Well then after avoiding this show for so many years heck i've seen the movie more times then I have this show i've decided to set out on my biggest challenge yet and not just review the show as a whole but to review each season of Avatar: The Last Airbender so here we go with season 1.
When I normally do a review of anything I don't take notes and that's because most of the shows I've done a review of don't tend to have a story but since this show does have a story I had to make notes and the only two episodes I didn't make notes for was the two part finale it was that damn epic and it set up season 2 pretty damn perfect.
The plot for season 1 was young waterbender Katara and her brother Sokka find a yound boy Aang trapped in an Iceberg and when he's freed it turns out he is the avatar the one is destined to bring peace to the world but he hasn't mastered the elements of airbending those being Water , Fire and Earth and he's only mastered Wind so they set out to find both Aang and Katara a waterbending master. I think with this season it wasn't just the destination that mattered but also the journey it takes them a good eighteen episodes until they reach there destination where as if this show was made they would have reached it in ten minuets.
The first season starred an evil Jake long (look it up trust me you'll laugh) , Zach Tyler Eisen , Dee Bradley Baker , Mae Whitman , Mako and Jack DeSena. This is a sixty episode show so i'm not going to name every single actor but tho even tho Dante Basco is awesome in this show and why wouldn't he be his uncle is freaking Mako all I could here was Jake Long so in my eyes Jake turned evil.
The rest of the voice cast did a really great and that's in part because they are really good in this series every actor is truly believable but also because the voice director for this was the legendary Andrea Romano who's worked on freaking everything from Batman: The Animated series to the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show and if anyone can get a great performance out of any actor it's her.
When I first started the show I thought that the story and the story telling was just going to be for little kids but my oh my was I wrong yes it does start out like that in the first few episodes but as the show goes on the story telling because more and more mature the audience isn't being talked down to instead we are being talked to on the same level and I never expected that.
Now what you might have noticed is that this show kinda looks like an anime and by kinda I mean it's anime in everything except the name but to this show's credit I think this kind of style helps with it's mature story telling and I think that having that anime look also lets you know that the comedy moments will be funnier due to the facial expressions.
The animation it self is truly stunning and is beyond what I was expecting from a show made in 2005 all of the characters even the ones that just appear in one episode have some great movements to them and in the action scenes the movements are really fluid and fast paced thud helping sell the fact that these fights are life and death.
I've been praising this season alot but I do have to say that I did notice some animation errors where people suddenly have no face and the fact that alot of the episodes just wasn't that good like for example The Waterbending Scroll episode while it does a good job of expanding the world it's not this seasons best episode and it teaches kids that it's ok to steal.
Now I have no idea how much research the writers did on this show but I found that Bumi in Hindi actually means Earth and one of the four elements that Aang has to learn is Earthbending so either that's a clever bit foreshadowing or it's a nice little easter egg for nerds either I thought it was bringing up here.
The amount of great actors who play villains in this season is truly breath taking it reads like a who's who of geek culture i've already mentioned Rafio from Hook and Mako are in this but The Fire Lord is played by The Joker / Luke Freaking Skywalker himself Mark Hamill and flipping over to another franchise with the word star in it's title original series Star Trek actor George Takei is in this show altho for the life of me I can't recall who he played and Harry Potter actor Jason Isaacs plays Admiral Zhao.
I freaking loved the fight scenes not because they were well executed altho that was part of the reason but because of how beautiful they were look at like I said before the animation is really faced paced in those scenes so it helps sell the scene and I hope to god these awesome looking fight scenes continue in seasons 2 and 3.
This show really knows how to balance between comedy and drama you get most of the comedy done with within the first five minutes of the episode while at the same time dealing out alot of story information and then you'll maybe get some jokes at the end and I have to say Sokka is easily the funniest character in this show nine times out of ten everything he says is funny as hell and I cannot believe they got away with using the word floozie on a kids show if you don't know what it means look it up but when I heard that I must have laughed for a good twenty minuets just because I didn't expect it.
Overall this was a solid first season i'm shocked that it didn't take me as long as I thought it would to finish it and I cannot wait to start season 2 Earth in a few days so for me this season gets a 8.5 out of 10.