What makes Avatar The Last Airbender special

LIGHT SPOILERS BELOW :

Avatar The Last Airbender is a unique animated show of its time when it aired on Nickelodeon in the early 2000s. Back then animated shows on cable tv platforms were not taken seriously and it was considered childish and anime wasn't even popular so it was a niche thing but Avatar The Last Airbender defies the narrative with great storytelling and animation for its time and remains timeless.

Avatar The Last Airbender begins simply with the chosen one trope with Aang being the Avatar who will end the 100-year-old war between the 4 nations. The worldbuilding is well crafted and easy to get into. The voice cast is great across the board and the characters Aang, Sokka, and Katara are the heart of this show. Their charm and chemistry elevate the whole show by a notch. Zuko's character played by Dante Basco has one of the best redemption arcs in any medium of entertainment. His relationships with Uncle Iroh warm my heart. Princess Azula played by the talented Grey Griffin is a great antagonist to our trio and a darker version of Prince Zuko. She is formidable and witty and is determined on her goals and also plays off with Prince Zuko pretty well .

The animation of this show is highly stylized for the fight scenes and they are visually great and still hold up after 10+ years. The animation takes a lot of inspiration from the Asian culture as the fight moves are taken from Asian martial arts and gives homage to it. The themes are beautiful and make a scene even better. The scenes with the Northern Water Tribe, Ba Sing Se, and the Fire Kingdom are immense in scope and scale. It delivers good episodes consistently with an occasional filler episode which is not bad but misses the mark of its previous episodes.

It is a well-planned show across 3 seasons with a beginning, middle, and end. The first season sets up the characters well for their character arcs and it sets up their character's journey with struggles and setbacks which provide great storytelling as par as a great live-action show. The second season is the midpoint of their character arcs and we have a better sense of where they are headed especially for Zuko and the Avatar gang and Toph, Azula, Ty Lee are a great addition to the cast which playoff with our central protagonists pretty well. The ending of season 2 is a great cliffhanger on par with the ending of Empire Strikes Back with our Avatar gang dealing with failure and setbacks and also becoming the characters which we will love at the end of the show.

Season 3 capitalizes on the setup of the earlier seasons and is payoff after payoff with each episode. Sure it has some silly episodes like Ember's island which are geared towards kids but it balances these episodes with great storytelling episodes like The Black Sun which is character-driven storytelling with a sprawling epic tone added to it. It is a great conclusion to a great animated tv show.

Avatar The Last Airbender is an animated show which has a special place in my heart. It gives me hope that we will get more animated shows like this that are on par with the quality of a live-action movie. This show balances mature character storytelling with childish fun but doesn't go too far with it which gives a lot of entertainment value and rewatchability to it. It has episodes ripped off from Japanese storytelling which is great for cinephiles. This is what makes this animated show so unique for me.