Netflix's 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' Showrunner Albert Kim Admits To Changing Aang's Character As Well As The Tone And Feel Of The Entire Show

Albert Kim, the showrunner for Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action adaptation of the popular Nickelodeon animated series, admitted they changed the character of Aang as well as the tone and feel of the show.

Speaking with IGN about the show, Kim first shared that the show would include a number of scenes that were referenced in the original animated series, but not explicitly depicted. He also described the entire series as a remix rather than a cover in an analogy to popular songs.

He shared, “I’ve used the term that this is a remix, not a cover, in that you’ve got to hit a lot of familiar notes, but you can’t forget that this is supposed to be a new song.”

“So obviously, there are story points and characters that you have to do fairly faithfully from the original,” Kim elaborated. “But at the same time, you’re literally translating something from 2D to 3D, and that meant dimensionalizing the story, taking it into new places, filling in some of the gaps.”

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Next, he detailed a number of scenes he and his team added to the series, “There are certain scenes that you never saw in the original, whether it’s the attack on the Southern Air Temple or the Agni Kai between Ozai and Zuko. And those are things that I knew we needed to see in order to make it feel much more grounded as a live-action show.”

“So it was about feeling your way throughout the process. Where can we take the story into the new directions that still feels true to the spirit of the original? And that’s what it all comes down to, making sure it feels like it was Avatar in spirit,” he explained.

Not only did he reveal they would be adding new scenes to the first season, but he also shared that he took a number of storylines from later seasons and put them in this first season of this Netflix adaptation. One of those storylines involves the Fire Nation and specifically Azula and Fire Lord Ozai.

Kim shared, “Yeah, so Azula is one who, in the animated series, you don’t really see until Season 2. Fire Lord Ozai is also one who does not appear very much in Season 1. But we made the conscious decision to bring some of those Fire Nation storylines more to the fore in the first season because I felt like we needed to balance out the storylines.”

“We needed to know more about the background for Zuko, and why he’s doing what he’s doing, and set that in the context of his family dynamic, and how he fits in with his father and sister,” he elaborated. “And that’s something they get to later in the series, of the animated series, but we had a little bit of a benefit of hindsight. We knew where that was going, so we could pull some of those elements upfront into the first season and make the first season a little bit richer and a little bit deeper in terms of character storylines.”

He reiterated, “We wanted to make sure that Zuko felt like a much more dimensionalized character, and that meant bringing in more elements of his family storyline. So that naturally meant feeling like we should see a little more Azula and a little more Ozai.”

“If anything, Azula’s story in the first season is a little bit of a prequel to her story in the second and third seasons, but that’s another element that we thought we should see rather than just talk about,” he revealed.

Later in the interview, he also admitted they moved this storyline forward to cut down on costs, “I’ll say that logistically speaking, that is also another reason we decided to do a little more of a Fire Nation story in the first episode because it gave us kind of some regular sets and environments that we could go back to in every episode, because our heroes are traveling from location to location every episode, but we can always go back to the Fire Nation throne room for a scene or two in each episode.”

“And it gave us a little bit more stability in the storytelling. So that was another reason for bringing them more into the fore in the first season,” Kim said.

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As far as the show’s tone, he relayed, “I think that’s the essential tightrope that we had to walk, is figuring out, tonally, where this show lived, because you wanted to stay true to the original, which had a large component of humor, lots of action, lots of darkness too.”

“This show, even as a Nickelodeon show, went pretty far in terms of mature themes and scenes, things that you didn’t see before. I mean, I think Koh the Face Stealer initiated nightmares in an entire generation of kids. That’s not something you normally see on a Nickelodeon show,” he said.

“And especially as the series went on, Seasons 2 and 3 are a lot more mature in theme than, say, Season 1 was,” Kim continued. “So for us, it was about striking that right balance, of making sure you were true to the DNA of the original. But at the same time, we had to make it a serialized Netflix drama, which meant it couldn’t just be for kids.”

“It had to also appeal to the people who are big fans of Game of Thrones. And so, it had to feel grounded and mature and adult in that way too. So that’s, like I said, the tightrope that we have to walk,” he admitted.

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Finally, he would reveal he changed Aang’s character saying, “So we decided to make Aang’s narrative drive a little clearer. In the first season of the animated series, he’s kind of going from place to place looking for adventures. He even says, ‘First, we’ve got to go and ride the elephant koi.’ It’s a little looser as befits a cartoon. We needed to make sure that he had that drive from the start.

He justified the change saying, “And so, that’s a change that we made. We essentially give him this vision of what’s going to happen and he says, ‘I have to get to the Northern Water Tribe to stop this from happening.’ That gives him much more narrative compulsion going forward, as opposed to, ‘Let’s make a detour and go ride the elephant koi,’ that type of thing. So that’s something, again, that’s part of the process of going from a Nickelodeon cartoon to a Netflix serialized drama.”

This would contradict Kim’s previous comments about maintaining Aang’s goofball nature.

He said earlier in the interview, “Aang is just a kid. He’s a goofy 12-year-old kid, and he’s having fun and he’s a big old goofball. And we wanted to make sure that we showed that because that’s as important to the story as all the action and the epic fantasy of it all.”