Graphic novelist attempts to return 'Last Airbender' to Asian roots
Updated: 2011-12-02 11:18
By Kelly Chung Dawson (China Daily)
NEW YORK - When the movie adaptation of Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender anime television series was released in 2010, many fans were disappointed that the Asian themes that had defined the original series had been toned down or in some cases, replaced entirely. But an upcoming graphic novel adaptation by Chinese American artist Gene Yang will attempt to stay true to the original series, which ran from 2005 to 2008 and included Asian lead characters in Asian cultures.
"When they adapted the series to the big screen, all the major hero characters were given to white actors," Yang said in an interview with China Daily. "I think that it's the latest in a long line of 'yellow-face casting.'"
He referred to a movie adaptation of the book 21, about real-life MIT students who had used math to "game the gambling system" in Las Vegas. The students in the book were Asian American, but the movie version of the book cast White actors in the lead roles.
"It's a fairly common thing," Yang said. "I think that Hollywood is afraid to put money behind Asian actresses and actors in lead roles. It seems to be a ridiculous thing to still be happening in 2011. With the Last Airbender, the cartoon series had enough of a fan following that it seems to me the movie would have had a fan base regardless of the race of the leading actors."
When the movie was released, the director M. Night Shyamalan (director of The Sixth Sense and Signs.) justified his decision to cast Caucasian actors because he felt the series was based on "world culture", Yang said. "But if you're familiar with the series and have a passing knowledge of Asian cultures, it was very apparent that the series was not a mishmash of world cultures; it was very Asian."
"That connection to real-world Asian cultures and Asian history has been there from the very beginning of the series," Yang said. In the original television show, the Japanese fire nation was defeated; the graphic novel will pick up where the series ended, exploring how the four nations move forward following the fire nation's defeat. Yang drew on Japanese post-WWII history for inspiration, he said.
Yang previously wrote the graphic novel American Born Chinese in 2006, which was nominated for a National Book Award and won the American Library Association's Printz Award. His 2009 collaboration with Derek Kirk Kim The Eternal Smile won an Eisner Award, and in June of this year he released a graphic novel titled Level Up.
Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Promise will be released in early 2012 through Dark Horse Comics, and is illustrated by Gurihiru Studios, a Japanese illustration team. He is co-writing the adaptation of Airbender with Mike Dimartino and Bryan Konietzko. In addition to his comic work, Yang teaches computer science at a high school in California.
Yang became involved in the project as the result of a Web comic he wrote in response to the movie adaptation, he said. The comic discussed his deep emotional attachment to the original cartoon series, and when Dark Horse comics bought the license to create a graphic novel adaptation, one of the editors contacted him after reading his Web comic.
"In a weird way, my eventual connection to the property is the result of my being angry about the movie," he said.
Most of Yang's books have featured Asian American characters, with American Born Chinese dealing most overtly with Asian American themes and storylines, he said.
"A theme in a lot of my other work has been the coming together and clash of cultures, or more specifically for me, the coming together and clash of Chinese and American cultures. Being an immigrant's kid, I've talked to a lot of people with parents from other countries, regardless of the country of origin and we've all struggled with this issue - how we take the country that surrounds us and the country of our parents and put it together and make sense of it. This is often particularly important to Asian Americans because many of our families are relatively new to the US. We're still in the middle of figuring out what it is to be Asian American, and how to meld those cultures together."
Yang was born and raised in California; his father was an engineer, his mother a programmer. He was a "typical Asian American kid growing up in Silicon Valley," he said, although in the early days there were only a handful of Chinese families in the neighborhood. Today, he estimates that 60 percent of the community is Asian.
As a teacher in Oakland today, he reports that there is less shame associated with immigrant cultures. "Even though most of my Chinese students speak perfect English, they're willing to speak Chinese to each other; they switch back and forth and it's not a big deal. When I was growing up, we wanted to define ourselves as separate from the FOBS (a slang word referring to recent immigrants being "Fresh Off the Boat"), whereas my students today don't seem to consider those distinctions to be important."
Changing perceptions about Asian culture are likely linked to the idea that "cool seems to follow the money," he said. "As China becomes more of a superpower, Chinese culture will have more of an influence on American culture. But it seems to me that it's not Asian culture that's the problem in America; it seems to be Asian faces. Hollywood is willing to have movies set in Asia featuring Asian culture, but the main protagonists are rarely Asian."
He acknowledged that movies like A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas (co-starring the Chinese American actor John Cho) signal a slow shift in perceptions. "It is changing," he said.
The adaptation will hopefully be part of that shift, he said.
"For me personally, as a fan of the series, I see this graphic novel as a way of continuing the tradition that was established by the original creators with the original series. I think my primarily responsibility is to tell a story that's able to keep readers interested from beginning to end, but I'm also personally interested in Asian American identity and I'm staying true to the Asian roots."
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