As a rule, I don’t readily admit that I think Nickelodeon’s animated show “Avatar: The Last Airbender” is one of the best television series I’ve ever seen. Or that I lied to my friends and said I had to babysit on a Friday night just so I could watch the series finale in peace — that is, if you want to call crying and yelling at the TV screen “peace.” But that just goes to show the devotion of Avatar fans.

These same fans were abuzz when word got out that Paramount Pictures was filming a live-action adaptation, but then problems started when Entertainment Weekly published the casting of the movie: all the actors were white.

“Avatar,” created by Americans Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, is inspired by and built on Asian and Inuit cultures and philosophy. The show centers on Aang, a 12-year-old boy who must bring peace back to a world embroiled in war by learning to control, or “bend,” the four elements: air, water, earth and fire.

His journey spans three seasons brimming with Asian-inspired culture, customs and philosophical themes. Although never openly stated, the costuming and sets make it clear that Aang comes from a society of Tibetan-like monks; two of his sidekicks are Inuit-inspired; and one of the antagonists, Prince Zuko, comes from an East Asian-modeled nation with an imperial look that could be ancient China’s or Japan’s.

When fans realized all the actors were white, they unleashed a huge Internet backlash. In response to “The Last Airbender” film casting, a Livejournal community named “aang_aint_white” was created and has so far been spearheading the protest against Paramount. While urging fans to write letters to the company, the community also compiles news, blogs and essays on the matter.

“People [tell] us we’re wasting our time, arguing that we’re being racist by talking about race … that ‘Avatar’ takes places in a fantasy setting and therefore has nothing to do with real-world races or cultures,” the creator of aang_aint_white, who wished only to go by the name Li, wrote in an e-mail to the Wheel.

But the casting of “The Last Airbender” represents more significant and deep-rooted problems.

At the heart of the casting controversy is the perceived whitewashing and the continued use of “yellowface” in Hollywood.

Whitewashing is casting white actors for nonwhite characters, and has most recently been used in films and TV shows such as “21,” “Speedracer” and “Tales of Earthsea.” “21,” based on a true story about MIT students who count cards in Las Vegas, cast Jim Sturgess (“Across the Universe”) and Kevin Spacey in the place of an Asian student and professor. The film version of “Speedracer,” a Japanese anime, had an all-white cast except for its antagonist; “Tales of Earthsea,” a beloved series by Ursula K. LeGuin whose protagonists were dark-skinned, featured white characters when the SciFi channel ported it to television.

Yellowface is like blackface, except with Asians: white actors will tape their eyelids, wear false teeth and yellow their skin. There are myriad examples in Hollywood films — even with famous actors such as Mickey Rooney in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961), Katharine Hepburn in “Dragon Seed” (1944) and as recently as 2005 with Rob Schneider in “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.” While ongoing movie adaptations don’t make yellowface as stereotype-laden and offensive as before, the fact remains that white actors get cast for Asian roles.

And the trend is getting worse, some say: Hollywood has happily jumped on the opportunities to adapt popular works from other media, but in the process has denied acting roles for minorities.

“[‘The Last Airbender’] would have been a perfect and extremely rare opportunity to give Asian-American actors a chance to break into a system and start building careers,” Li wrote. “As it is, they’re cut out from the very beginning.”

Plans for other live-action adaptations give further proof. “Dragonball Evolution,” slated to come out April 8 and based on the wildly popular Japanese anime series “Dragon Ball,” has cast Justin Chatwin (“War of the Worlds”) as protagonist Goku and Emmy Rossum (“The Phantom of the Opera”) as sidekick Bulma.

Another two anime series planned for U.S. adaptations, “Akira” and “Cowboy Bebop,” already have Leonardo DiCaprio and Keanu Reeves in the lead roles, respectively. The popular videogame Prince of Persia, whose main characters are Iranian, is being adapted to the big screen with Jake Gyllenhaal as the lead.
“The current system favors young, white actors,” Li wrote. “This system isn’t deliberately racist so much as it is extremely conservative — they want guaranteed success, and they see minority actors as a risk.”

Responses from cast and crew members on “The Last Airbender” whitewashing has only further aggravated fans.

While promoting last month’s open casting call for the film, “The Last Airbender” casting director Deedee Rickets wrote to the Daily Pennsylvanian, “We want [actors] to dress in traditional cultural ethnic attire. If you’re Korean, wear a kimono.” Honest mistake or not, it was clear to fans that the attempt to diversify the film was not sincere — the traditional garb for Koreans are hanboks while a kimono is a traditional Japanese dress.

“The Last Airbender” viewers were also upset with Jackson Rathbone, an actor cast as one of Aang’s sidekicks, over an interview he did with MTV.com. When asked how he felt about the whitewashing concerns, Rathbone dismissed the controversy, saying he merely needed a tan and a new hairstyle to represent the character well.

The situation stirred up once again when Paramount announced that the role of Prince Zuko, which had originally gone to blond pop singer Jesse McCartney, would instead be played by Dev Patel of “Slumdog Millionaire” fame. While seen as a step in the right direction by some fans, casting Patel as Zuko also reeked of tokenism.

“The choice of Dev Patel … was an attempt to keep [the] controversy from growing. … Why not cast another young, white actor? The reasons for this change couldn’t be more clear — Paramount’s attempts to sidestep the issue aren’t fooling anyone,” Li wrote.

Many observers don’t see a problem with the casting; some note that the characters are drawn with Caucasian features, much like other anime shows.

“A lack of exaggerated ethnic features doesn’t mean that an animated character defaults to white,” Li wrote. “I would point out that a character’s clothing, culture, beliefs and language say as much about their ethnicity as the way their face is drawn.”

As such, many believe the argument that “anime characters look Caucasian” is grounded in Western superiority itself. Others say that when Japanese cartoonists and animators first began to create anime, the distinctive features (bright colors, round eyes) were meant to capture youth, and that the idea of anime characters having “Caucasian features” started only with Westerners.

A poster under the alias dylan0513 dismissed the racial conflict on Li’s Livejournal page.

“The ‘Avatar’ world is Asian-influenced, but none of the characters themselves are Asian. So really, the only grounds of protesting the movie on race is that the Asian-influenced world is being made by Americans. And that’s not a very strong claim,” he wrote.

Others state that “The Last Airbender” is just a movie, and that as such it has no significant impact on society.

“We’re all shaped constantly and profoundly by the media,” Li wrote. “Representation matters because when we present kids with a world where all the heroes are white, that says something. If that world is culturally non-white, like the ‘Avatar’ [TV series world] is, and we still populate it with white faces, the message we send is even louder and more destructive.”

More troubling are the undercurrents of white superiority that still exist in the United States, critics say, noting that behind the casting controversy and terms like “whitewashing” and “yellowface” lies an ingrained prejudice.
Li wrote that a large number of people simply refuse to believe that the characters in the TV show are Asian, despite the fact that the creators themselves have said that they are.

“As long as white remains the [‘default’ race] we have a lot of work left to do,” Li wrote. “But the way people fight to maintain those assumptions has really shaken me. It’s one thing to watch a show modeled on Asian and Inuit cultures and unthinkingly assume those characters are white; it’s another to fight tooth-and-nail when the problems with that assumption are pointed out to you.”

“Avatar” was a wildly successful show for Nickelodeon, among audiences and critics alike. During its run, the show picked up annual wins at the Annie Awards and the Emmys. Perfectly incorporating Asian themes into an exciting mainstream American show, “Avatar: The Last Airbender” managed to snag up to 5.6 million viewers. It even excelled at getting high ratings with viewers outside of its 6- to 11-year-old demographic — and hey, it made a TV snob like me sit in alone on a Friday night.

— Contact Ginny Chae.