What makes animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender so unique? “Well, everything,” said Grey DeLisle, who voices the show’s big bad character, Azula. “I’m watching it right now with my nine-year-old and I’m just marvelling at how … ahead of its time it was.”
Indeed, behind the fantasy action show’s deceptively showy Nickelodeon facade lay a nuanced morality tale about totalitarianism, state-sponsored indoctrination, inequality and war. Heady themes, true, but they were so deftly delivered via a vast world of baroque storytelling that before we knew it, over three seasons between 2005 and 2008, an entire generation of kids had taken a crash course in ethics and political discourse.
