Welcome back for another weekly review of Avatar! This week, the season’s three separate character groups finally converge during “The Chase.” How does the episode hold up? Here are my thoughts.
1. “We’ve Been Up All Night with No Sleep!”
This is one of my favorite episodes, and part of that reason has to do with the simplicity of the main characters’ goal: to sleep. That’s all our main gang of four (six if we count the animals) wants, and everything else is an obstacle. It’s amazing how much happens in this episode, given that the goal is something so straightforward, yet everything branches out from there.
Also on the topic of no sleep, while exhaustion brings out the worst in our characters, depicting it brought out the best in the animators. As the episode goes on and their exhaustion gets worse, the team’s faces and bodies get progressively more expressive. It’s not uncommon for Avatar to add an expressive reaction here and there, but it is rare for an entire episode to feature exaggerations as memorable as these. Who could ever forget Katara’s “I’M COMPLETELY CALM!!” moment?
2. “I Carry My Own Weight”
For our first episode with Toph as a main member of the crew, we see a lot of her rough edges. She’s not a team player, and she’s about as stubborn as a functioning human can be. Naturally, those rough edges do not jibe with the motherly and cooperative Katara. Throw in some exhaustion from lack of sleep and you end up with Katara going right for the throat with a cut about Toph’s blindness.
With Aang as the peaceful soul he is, the antagonism between main characters has previously been limited to Katara and Sokka’s sibling banter. Toph’s personality is so brash that, while she and Katara are the main ones getting annoyed at each other here, she even draws a reaction from Sokka, who is otherwise focused on the group’s goals, and Aang, who, uh, wow, really doesn’t like it when people insult Appa.
I like that the show skipped the gradual build-up and got the team’s in-fighting out of the way the first chance they got. Having this happen so early in the team’s time together also helps establish the combinations of character personalities that can be played with later, so time isn’t wasted on that when more important things need establishing.
3. Badass Lady Trio Returns!
In their second present-day appearance together (though Azula did have one solo appearance at the beginning of the season and the three appeared in flashback last episode), the badass lady trio of Azula, Ty Lee, and Mai get a big chance to shine here. They and their harsh metal tanks are relentless in their pursuit of our heroes, constantly on their trail and progressively more aggressive as the episode goes on. As the primary obstacle preventing our heroes from getting sleep, they feel downright vicious.
It’s not all relentless aggression, though. Ty Lee’s just as bubbly as ever, jumping around and effortlessly incapacitating Sokka, and Mai is still equally as apathetic. Really, nothing too deep is revealed about these characters in this episode. But that doesn’t matter, because the episode was focused on other things. This is only the group’s second appearance together, and they’re still so much fun to watch as the mysterious, powerful antagonists.
4. These Backgrounds are Out of This World
This is the fourth time in the last year and a half that I’ve watched this episode in sequence, and every time I’m blown away by the background designs in this episode, particularly the colors. Even better, I feel that the designs continue to be this quality for the rest of the series. I’m not sure what happened between the episodes before this and this one, especially since the artists are all the same. Maybe it’s the fact that this episode went out of its way to depict different times of day in a wide variety of environments?
In any case, background designers Enzo Baldi and Elsa Garagarza and background painter Bryan Evans turn in some top notch work, with Evans’s colors expertly blending together for some lush scenery. The sharp shadows and blaring sun in the yellow-orange abandoned town perfectly depict the feeling of the hot late-afternoon, and the deep greens of the forest at mid-day have a certain soothing quality. But the shot that always gets me is the sunset as Toph and Iroh share a pot of tea, a stunning mixture of dark blue into purple into light yellow in the sky against the natural green and brown land. Look, it’s difficult to describe color work, so just see for yourself, courtesy of AvatarSpirit.net (note that this is a DVD screencap, and the Blu-ray looks even better):
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5. Everything Comes Together!
As hinted at in the previous points, this episode marks the first time all season that the three separate groups of characters, consisting of (1) Aang, Katara, Sokka, and now Toph, (2) Zuko and Iroh, and (3) Azula, Ty Lee, and Mai, all collide. This allows for some super fun pairings, like Ty Lee and Sokka or Toph and Iroh. It also shows how complex the plotting of the season has been. Iroh and Zuko reconnect. Zuko finally faces Azula. Azula finally faces Aang. Iroh and Toph find solace in each other’s experiences. There’s so much going on here, and it all somehow comes together before our eyes as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
The Western-inspired three-way final fight scene is really something to behold. Starring Zuko, Azula, and Aang, the scene has so much emotional weight behind it, and I genuinely can’t wrap my head around how Giancarlo Volpe could have choreographed it. As if those three jumping around the abandoned town and shooting fire at each other wasn’t enough, Katara and Sokka then show up to fight, and then Toph, and then Iroh. That’s seven (!) people fighting with various ill relations or allegiances to one another, and again, it all somehow looks completely smooth and natural.
The characters go their separate ways by the end of the episode, leaving us with the satisfying final shot of the kids finally getting to sleep. Give them some rest before everything converges again. That was exhausting. Beautiful and exhilarating, but exhausting.
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What did you think of the episode? Happy to see everything come together? How about that final fight? Let me know in the comments!
