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‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Boss on Adapting Beloved Anime: ‘It Was a Balancing Act’

Showrunner Albert Kim speaks with IndieWire about the joys and challenges of adapting an adventure-of-the-week cartoon for a bingeable Netflix drama.

“I did work with [DiMartino and Konietzko] for a short period, and we overlapped while we were here and I got along great with them,” Kim told IndieWire ahead of “Avatar”s February 22 premiere. The writers room was a mix of diehard fans and the uninitiated, as was the set (there may have been some “Avatar” tattoos), to create accountability for which story points were essential and which could be repurposed. The decision, for instance, to have more Azula and Ozai in the first season, that felt natural to me because I wanted to be able to balance out the story a little bit and show more of the Fire Nation than they did in the original.

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