Welcome back for another weekly review of Avatar! This week, we meet the Bato of the Water Tribe. How does the episode hold up? Here are my thoughts.
1. Aang, Hiding Bodies.
After some major development over the last few episodes, we see here that Aang still has a long way to grow. He can’t help but jealously hide the information about the whereabouts of Katara and Sokka’s father, then constantly hide the evidence. On one level, some of the drama here feels manufactured — I never completely bought the interactions after Aang comes clean. But that may just be an execution problem, because the concept is completely logical and feels true to the situation.
This does, however, lead somewhere greater than if we hadn’t seen Aang fall for this character flaw. By the end of the episode, everybody makes up and learns their lessons, and the bonds ultimately feel stronger for it. Aang isn’t a perfect character, and that’s by design. Everybody has their own flaws that lead them to do things they regret. It’s how we react to them and attempt to make up for them that defines who we are.
2. Sokka And Katara In Their Element.
As the title would suggest, “Bato of the Water Tribe” ended up being pretty big for our two main water tribe characters. In their first time interacting with one of the men who left years ago, they immediately feel at home with Bato. They reconnect, hearing tales of their father and his crew and sharing old memories. Sokka even gets to have the coming-of-age ceremony that he was initially denied due to the village’s men leaving! There was a bit of exaggeration in the interest of rationalizing Aang’s jealous actions, but on the whole we get some heartfelt, explicitly water tribe moments, which hadn’t been explored since Avatar’s pilot.
3. Iroh and June.
I’ve mentioned before that my favorite character is Iroh. Guess who one of my favorite guest characters is? With her dry, biting wit and a ruthless shirshu to match, June immediately found her way to my heart. And, it appears, into Uncle Iroh’s. I love the joy he gets whenever June casually throws out a clever insult, even when they’re aimed at him. He realizes that she takes no shit, and he loves every second of it.
4. Choreography In Final Fight Scene.
Nostalgic reasons notwithstanding (this scene played on a reel when waiting in line for the Jimmy Neutron’s Nicktoons Blast ride at Universal Orlando), this has always been one of my favorite fight scenes in the show. There’s a lot going on: Aang and Zuko bring their fight from the courtyard to the rooftops to the well, Aang wants to get Katara’s necklace back, Appa and Nyla duke it out, and the perfume women work with Sokka and Katara for a solution. The scene was actually so big that, instead of sticking to the standard act-by-act breakdown of storyboarders, every boarder on the episode lent a hand to the scene.
Each moment has its own timbre so that switching between them gives variety, and there are plenty of fun details thrown into each. Tiles go flying when Aang and Zuko fight on the roof, Aang bounces around the well structure in evasive maneuvers as Zuko accidentally destroys it, and Appa struggles to stay up after being struck by Nyla’s venom. I especially love the one-on-one stuff between Aang and Zuko when they’re close to each other: because they’re so close, it actually looks less like bending and more like a martial arts duel between a Northern Shaolin Kung Fu fighter and a Baguazhang fighter (the martial art forms that firebending and airbending are based on). Check Aang’s stance as he circles around Zuko, and Zuko’s pure expressions of power as he attempts offensive moves.
Shout-out to the episode’s director, Giancarlo Volpe, who also storyboarded the Zuko/Aang parts of the scene, along with Chris Graham on the Appa/Nyla parts, plus Kenji Ono and Bobby Rubio, who boarded on the rest of the episode and presumably jumped in here as well.
5. Shirshu Effects.
Seriously, how cool was that? You can imagine the team brainstorming: how do you visually represent the perspective of an animal without eyes but with an enhanced sense of smell? A grainy black and white image with colored scent trails, frantically changing direction towards the desired scent. Not to mention the way they depicted the olfactory overload at the end of the episode. Genius.
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What did you think of the episode? Are you also a fan of June and Nyla? Did you find Aang’s actions out of character? And how about that fight scene, huh? Sound off in the comments!
