The weirdest thing about the abhorrent whitewashing in The Last Airbender, perhaps, is that the director - M. Night Shyamalan of The Sixth Sense fame - is of Asian heritage himself. Was he not deemed to be a suitable choice of director for this particular source material for exactly that reason? As a person who would be able to embrace The Last Airbender's obvious Asian influences and render them on screen in a wholly suitable way? That didn't happen, of course: instead, the film adaptation of the popular - and immensely more interesting and brilliant - anime series wound up as one of the worst movies of all-time. Then you throw in the fact that all of the Asian characters from the series were changed to be "white" for the movie... Texan Noah Ringer as Aang? No freakin' way! Shyamalan tried to talk his way out of it by saying that the characters in the anime series were "racially ambiguous," but c'mon - that's just a lame cop-out. Only an idiot could watch The Last Airbender and not realise that the characters were of Asian decent - it's sign-posted at pretty much every point, through the costumes, the culture and the traditions. Rather tellingly, it's the villains of the movie who remain Asian or dark-skinned here. Dev Patel turns up, but - guess what? - he's there to play a bad guy. Ugh. Like this article? Let us know all your thoughts on Hollywood and its obsession with whitewashing. Who do you think is ultimately to blame? The studios or the audiences?
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
