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attackfishCommentators: Michael Dante DiMartino, series co-creator, Bryan Konietzko, series co-creator, and Aaron Ehasz, series head writer.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Hey this is Mike DiMartino, co-creator of Avatar.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: This is Bryan Konietzko, the other co-creator of Avatar.
AARON EHASZ: And this is Aaron Ehasz, head writer.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: So this is the main title of the show, which, uh, took a lot of work and effort by a lot of different artists.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I was driving back and forth between the Burbank studio, Titmouse’s studio in Hollywood, and my friend Andy Dill’s house where he was working on the digital stuff and compositing in some other part of LA, every day hitting all three, and it was… pretty rough. But it came out cool. We’re happy. That last shot I really like. I like the way the perspective shifts.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: So this is kind of the first in the trilogy of uh, Northern Water Tribe episodes, where they finally get to the Northern Water Tribe. And actually... I wrote this episode so I was kind of- I was really into it and unlike most of the episodes from the first season, like, this was a story that we, Bryan and I had from the beginning almost, like we, we wanted to have like, we knew that when they got to the Northern Water Tribe that Katara would uh, you know, finally think that she realized her vision of becoming a waterbender, and be shut down by the old waterbending master. And yeah, there was a lot of buildup all season to get to this point, so… It was very exciting to finally get to this, this story and be able to do it.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I kind of like the way the, the way the season wraps up with some familiar things. Zhao in this tent sort of planning this big attack on the Northern Water Tribe really reminds my of episode 1.03 when uh, he first learns that the Avatar is back, with Zuko. I think it’s kind of a neat bookend, bookends for the season.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Another thing about this guy, Admiral Zhao, he was voiced by Jason Isaacs, who’s in… bunch of things. He was in The Patriot, and he was in uh, Harry Potter movies, he’s Lucius Malfoy. He’s just a great great actor and a great villain overall.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: We were very lucky to get him. I remember Mike kept saying to the casting department, “Can we just get somebody like Jason Isaacs?” and they finally said “What if we get Jason Isaacs?”
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: [Imitating himself] Yep, that’s cool.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: We got really lucky.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah, he’s a great actor, and you know, as you will see in the later episodes, unfortunately, he’s... he’s dead, but…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Not Jason Isaacs.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: [Laughs] The character, the character.
AARON EHASZ: Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Isaacs, your son is okay, don’t worry.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Uh, it took a lot of discussion in the board room to figure out these water-lock systems, and unfortunately a lot of the scenes got cut, but it came out pretty cool, and I think you get the idea that this culture has built their whole… They built their whole culture around water, and it’s kind of like these veins going through the city, and cascading down from the chief’s palace all the way down to the lower snow fields. That’s a great character design by Angela Muller on Princess Yue. And Aaron was adamant that she have silvery hair because he knew pretty early on that she was gonna be tied in with the moon. So I remember you like grabbed me in the hallway and you were like [gravelly whisper] I saw a drawing where her hair was dark. It’s got to be white!
AARON EHASZ: Yes, there are very few visual things that I actually get involved in.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: That’s true.
AARON EHASZ: And bicker about. Or whatever, but…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: When someone’s that passionate about something, I just say okay. No it was great. It really made her stand out.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: We got to mention Uncle’s song here, because the Uncle, who’s voiced by Mako, great great actor, uh, he hates singing, but he’s really good at it, so we keep giving him songs, but every time he’s like [imitating Mako] no, don’t make me sing another song, I don’t want to do that.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: But I think he was on Broadway. At least that’s what I heard.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Oh yeah, he’s pretty great. So yeah, we love to have Uncle sing. It’s very hilarious, and I think that’s uh, the first official song we had him do.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: So if you haven’t noticed before, that uh, that love theme that he sings becomes the theme for Sokka and Yue’s love story in this trilogy of episodes. So uh, you’ll hear that melody woven into the score by Jeremy Zuckerman throughout eighteen, nineteen, and twenty.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Oh another good actor note, this is uh…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: John Polito.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah, John Polito does the chief’s voice, and uh, he’s in uh Coen Brothers movies, and he’s just a great character actor.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I… I was star struck for the first time when I got to meet him. That was really cool. Yeah, being a Coen brothers disciple in art school, definitely.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah it’s, it’s… Yeah in our show, it’s kind of hard to find actors who can really bring like a realism to it, but also be funny, and dramatic, and all the things you need to be a great actor. And you know we try to balance it out with actors that can bring a lot to the table. So like Jack De Sena does a great job with Sokka, and Mae Whitman… Mae Whitman is Katara, she’s really wonderful.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Some great animation by Animation director Yu Jae Myung from JM animation. Ever since the pilot, he has taken to Sokka so well, just like Jack has. And um, the two of them together just make a great lively combination. I really like that, this background. The lighting’s really cool. The kind of, glowing fountain, but the characters in shadow. I thought that was nice. Pakku, this character, is one of our favorites. He’s a… Came out really well. If you notice, he is the first character in the um, in the main title sequence. The waterbending character in the red silhouette is Pakku, so. Like Mike said, we had plans for him very early on, so we put that design in. I just love any scene between Zuko and Zhao, it’s just awesome. These guys are… Their egos are soooooo big, and uh so much tension, and they both kind of want the same thing. They both want the Firelord’s approval, and it’s just a great clashing of the egos.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: This is like the first moment where Zhao recognizes that Zuko is the Blue Spirit.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I really was happy with the color correction on those flashback scenes… I thought it looked pretty… pretty cool. [Referring to Zhao’s sword flip with Zuko’s dao sword] That was a really hard move to do in the acting reference, to flip the sword over and catch it. I didn’t know if I could do it, but actually I got it the first time. The second time I dropped the sword and it bounced all over the room, which was pretty scary, but… I should have just stuck to the first take.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: So do you ever see yourself in these uh, in the animation, because times you do the reference for the acting.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I do!
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Or the kung fu, do you ever see your…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Oh definitely. I think you can recognize the hands most. And I definitely recognize Sifu Kisu, our martial arts consultant in a lot of the action. That’s just great character animation on Pakku. Got really really lucky on that one.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show
KATARA: What do you mean you won’t teach me?]
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I love this part.
Interjection of Dialgue from the show
KATARA: I didn’t travel across the entire world for you to tell me no!
PAKKU: No.]
BRYAN KONIETZKO: He’s just a… He’s not a nice guy.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: He’s a great jerk.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Jerk is a good word. Great voice acting. Who was the voice actor on him?
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Victor Brandt did the voice acting on him.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Fantastic. It just matched with the character design so well. I like those little spirit animal heads on the… It’s like a little motif throughout the city. There’s like uh totem poles with the various animal heads.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: And there’s a lot of details like that are in the background, designs and stuff that are in the backgrounds if you look closely. there’s a lot of great, great detail and stuff that has been thought through by the background designers and Bryan and me in the art direction, so. A lot of moon motifs for the Water Tribe, the idea that the moon moves the tides, and is sort of the fist waterbender, which Yue talks about later.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I think Bobby Rubio had storyboarded most of the romance stuff in this one.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: He did a great job, lot of personality in his drawings.
AARON EHASZ: I would like to observe that the canals and sort of gondola-like sequences are based on my recent trip to Italy, and that is a note directed at the IRS.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Oh wow, alright, there you go. Alright, here’s a little fun fact for you all. That pirate barker we just saw biting the gold, that’s Bryan’s voice. And he is a... Another tidbit, all the pirates are based off a, our character design is based off the animators in Korea, a lot of the animators we work with, so it was fun. They first appeared in, uh, “The Waterbending Scroll” episode, and are reappearing here.
AARON EHASZ: Kids are always so cute on Avatar. That’s another…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: [laughs] Yeah
AARON EHASZ: Especially Water Tribe kids.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: And that’s another batch of great character designs by Angela Mueller. She did a great job on all the Water Tribe kids, they were really cute.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Some great drawings by Chris Graham, storyboard artist here. He handled most of this Pakku Aang stuff.
AARON EHASZ: What was Pakku just slurping?
BRYAN KONIETZKO: We thought instead of just noodles, he’d have some like tentacles mixed in there.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah, they’re like octopus squid tentacles or something.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: [Referring to Yugoda] Famous voice actor there.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Lucille Bliss. She’s Smurfette, I believe.
AARON EHASZ: No kidding.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Classic. Classic. Very nice lady.
AARON EHASZ: This, what’s happening right here is something I love about Avatar, which is that this necklace that we’ve known about for so long and that’s sort of had it’s own kind of mini plot where it got lost and Zuko had it, now we’re finding out kind of this deeper history behind it, and like there are so many things in this show that start off seemingly so innocently, that pay off with such depth, and that’s one of my…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: It’s true, even with the class that Yugoda’s teaching is a healing class with waterbending, and that plays a really important role even before that sequence and a lot after that sequence in other episodes, and basically she’s moving the water along the acupressure points in the body. So this is another… This is one of my favorite sequences I think we’ve done. It just came out great. Great staging.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I love that rope noise from Ben. That’s great.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: The Pirates again are back.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:
PIRATE BARKER: Careful with the blasting Jelly!]
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: That was Bryan right there.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Terrible. Terrible voice acting. It was really hard to imitate my friend Seung Hyun Oh, and whisper, that was difficult.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah it’s just really great to do sequences where theres… You know as much as we like to write jokes and do great dramatic scenes and stuff, to do stuff that we can rely on the animation and the acting and the staging and stuff to sell the story is…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Great storyboard by Chris Graham here. I love this ominous bird with glowing eyes. Lot of shots of this ship blowing up.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah we wanted to kind of… There, Chris had the idea to kind of stage it like a like, a live action explosion, where they shoot it from a bunch of angles and then we edit it together.
AARON EHASZ: Coverage.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: That probably comes from the fact that it costs a lot of money to get all those cameras, because you can only blow up the prop one time, so, that’s probably why.
AARON EHASZ: Yeah.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: The director’s probably like ahhhh.
AARON EHASZ: We gotta get it.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: We gotta put more shots in there. I love, I love coming out of that really dramatic, tense scene, to this romance scene that at first seems innocuous, and then…
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Has its own drama.
AARON EHASZ: I love this little thing he made for her.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I remember writing this joke and thinking, I don’t know if this is going to work, but then in the storyboard, I think it was Bobby Rubio did the storyboard, and he drew that, the bad little…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Fish bear.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Fish bear design, and we were like that’s the design, don’t change it at all, that’s got to be exactly that. He just captured the terrible Sokka carving.
AARON EHASZ: I hope that will be coming to stores.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yes.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:
SOKKA: Princess Yue. I don’t get it. One minute she’s telling me she wants to go out with me, and the next, she’s telling me to get lost.]
AARON EHASZ: Oh Sokka.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I love when Katara, this little bit of acting, how her hood flops over her head. I thought that was nice. It’s so cute how Momo tries to pay attention to what people are saying.
AARON EHASZ: I love how quickly Katara dismisses Sokka.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I love this background. The reflected, the reflected light on that wall is just gorgeous. Beautiful. Everything, the stairs kind of fading into the water is really cool. Really feels like moonlight, on a luminous reflective surface.
AARON EHASZ: Also if you notice, the phase of the moon, that was carefully…
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Planned.
AARON EHASZ: Planned.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: That’s a cool design, I think Dean Kelly, storyboard artist, did some background design on this. I think he did that altar piece thing.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I think Giancarlo Volpe storyboarded this part. And he also directed this episode.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I love this scene.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:
CHIEF ARNOOK: I suspect he might change his mind if you swallow your pride and apologize to him.
KATARA: Fine.
PAKKU: I'm waiting, little girl.]
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Oooh, too far. I love the cracks. They look really beautiful.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: This kind of calls back to episode one, where she was getting all mad at Sokka for being a little sexist about his attitudes and she ended up breaking the iceberg that eventually freed Aang.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:
AANG: I'm sure she didn't mean that.
SOKKA: Yeah, I think she did.]
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Maybe that’s why Sokka says yeah he thinks she did. He remembers. [Referring to the scene change to Zhao’s quarters] This is a cool scene too.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah, there’s a lot of great dramatic tension and stuff. It was just really great that we could do funny scenes, and then we can have a scene like this where it’s all dramatic tension between two dudes. It’s great, because Uncle knows… They’re both lying right here.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yeah.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Uncle knows Zuko isn’t dead, and he knows Zhao did it, but he’s lying and pretending the pirates did it, and Zhao thinks that Zuko’s dead, and knows because he set it up.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yeah. Just a cool scene, just a lot of underlying… motivations.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:
SOKKA: Are you crazy, Katara? You're not gonna win this fight!
KATARA: I know! I don't care!]
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Love this fight. Came out really great.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah this is really the first time we see how much passion Katara has with her waterbending and see how much raw talent she has, kind of, and, you know, after this episode, she begins to hone that more, but…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: A lot of care went into the Kung Fu reference with Sifu Kisu. We wanted to make Pakku look refined, like he had trained a style, a specific style, and that Katara was kind of like a street fighter, just raw passion and talent, but unrefined in her skills. Sokka’s always… We figure he has really bad karma, because he’s always getting knocked around. This is cool.
AARON EHASZ: Neat, he’s…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Great animation.
AARON EHASZ: I love that move, just stabilizing herself, it’s so simple.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:
KATARA: You can't knock me down!]
BRYAN KONIETZKO: The key to Kung Fu is just rooting, rooting yourself. It’s cool. Chris Graham storyboarded this fight.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Wait, so smug, what a jerk. Yeah, I love the little kids who see her Kung Fu and start cheering.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: It’s kind of influenced by all my seven nephews who get so pumped by watching Avatar, they start jumping around the living room.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: No, it’s great to see that, like kids are actually learning like Kung Fu moves from the show because they’re watching over and over and over and over again.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: My nephew Ryan has a perfect horse stance, and he learned it from the opening.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: That’s cool!
BRYAN KONIETZKO: My favorite shot coming up right here, this wave that she sends out. Oh I love it. My favorite shot! It’s like eighteen frames long. This is really cool too. You see he freezes it as he’s coming down.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Oh this is also the first time we see Katara’s hair down I believe, which was… This was popular with the crew.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I love that she’s still defiant.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I think this ice cage thing was kind of inspired by, I think we had just seen house of flying daggers.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: The bamboo.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: The bamboo cage that they formed.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Beautiful movie. And then it melts. Right when his heart melts. That was intentional. So poignant. [Referring to a shot of the Fire Nation Navy ships] That’s a cool shot. We always try to show with the Fire Nation just a militaristic organization, and…
AARON EHASZ: You have no idea what Zuko had to do to get that uh, that uniform and helmet.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I like, I’m pretty happy with the battle damaged Zuko. I like the specificity of the scars. He looks good.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: If you like toggle through the explosion scene with Zuko’s ship, you’ll see that moments before the explosion reaches him, he performs a protective fire shield around himself, and um, kind of fights fire with fire. And um that’s how he was able to survive. And so he and the bubble of fire are pushed out of the ship through the window. In case you were… In case you thought it was a stretch. It took Sokka all night to find her, on the same bridge where he met her on both times.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I was going to say that, but I thought it was a little, a little negative.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: It was late in the day though in that last scene.
AARON EHASZ: I also like his glove mittens.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: That actually comes from snowboarding.
AARON EHASZ: Really?
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yeah. It was influenced by when you have to get into your bindings. If you’ve got those split mittens, it’s a lot easier, but it keeps your fingers a little warmer. The, sort of the backstory that we didn’t get as much time to deal with is that the Southern Water Tribe was hit harder in the war than the Northern Tribe was. They were closer to the Fire Nation and just through some battles and strategic things, um, they took the brunt of the attacks, so their culture was sort of wiped out. That’s why when we see them, they’re a little bit more um, just smaller family and more like rudimentary camps and stuff, where as the Northern Tribe was able to, maybe because of the landscape or the way they had fortified themselves, were able to preserve their culture a little bit more. So that’s sort of the contrast where Sokka thinks he’s from this uh, I don’t know, less cultured community in comparison to Yue. [Referring to a panning shot of Zhao’s fleet] This is a cool shot. I love how it takes its time.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Good, good cliffhanger.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Good job, Mike and Aaron. Do we talk over this part?
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Sure, why not?
AARON EHASZ: I should say that my two year old son, Paul, loves the closing credit theme and will dance to it for the entire... Jump up and down...
BRYAN KONIETZKO: That’s awesome.
AARON EHASZ: It is awesome. You should try… You the listener should try dancing to this right now. Enjoy.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I think I mentioned before, but this is Kecek, it’s a Balinese monkey chant. It’s really amazing, kind of group music. Ben studied this in school.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Hey this is Mike DiMartino, co-creator of Avatar.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: This is Bryan Konietzko, the other co-creator of Avatar.
AARON EHASZ: And this is Aaron Ehasz, head writer.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: So this is the main title of the show, which, uh, took a lot of work and effort by a lot of different artists.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I was driving back and forth between the Burbank studio, Titmouse’s studio in Hollywood, and my friend Andy Dill’s house where he was working on the digital stuff and compositing in some other part of LA, every day hitting all three, and it was… pretty rough. But it came out cool. We’re happy. That last shot I really like. I like the way the perspective shifts.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: So this is kind of the first in the trilogy of uh, Northern Water Tribe episodes, where they finally get to the Northern Water Tribe. And actually... I wrote this episode so I was kind of- I was really into it and unlike most of the episodes from the first season, like, this was a story that we, Bryan and I had from the beginning almost, like we, we wanted to have like, we knew that when they got to the Northern Water Tribe that Katara would uh, you know, finally think that she realized her vision of becoming a waterbender, and be shut down by the old waterbending master. And yeah, there was a lot of buildup all season to get to this point, so… It was very exciting to finally get to this, this story and be able to do it.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I kind of like the way the, the way the season wraps up with some familiar things. Zhao in this tent sort of planning this big attack on the Northern Water Tribe really reminds my of episode 1.03 when uh, he first learns that the Avatar is back, with Zuko. I think it’s kind of a neat bookend, bookends for the season.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Another thing about this guy, Admiral Zhao, he was voiced by Jason Isaacs, who’s in… bunch of things. He was in The Patriot, and he was in uh, Harry Potter movies, he’s Lucius Malfoy. He’s just a great great actor and a great villain overall.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: We were very lucky to get him. I remember Mike kept saying to the casting department, “Can we just get somebody like Jason Isaacs?” and they finally said “What if we get Jason Isaacs?”
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: [Imitating himself] Yep, that’s cool.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: We got really lucky.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah, he’s a great actor, and you know, as you will see in the later episodes, unfortunately, he’s... he’s dead, but…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Not Jason Isaacs.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: [Laughs] The character, the character.
AARON EHASZ: Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Isaacs, your son is okay, don’t worry.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Uh, it took a lot of discussion in the board room to figure out these water-lock systems, and unfortunately a lot of the scenes got cut, but it came out pretty cool, and I think you get the idea that this culture has built their whole… They built their whole culture around water, and it’s kind of like these veins going through the city, and cascading down from the chief’s palace all the way down to the lower snow fields. That’s a great character design by Angela Muller on Princess Yue. And Aaron was adamant that she have silvery hair because he knew pretty early on that she was gonna be tied in with the moon. So I remember you like grabbed me in the hallway and you were like [gravelly whisper] I saw a drawing where her hair was dark. It’s got to be white!
AARON EHASZ: Yes, there are very few visual things that I actually get involved in.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: That’s true.
AARON EHASZ: And bicker about. Or whatever, but…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: When someone’s that passionate about something, I just say okay. No it was great. It really made her stand out.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: We got to mention Uncle’s song here, because the Uncle, who’s voiced by Mako, great great actor, uh, he hates singing, but he’s really good at it, so we keep giving him songs, but every time he’s like [imitating Mako] no, don’t make me sing another song, I don’t want to do that.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: But I think he was on Broadway. At least that’s what I heard.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Oh yeah, he’s pretty great. So yeah, we love to have Uncle sing. It’s very hilarious, and I think that’s uh, the first official song we had him do.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: So if you haven’t noticed before, that uh, that love theme that he sings becomes the theme for Sokka and Yue’s love story in this trilogy of episodes. So uh, you’ll hear that melody woven into the score by Jeremy Zuckerman throughout eighteen, nineteen, and twenty.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Oh another good actor note, this is uh…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: John Polito.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah, John Polito does the chief’s voice, and uh, he’s in uh Coen Brothers movies, and he’s just a great character actor.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I… I was star struck for the first time when I got to meet him. That was really cool. Yeah, being a Coen brothers disciple in art school, definitely.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah it’s, it’s… Yeah in our show, it’s kind of hard to find actors who can really bring like a realism to it, but also be funny, and dramatic, and all the things you need to be a great actor. And you know we try to balance it out with actors that can bring a lot to the table. So like Jack De Sena does a great job with Sokka, and Mae Whitman… Mae Whitman is Katara, she’s really wonderful.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Some great animation by Animation director Yu Jae Myung from JM animation. Ever since the pilot, he has taken to Sokka so well, just like Jack has. And um, the two of them together just make a great lively combination. I really like that, this background. The lighting’s really cool. The kind of, glowing fountain, but the characters in shadow. I thought that was nice. Pakku, this character, is one of our favorites. He’s a… Came out really well. If you notice, he is the first character in the um, in the main title sequence. The waterbending character in the red silhouette is Pakku, so. Like Mike said, we had plans for him very early on, so we put that design in. I just love any scene between Zuko and Zhao, it’s just awesome. These guys are… Their egos are soooooo big, and uh so much tension, and they both kind of want the same thing. They both want the Firelord’s approval, and it’s just a great clashing of the egos.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: This is like the first moment where Zhao recognizes that Zuko is the Blue Spirit.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I really was happy with the color correction on those flashback scenes… I thought it looked pretty… pretty cool. [Referring to Zhao’s sword flip with Zuko’s dao sword] That was a really hard move to do in the acting reference, to flip the sword over and catch it. I didn’t know if I could do it, but actually I got it the first time. The second time I dropped the sword and it bounced all over the room, which was pretty scary, but… I should have just stuck to the first take.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: So do you ever see yourself in these uh, in the animation, because times you do the reference for the acting.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I do!
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Or the kung fu, do you ever see your…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Oh definitely. I think you can recognize the hands most. And I definitely recognize Sifu Kisu, our martial arts consultant in a lot of the action. That’s just great character animation on Pakku. Got really really lucky on that one.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show
KATARA: What do you mean you won’t teach me?]
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I love this part.
Interjection of Dialgue from the show
KATARA: I didn’t travel across the entire world for you to tell me no!
PAKKU: No.]
BRYAN KONIETZKO: He’s just a… He’s not a nice guy.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: He’s a great jerk.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Jerk is a good word. Great voice acting. Who was the voice actor on him?
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Victor Brandt did the voice acting on him.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Fantastic. It just matched with the character design so well. I like those little spirit animal heads on the… It’s like a little motif throughout the city. There’s like uh totem poles with the various animal heads.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: And there’s a lot of details like that are in the background, designs and stuff that are in the backgrounds if you look closely. there’s a lot of great, great detail and stuff that has been thought through by the background designers and Bryan and me in the art direction, so. A lot of moon motifs for the Water Tribe, the idea that the moon moves the tides, and is sort of the fist waterbender, which Yue talks about later.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I think Bobby Rubio had storyboarded most of the romance stuff in this one.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: He did a great job, lot of personality in his drawings.
AARON EHASZ: I would like to observe that the canals and sort of gondola-like sequences are based on my recent trip to Italy, and that is a note directed at the IRS.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Oh wow, alright, there you go. Alright, here’s a little fun fact for you all. That pirate barker we just saw biting the gold, that’s Bryan’s voice. And he is a... Another tidbit, all the pirates are based off a, our character design is based off the animators in Korea, a lot of the animators we work with, so it was fun. They first appeared in, uh, “The Waterbending Scroll” episode, and are reappearing here.
AARON EHASZ: Kids are always so cute on Avatar. That’s another…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: [laughs] Yeah
AARON EHASZ: Especially Water Tribe kids.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: And that’s another batch of great character designs by Angela Mueller. She did a great job on all the Water Tribe kids, they were really cute.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Some great drawings by Chris Graham, storyboard artist here. He handled most of this Pakku Aang stuff.
AARON EHASZ: What was Pakku just slurping?
BRYAN KONIETZKO: We thought instead of just noodles, he’d have some like tentacles mixed in there.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah, they’re like octopus squid tentacles or something.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: [Referring to Yugoda] Famous voice actor there.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Lucille Bliss. She’s Smurfette, I believe.
AARON EHASZ: No kidding.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Classic. Classic. Very nice lady.
AARON EHASZ: This, what’s happening right here is something I love about Avatar, which is that this necklace that we’ve known about for so long and that’s sort of had it’s own kind of mini plot where it got lost and Zuko had it, now we’re finding out kind of this deeper history behind it, and like there are so many things in this show that start off seemingly so innocently, that pay off with such depth, and that’s one of my…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: It’s true, even with the class that Yugoda’s teaching is a healing class with waterbending, and that plays a really important role even before that sequence and a lot after that sequence in other episodes, and basically she’s moving the water along the acupressure points in the body. So this is another… This is one of my favorite sequences I think we’ve done. It just came out great. Great staging.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I love that rope noise from Ben. That’s great.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: The Pirates again are back.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:
PIRATE BARKER: Careful with the blasting Jelly!]
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: That was Bryan right there.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Terrible. Terrible voice acting. It was really hard to imitate my friend Seung Hyun Oh, and whisper, that was difficult.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah it’s just really great to do sequences where theres… You know as much as we like to write jokes and do great dramatic scenes and stuff, to do stuff that we can rely on the animation and the acting and the staging and stuff to sell the story is…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Great storyboard by Chris Graham here. I love this ominous bird with glowing eyes. Lot of shots of this ship blowing up.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah we wanted to kind of… There, Chris had the idea to kind of stage it like a like, a live action explosion, where they shoot it from a bunch of angles and then we edit it together.
AARON EHASZ: Coverage.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: That probably comes from the fact that it costs a lot of money to get all those cameras, because you can only blow up the prop one time, so, that’s probably why.
AARON EHASZ: Yeah.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: The director’s probably like ahhhh.
AARON EHASZ: We gotta get it.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: We gotta put more shots in there. I love, I love coming out of that really dramatic, tense scene, to this romance scene that at first seems innocuous, and then…
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Has its own drama.
AARON EHASZ: I love this little thing he made for her.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I remember writing this joke and thinking, I don’t know if this is going to work, but then in the storyboard, I think it was Bobby Rubio did the storyboard, and he drew that, the bad little…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Fish bear.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Fish bear design, and we were like that’s the design, don’t change it at all, that’s got to be exactly that. He just captured the terrible Sokka carving.
AARON EHASZ: I hope that will be coming to stores.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yes.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:
SOKKA: Princess Yue. I don’t get it. One minute she’s telling me she wants to go out with me, and the next, she’s telling me to get lost.]
AARON EHASZ: Oh Sokka.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I love when Katara, this little bit of acting, how her hood flops over her head. I thought that was nice. It’s so cute how Momo tries to pay attention to what people are saying.
AARON EHASZ: I love how quickly Katara dismisses Sokka.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I love this background. The reflected, the reflected light on that wall is just gorgeous. Beautiful. Everything, the stairs kind of fading into the water is really cool. Really feels like moonlight, on a luminous reflective surface.
AARON EHASZ: Also if you notice, the phase of the moon, that was carefully…
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Planned.
AARON EHASZ: Planned.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: That’s a cool design, I think Dean Kelly, storyboard artist, did some background design on this. I think he did that altar piece thing.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I think Giancarlo Volpe storyboarded this part. And he also directed this episode.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I love this scene.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:
CHIEF ARNOOK: I suspect he might change his mind if you swallow your pride and apologize to him.
KATARA: Fine.
PAKKU: I'm waiting, little girl.]
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Oooh, too far. I love the cracks. They look really beautiful.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: This kind of calls back to episode one, where she was getting all mad at Sokka for being a little sexist about his attitudes and she ended up breaking the iceberg that eventually freed Aang.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:
AANG: I'm sure she didn't mean that.
SOKKA: Yeah, I think she did.]
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Maybe that’s why Sokka says yeah he thinks she did. He remembers. [Referring to the scene change to Zhao’s quarters] This is a cool scene too.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah, there’s a lot of great dramatic tension and stuff. It was just really great that we could do funny scenes, and then we can have a scene like this where it’s all dramatic tension between two dudes. It’s great, because Uncle knows… They’re both lying right here.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yeah.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Uncle knows Zuko isn’t dead, and he knows Zhao did it, but he’s lying and pretending the pirates did it, and Zhao thinks that Zuko’s dead, and knows because he set it up.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yeah. Just a cool scene, just a lot of underlying… motivations.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:
SOKKA: Are you crazy, Katara? You're not gonna win this fight!
KATARA: I know! I don't care!]
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Love this fight. Came out really great.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah this is really the first time we see how much passion Katara has with her waterbending and see how much raw talent she has, kind of, and, you know, after this episode, she begins to hone that more, but…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: A lot of care went into the Kung Fu reference with Sifu Kisu. We wanted to make Pakku look refined, like he had trained a style, a specific style, and that Katara was kind of like a street fighter, just raw passion and talent, but unrefined in her skills. Sokka’s always… We figure he has really bad karma, because he’s always getting knocked around. This is cool.
AARON EHASZ: Neat, he’s…
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Great animation.
AARON EHASZ: I love that move, just stabilizing herself, it’s so simple.
[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:
KATARA: You can't knock me down!]
BRYAN KONIETZKO: The key to Kung Fu is just rooting, rooting yourself. It’s cool. Chris Graham storyboarded this fight.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Wait, so smug, what a jerk. Yeah, I love the little kids who see her Kung Fu and start cheering.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: It’s kind of influenced by all my seven nephews who get so pumped by watching Avatar, they start jumping around the living room.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: No, it’s great to see that, like kids are actually learning like Kung Fu moves from the show because they’re watching over and over and over and over again.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: My nephew Ryan has a perfect horse stance, and he learned it from the opening.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: That’s cool!
BRYAN KONIETZKO: My favorite shot coming up right here, this wave that she sends out. Oh I love it. My favorite shot! It’s like eighteen frames long. This is really cool too. You see he freezes it as he’s coming down.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Oh this is also the first time we see Katara’s hair down I believe, which was… This was popular with the crew.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I love that she’s still defiant.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I think this ice cage thing was kind of inspired by, I think we had just seen house of flying daggers.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: The bamboo.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: The bamboo cage that they formed.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Beautiful movie. And then it melts. Right when his heart melts. That was intentional. So poignant. [Referring to a shot of the Fire Nation Navy ships] That’s a cool shot. We always try to show with the Fire Nation just a militaristic organization, and…
AARON EHASZ: You have no idea what Zuko had to do to get that uh, that uniform and helmet.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I like, I’m pretty happy with the battle damaged Zuko. I like the specificity of the scars. He looks good.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: If you like toggle through the explosion scene with Zuko’s ship, you’ll see that moments before the explosion reaches him, he performs a protective fire shield around himself, and um, kind of fights fire with fire. And um that’s how he was able to survive. And so he and the bubble of fire are pushed out of the ship through the window. In case you were… In case you thought it was a stretch. It took Sokka all night to find her, on the same bridge where he met her on both times.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I was going to say that, but I thought it was a little, a little negative.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: It was late in the day though in that last scene.
AARON EHASZ: I also like his glove mittens.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: That actually comes from snowboarding.
AARON EHASZ: Really?
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yeah. It was influenced by when you have to get into your bindings. If you’ve got those split mittens, it’s a lot easier, but it keeps your fingers a little warmer. The, sort of the backstory that we didn’t get as much time to deal with is that the Southern Water Tribe was hit harder in the war than the Northern Tribe was. They were closer to the Fire Nation and just through some battles and strategic things, um, they took the brunt of the attacks, so their culture was sort of wiped out. That’s why when we see them, they’re a little bit more um, just smaller family and more like rudimentary camps and stuff, where as the Northern Tribe was able to, maybe because of the landscape or the way they had fortified themselves, were able to preserve their culture a little bit more. So that’s sort of the contrast where Sokka thinks he’s from this uh, I don’t know, less cultured community in comparison to Yue. [Referring to a panning shot of Zhao’s fleet] This is a cool shot. I love how it takes its time.
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Good, good cliffhanger.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: Good job, Mike and Aaron. Do we talk over this part?
MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Sure, why not?
AARON EHASZ: I should say that my two year old son, Paul, loves the closing credit theme and will dance to it for the entire... Jump up and down...
BRYAN KONIETZKO: That’s awesome.
AARON EHASZ: It is awesome. You should try… You the listener should try dancing to this right now. Enjoy.
BRYAN KONIETZKO: I think I mentioned before, but this is Kecek, it’s a Balinese monkey chant. It’s really amazing, kind of group music. Ben studied this in school.
