Avatar: The Last Airbender Composer Addresses Live-Action Differences

Avatar: The Last Airbender's composer revealed how they approached the difference is between the animated series and Netflix's new show. Takeshi Furukawa help mold the soundscape of this new world for Avatar: The Last Airbender. ComicBook.com spoke to the composer about new scenes that are not present in the Nickelodeon series. Furukawa motioned toward the struggle between the Air Nomads and the Fire Nation in the new show. "I'm tap dancing around this for the people who have not seen it already," the composer teased. "But it is different if you love the show, you're going to be surprised when you get to that point." Viewers sitting at home need to be prepared to be taken on an emotional journey with this adaptation.

"I think, before I touch upon the musical differences like we should mention how different the show is. In certain aspects, because you can't do a one to one adaptation of an animated series to live action right? There are some comedic elements in the original series where, like Sokka bounces around and contorts himself and stuff like that. Which is the comedic element. That just does not translate, well I don't think, in a live action show."

"So, I believe the filmmakers did a fantastic job of trying to find a fine line between retaining, capturing and maintaining the essence of the original. Yet, bring it to the context of our adaptation, which I think personally, that the age setting has been elevated just a bit. But, do you know the great thing is that you were right there… You know that there are moments of levity. That there's those comedic moments where people are laughing. So, really the heart and soul of the show has been retained. It's there. And, I think you know Albert [Kim] and his team just did a great job of almost cherry picking the best of both worlds. The best of the animated world and its essence and then also bringing it into the context of live action."

Avatar: The Last Airbender As Emotional Story

After establishing that baseline, the composer would begin to break down how they approached this series musically. As previously discussed, there are a lot of differences between an animated project and a live action adaptation like Avatar: The Last Airbender. Furukawa quickly zeroed in on emotion as the throughline and they were off and running.

"Musically, we would score it from a live action perspective, not an animated perspective. Where an animation, there's certain things that makes sense in scoring animation. Back in the day, it was a term called Mickey Mouse-ing. It's like hitting the action musically almost to a comedic effect. We did not want to do that. We didn't think it was going to work in our sense. We_of the emotion more. And also, I think this is just for me as a composer, I always tend to lean towards scoring emotion."

"my personal affinity is for emotional moments. It's more than action. I mean, I love action. You know, it get your heart pounding, and it's amazing to see it. But, musically I just love those quiet beats of just emotion. Where are the actors are able to Xpress their emotional range and the music has emotional range. The music has the most ranges from the most quiet pianist to the big orchestral flourishes. So, that's the way I approached it."

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