Avatar: The Last Airbender

It was commissioned as a children's cartoon and opens with a genocide. Avatar The Last Airbender ran on Nickelodeon from 2005, told one continuous story across three seasons, and has since lost its creators to two separate live-action adaptations.

An American cartoon that hired a martial arts consultant

Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko built the series around four elements, and assigned each a real martial art: tai chi for water, hung gar for earth, northern shaolin for fire, bagua for air.

Sifu Kisu choreographed the fights on that basis, so the animation shows recognisable forms rather than invented ones. The design borrows from Chinese, Inuit and Tibetan cultures with a consistency rare in American television of the period.

The series ran 61 episodes. The premise is bleak for the slot it occupied. An entire people has been exterminated before the first episode, and the survivor is a twelve-year-old who ran away.

Three seasons, one story, no reset

Children's animation at the time ran on episodes that end where they began. This series ran a single arc to a planned conclusion, with characters who age, learn and change their minds about the war.

The war has been running for a hundred years when the series opens, and the show never presents it as a misunderstanding. Its antagonist becomes its most followed character. Zuko spends three seasons failing to earn his father's approval, and the turn is written slowly enough to be believed.

The Legend of Korra followed in 2012, set seventy years later with a female lead, and ended on a same-sex relationship the creators confirmed publicly the week after broadcast.

Two adaptations, two departures

M. Night Shyamalan directed a film in 2010 that scored 20 on Metacritic. It cast white actors as characters drawn from Inuit and Asian cultures, and it compressed a season into ninety minutes.

Netflix announced a series in 2018 with DiMartino and Konietzko attached. They left in 2020, stating publicly that the production had moved away from what they had agreed.

The film remains one of the lowest-scoring adaptations of any animated series. Avatar: The Last Airbender arrived in 2024 without them, was received as competent and unremarkable, and was renewed for two further seasons.

What it proved about writing for children

The series treats war, imperialism and the cost of forgiveness without softening any of them, and it was watched by eight-year-olds.

The industry took the lesson. Continuous storytelling in children's animation became normal in the decade that followed, and a generation of showrunners cite this series directly.

Its final episode is still the highest-rated Nickelodeon has ever broadcast, on a channel whose model was built entirely on episodes that could be shown in any order.