Avatar...DONE!

This girl named Laura, who is now spending a small portion of her life in a facility that is training her to become an unstoppable, Russian-speaking missionary, was obsessed with this show called "Avatar: The Last Airbender." She persuasively insisted that I give it a try.

So I did.

Thanks to Netflix, I have now finished all three seasons of this enormously enjoyable cartoon. And let me tell you something about this cartoon--it is ENORMOUSLY enjoyable.

I have friends who hate anime, and I sympathize with them, because, and let's be honest, what's NOT to hate about anime? My exceptions are very limited: anything by Hayao Miyazaki (I definitely had to look that up)--Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle, and so on--and now, beautifully, Avatar.

Of course, Avatar isn't really anime. It's an American-made, anime-loving cartoon. It's influences (this from our beloved Wikipedia) are East and South Asian, and Western animation, so it ends up being more interesting and culture-rich than any of them.

I can't even really tell you why I loved it so much. The animation is great, I suppose. It's beautiful and exciting. But the writing is often corny, the humor almost unendurably silly, and most of the dramatic dialog is definitively on-the-nose. It's moralistic, and the characters barely escape being flat.

But the story is fantastic. It's not so crazy that you never know what's coming next, but it's deeply imaginative and moves along at a really excellent pace. Each subplot is satisfyingly fun or touching, depending, and the overall story arch--the one that stretches over all three seasons--is really, really cool.

And the characters are actually quite lovable, once you've got half a dozen episodes under your belt. And the humor succeeds just often enough at being incredibly funny.

Crap, everyone, I love this show. I couldn't wait to dig into each disc as it got mailed to my apartment. If I had to go a couple of days without seeing it, I felt like dying. But here's the best part, now that it's over, I'm OK. I'm happy with it. There's no enduring ache that there are no more episodes to watch. The story is finished, everything happened that needed to happen, and I'm satisfied. It's a great feeling.

Want to know what the show's actually about? Well I won't tell you. You can find out more about it here, or buy it here (if you have Netflix, you can watch the whole first season online), or get excited about the movie adaptation Shyamalan is doing here.

Man, I wish I could bend stuff.