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this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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Avatar: The Last Airbender
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Avatar is one of the greatest animated shows to have been released in at least the last 30 years
It's the greatest animated kids show ever made.
Avatar is great but I don't think it's the greatest animated kids show. For instance I would put Bluey above Avatar.
Bluey is a show that tries to, and also successfully does, appeal to children and to parents. It doesn't try to be anything more. It's lighthearted and fun and that's all it's supposed to be.
Avatar on the other hand is a kids show that also wants to appeal to pre-teens and teenagers. Some of the themes of Avatar are not really kid friendly: the genocide of air benders, Zukos father mutilating him to make an example, Sokka losing someone he loved. Those are examples from the first season that I remembered. Avatar has a lot of mature subjects. There's a reason the legend of Korra targeted late teens and young adults, because the more mature subjects of Avatar were what made the show great and the audience grew up.
Overall Avatar is the better show, but Bluey is the better kids show.
The only episodes of Bluey that I’ve seen are the cricket one and the State of Origin one, so I don’t think I’m best-placed to answer, but I would say it’s slightly more than @GoodEye8@lemm.ee gives it credit for. It helps role model good parent-child relationships, engages with adults emotionally. But unlike Avatar, which engages you emotionally entirely on its own merits, Bluey engages with your inner child or your parental instinct in an amazingly effective (but quite different and difficult to compare to Avatar) way.
I think they’re difficult to compare.
Bluey is a young kids’ show which adults can enjoy because of how it engages their inner child and their parental instinct.
Avatar is a show for older kids which adults can enjoy because of the deep themes, excellent character development, and sensitive world building. Adults enjoy Avatar in entirely the same way they enjoy Lord of the Rings or Star Wars.
It's got the anime problem for me, too much filler...
I disagree.
Many of the manga-based anime were produced in parallel with the manga, so they would need those filler episodes to kill time. They were also adapting a fixed media with iconic images, so frozen poses of each character reacting to something "needed" to be included. Same thing with freeze-frame fight sequences, or extended power-up poses. That sort of filler could stretch a single chapter into three or four episodes. And then sometimes they would just make up some crazy shit for a few episodes. Oh no, the heroes have to fight a dinosaur somewhy.
With Avatar, there was no manga, and no need to fill time. The episodes were planned as part of the series, written and storyboarded for television.
Maybe the pacing wasn't always great, and there are some less exciting episodes. Appa was lost for way too long. But that's not the same sort of filler problem that anime struggles with.
It has an amount of filler, sure, but far from your typical anime. As someone that just finished rewatching it while separately watching through Naruto, A:TLA is miles better in terms of less filler.
If you are saying this without ever having finished a full watch through, I would highly recommend giving it another try.
Naruto Kai removed all the fillers
So it's only 10 episodes?
There's a little bit I suppose.
But it does have an end. One Piece has almost 20 times the number of episodes, and is in no danger of reaching any kind of conclusion. It's Coronation Street with pirates.
I can understand why you would say this, but I don’t really agree. There are a couple of complete filler episodes, but for the most part I think every episode is important. Avatar thrives on how good not only its main story is (I think the main story is good, but honestly is weak in comparison to the other things it does so well), but also on the strength of its worldbuilding and character development. Episodes like The Storm, Zuko Alone, and The Beach are amazing for how they teach us more about the characters and show us how they are changing. Avatar Day, The Headband, and The Avatar and the Firelord give us insight into the history of the world, explaining the background of how it came to be how it is, and how the world outside of our main heroes currently function.
It’s a show with just 61 22 minute episodes, telling one unified story. It’s very much not the anime that keeps stretching out plot lines to fill up its seasons, or that stalls for time while waiting for the manga to catch up.