Netflix’s Live-Action Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 2 Still Doesn’t Find Balance

By Caroline Cao | June 27, 2026 | Movie Reviews

Does the sophomore season live-action remake of a classic kids’ cartoon rescue itself?

It’s easy to understate the spell that Avatar: The Last Airbender, running on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008, had on the animation industry and its acolytes. It was also blessed in an era where 26 episodes per season were the standard practice. Plenty of the narrative then-innovations–gasp, fully-drawn character arcs, complex worldbuilding, gray lenses on good and evil, Y7 exploration on imperialism, PTSD, and cultural genocide–also no longer feel like a novelty in western animation.

The animated IP, created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, is now dealing with a troubling saga: The infamous leak of the Paramount+ Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender (2026), a springboard for conversations about animators being generally underappreciated and unprotected by corrupt entities.

But we’re here to talk about the Netflix live-action reimagining of the show, from which the original creators and the original cartoon’s composer, Jeremy Zuckerman, departed production. With showrunners Albert Kim and Christine Boylan, season 2 struggles but intermittently yields more pleasures than its first season. The Netflix telling is identical in broad strokes. Avatar takes place in an Asian-Indigenous-inspired fantasy world where there are “benders,” humans with the ability to control earth, fire, water, or wind, each living in their respective nations. The “Avatar” is a reincarnated savior with the ability to bend all four elements and serves as the Chosen One, bringing balance to a chaotic world.

While the ruthless Fire Nation and its Fire Lord Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim who makes his paternal take on Ozai work) are waging a One Hundred Year War, a pair of Water Tribe members, the young waterbender Katara (Kiawentiio) and her elder brother Sokka (Ian Ousley), discover the young avatar Aang (Gordon Cormier), an airbender who fled the genocide of the Air Nation, and his sky bison slumbering in an iceberg. It’s going to take lots of journeying and training to mold Aang into the savior against the Fire Nation.

As in the previous season 1 of the Netflix one, it compresses and squeezes in plotlines and characters from the cartoon to the point of suffocation. This season 2 gets a squeeze of 7 episodes. But once season 2 gets inside the great walls of Ba Sing Se, the capital of the Earth kingdom, intrigue boils around. When the Gaang (as the main heroes are called) explore separate paths on how to help the Earth Kingdom civilians while hatching a plan to finally reach the Earth King (Justin Chien).

The Cultural Minister Long Feng (Chin Han, glorious in a different take on the character) preys on Aang’s faith through sheer paternal warmth, while Katara finds a way to help the poorer refugees. Meanwhile, Sokka is trying to track his missing mechanic friend Sai (a delightful Danny Pudi). Their new teammate is Toph Beifong (a darlingly snarky Miya Cech from Beef), the blind earthbending prodigy of the wealthy Beifong family and Aang’s earthbending teacher. (Although Netflix put out a call for low-vision and blind children to audition for Toph, it’s a loss that a non-disabled kid end up being cast.)

Gordon Cormier as Aang, Miyako as Toph in season 2 of Avatar: The Last Airbender

There’s an occasional breath of fresh air in shots that look as if they’re inspired by Asian dramas, and notably, these are the shots with the least foreground VFX. While artistic VFX are possible (see Fast Color), Netflix’s Avatar hasn’t really figured out how to make its “realism” appealing onscreen despite its attempt to make it cartoonish. While it’s an obvious improvement from the reviled, whitewashed M. Night Shyamalan’s 2010 live-action adaptation, it hasn’t found its soul.

So much rests on its great performances. Dallas Liu’s Zuko and his dynamic with Paul Sun-Hyung Lee’s Uncle Iroh brew and boil into a compelling conflict that rhymes with the troubled bond of their cartoon counterpoints. When Toph’s mother gets greater prominence, actress Crystal Yu steps up to the task to portray an upper-crust strict mother who convinces herself it’s done out of love.

Elizabeth Yu as Azula in Avatar: The Last Airbender

But deserving of the crown is Elizabeth Yu, feasting on her role as the sadistic Fire Princess Azula, a foil to her brother Zuko. Seeing Azula as a live-action youth, other than the original animated counterpart voiced by Grey DeLisle, leaves intoxicating flames on screen. Yu has fun with the divalicious cruelty, while having those dips of vulnerability.

Borrowing the original music by Jeremy Zuckerman, Takeshi Furukawa weaves out his cues to his own vernacular. Occasionally, the costume work by Christopher Hargadon is illuminated with a luscious sheen, particularly in the Fire Nation palace getup, but it is often drowned out by the lack of cinematic color (Michael Goi, Michael Balfry, Stewart Whelan). Netflix’s Avatar is inescapably dullen of its color.

To a hit-or-miss effect, the series is “What if these characters who never interacted in the original series interacted?” or “What if we mesh these plotlines together.” Sebastian Amoruso as non-bender Freedom Fighter Jet, who buts head with Zuko in the Earth Kingdom, ends up being watered down when Jet is a character with the most potential to be redefined.

But there is one sequence that sings, and it’s a practical effects relief from the VFX artifice: It’s a trippy nightmare staged with Bunraku puppets. For once, perhaps they crack the code in converting Avatar into soulful live action.

Avatar: The Last Airbender’s season 2 is now playing on Netflix.