Action adventure meets legend and lore with an anime influence—but with minimal violence to make the stories kid-friendly. Oh, and the plot will unfold in serialized format with a fixed ending.
Given how deeply audiences have embraced all things anime over the past 20 years, the above would not be a wacked-out pitch in 2025. Back in the early 2000s, however, the idea for what became Avatar: The Last Airbender was a different animal. Nonetheless, series co-creators and longtime friends Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko knew what kinds of stories ignited their creative fire, and they felt viewers might feel the same heat.
Avatar ran from 2005-2008, winning multiple awards. From the success of that original series sprang a live-action feature film, a live-action Netflix series, and the sequel series The Legend of Korra. Today you can find main character Aang and his friends on t-shirts and backpacks, as well as in LEGO and video games. There’s even “Avatar: The Last Airbender In Concert,” featuring a live orchestra accompanying episodes from the series, which continues to tour the world. Here, we look back at the inspiration and artwork that led to this timeless show.
Michael Dante DiMartino, Creator & Writer
Bryan Konietzko, Creator & Art Director
“We did not invent the wheel,” says Bryan Konietzko. “We made the show as a love letter to a lot of Japanese anime, Hong Kong martial arts films, and the kind of art and culture that Mike [Dante DiMartino] and I were inspired by.” He explains that this was during an era when Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings were dominating Western pop culture, and he thinks audiences were looking for bigger, expansive stories that had a lot of world-building and lore. “This was also when anime used to be this niche thing that only the diehard otaku [anime enthusiasts] were into,” he notes, adding that he and DiMartino were on the crest of a wave of Western artists and storytellers who were also anime fans and wanted to create in that same artistic space.
The series follows the exploits of the title character, Aang, who battles with the Fire Lord Ozai to control the fate of the world. DiMartino and Konietzko took inspiration from a grab bag of sources ranging from Bikram yoga to Cowboy Bebop, from Ernest Shackleton’s exploration of Antarctica to the comic mayhem of Jackie Chan. They found a receptive ear in Nickelodeon’s VP of Development Eric Coleman who, at the end of their lengthy pitch, declared: “This is my priority project.” Coleman would become the series’ Executive Producer.
The partners’ main request was to make sure each episode could function as its own story. “So if you dropped in, you still enjoyed that particular story on its own even though it was part of a larger narrative,” says DiMartino.
In assembling their team, one their first calls went to longtime Storyboard Artist Dave Filoni with whom DiMartino had worked on King of the Hill. The future producer and director of multiple Star Wars series, Filoni introduced them to the films of Hayao Miyazaki and was a frequent director on season one. “He’s just a super-talented, passionate guy,” DiMartino says, remembering Filoni’s thumbnail drawings of the first episode and how he helped establish a unique aesthetic.
Over the course of the last two decades, during their interactions with fans, DiMartino and Konietzko have seen time and again how beloved their world and their characters remain. Konietzko recalls a survivor of Hurricane Katrina who, in the face of having lost their home, took emotional inspiration from the depiction of Avatar’s tortured Prince Zuko.
“These characters are very real to me,” says Konietzko, “but you still can’t really anticipate how much this will mean to someone [else], when it will come into their lives at a really critical moment.”
“We wanted to create a show that definitely stood the test of time,” adds DiMartino, “but it’s one thing to say that, and it’s another thing to actually see that happen. Twenty years on, people are still… having emotional responses to the stories and the characters.”
Angela Mueller, Character Layout Artist/Character Designer
Angela Mueller was already at Nickelodeon when she heard rumblings of a buzzy new series in development on the same floor. Given Mueller’s animation layout experience and interest in anime, her then-boyfriend (now-husband), Josh Hamilton, had already joined the Avatar crew as a Writer’s Assistant, and he submitted her name for consideration to join the artistic staff. She was hired as a Character Layout Artist, and midway through the first season joined the character design team reporting to Konietzko.
“I had worked in primetime and some other shows that were more cartoony, but my [personal] style was always more action adventure, more realistic proportions, more anime-focused,” says Mueller. “So it was such a fun opportunity to try to do that for a series for the first time.”
Mueller feels the anime of Avatar embodied a Westernized style, less cartoony and with more realistic proportions than its Asian counterparts. Over time, she would learn to emulate the specifics of Konietzko’s drawing style, reaching the point where the clean-up notes would be minimal “knuckles and nostrils,” as she liked to joke.
Mueller grew up watching fare like Batman, Gargoyles, and G. I. Joe, which she found “too kiddy, but that’s all I had.” Even as she was working on Avatar, Mueller sensed that the series was breaking new ground for kids TV both visually and in storytelling.
“I would see the storyboards and the animatics–I’d get the scripts and start to do the designs and dive in a little bit more–and it was like, ‘Wow there’s a lot going on,’” says Mueller. “The visuals, too. I go back and look at some of the shows [from] the mid-90s that I thought were beautiful and amazing, and they’re a little hard to watch.” But when she looks back on the animation sequences, choreography, and quality of Avatar, she believes it holds up.
Just four years later, on The Legend of Korra, everything about how Mueller worked had changed. She remembers pulling out her big box of supplies. She was around some younger artists, and one took out the eraser brush and asked, “What’s this for?” She had to explain it was for brushing away eraser shavings. She was given her own computer station and worked on a Cintiq—a big leap from Avatar when she was drawing by hand with mechanical pencils, cleaning up right on the paper, and scanning paper images to be digitized. While she likes how technology has made her work faster and more efficient, Mueller marvels at what Avatar accomplished in that pre-digital age.
Ethan Spaulding, Storyboard Artist/Director
Like Mueller, Ethan Spaulding was attracted by the buzz surrounding the new project at Nickelodeon. A colleague from The Simpsons was joining the team, and she shared a videotape of a short that DiMartino and Konietzko had made. The quality of the short–which included moss on the rocks and boulders in the background–blew Spaulding away.
“I’m like, okay, these guys are paying attention to [Studio] Ghibli,” Spaulding says. “I was a lifelong fan of anime, and I always wanted to try my hand at doing action stuff. Mike and Bryan liked my test, and it went from there. I lucked out.”
Having spent 10 years as a Character Layout Artist on The Simpsons, the opportunity to work on Avatar gave Spaulding his first professional experience as a Storyboard Artist and, in season two, as a director. In both cases, he followed the leads of DiMartino and Konietzko. “Mike and Bryan had a clear vision of what they wanted, and it was a chance for me just to go wild,” he says.
For opportunities to grow, Spaulding cites the realistic drama and philosophical elements that are sprinkled throughout the series. A cerebral character like Aang, who thinks before he leaps, is unusual for the genre. “The characters had more real-life grounded aspects to them than your standard animation at that time,” he says. “It was something to sink your teeth into as a board artist. You can really make those characters act and emote. It’s not just happy, sad, or angry emotions. Everything about that series was chock-full of gray moments.”
Spaulding, who would later go on to direct on the Batman, Mortal Kombat, and Scooby-Doo franchises, made his directing debut in Avatar’s second season on the “Return to Omashu” episode. “It was exciting,” he says. “You’re trying to balance the story, and you have your storyboard team. You’re dealing with the producers and writers. We actually over-boarded.” The 22-minute episode ended up around 32 minutes, meaning a lot had to be cut. “Back then I was very scared to edit stuff, [but] as a rookie director, you’ve got to learn the main part of the story that you need to keep. Visualizing the script as best you can and telling an entertaining story was my main goal. Hopefully we did that.”
Playing Favorites:
Avatar creatives share their favorite episodes
Season 1, Episode 20: “The Siege of the North, Part 2”
For DiMartino, seeing Aang combining with the Ocean Spirit, and the epic scale they were able to achieve, is a highlight. This was before a widescreen TV was in every living room, and he says: “We were always aspiring to make this cinematic animated experience on television, and that was definitely one episode that sticks out where we hit our goals.”
Season 1, Episode 13 “The Blue Spirit”
Konietzko calls this episode “a big caper/martial arts crazy extravaganza” with all the different elements found in Hong Kong action movies. But instead of characters just fighting, they used props and the environment. This posed interesting martial arts challenges, like Aang improvising to use bamboo ladders as stilts to helicopter across walls.
Season 3, Episode 17 “Ember Island Players”
As an artist working on almost the entire run of the show, Mueller recalls that when they got to this episode, she loved all the inside jokes and doing parody versions of the characters. “I got to work with [Konietzko] in several sessions and just doodle the craziest ideas on paper,” she says. “That was memorable because it was fun and hilarious, and I really enjoyed that as a designer.”
Season 3, Episode 6 “The Avatar and the Fire Lord”
This episode required multiple designs for each character because the story took place at different moments in their past. “So you’re tracking the characters at different ages, and therefore there’s a whole new set of designs, and in some ways that can be a nightmare,” says Spaulding. “I like that episode because I’m proud of what the crew did and how we were able to get [it] made.”
