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The Last Airbender is a 2010 action-adventure fantasy film directed by M. Night Shyamalan. The film, a live-action adaptation of the Nickelodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, became one of the most anticipated films of the decade in the wake of its official announcement. However, when news of the cast of the film was finally made public, the filmmakers were widely and severely criticized. The negative reaction stemmed from the filmmakers’ choice to whitewash the film’s cast.
Whitewashing refers to a casting practice in which film producers cast white actors into roles originally meant for people of colour. Several Hollywood films over the last two decades have faced criticism owing to their decision to whitewash characters. Popular examples include Ben Affleck directing himself playing an Hispanic character in the Oscar-winning Argo (2012); Angelina Jolie portraying a character which was originally African-American in the 2008 film Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, 2008); and Johnny Depp being cast as a Native American in The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski). Similarly, The Last Airbender was accused of whitewashing, and its casting choices were panned by fans of the original show and film critics alike.
In this essay, I will look at how the whitewashing of characters in The Last Airbender reinforces orientalist ideas and that the casting of white actors as heroes and brown actors as villains pushes the film to perpetuate a system of othering that not only uses the categories of “white” and “colour” as binary opposites, but also links it with the concepts of Good and Evil. This glorifying of whiteness and vilifying of colour affects the understanding of the Occident and the Orient, and the lives of the people who identify with these cultures.
The Whitewashing Problem in The Last Airbender
There is a widely accepted notion in the Western entertainment industry that “white” is the default race. Most of the characters in films, books, and television shows generated in the West are white people. Typically, characters of colour in these narratives are examples of token representation. There is a tendency for these characters to fit into popular stereotypes and they are often marginalized with flat and uninteresting character arcs (Nelson 03). Nickelodeon Animation Studio’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, was a show that broke...