Avatar: the Last Airbender DVD Commentary: Book I, Chapter 19, The Siege of the North, Part One

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Commentators: 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: And Bryan Konietzko, the other co-creator of Avatar.

AARON EHASZ: This is Aaron Ehasz, head writer.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Here, there’s the map of the world. We zoom in very ex- dramatically.

AARON EHASZ: We just breezed by Azula. Weren’t we going to say something about Azula back there?

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Oh yeah! The firebender in the main title is Azula, if you don’t know, and this guy right here is Roku.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Azula is Zuko’s sister, who is only kind of teased in this episode.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: That’s true, we only kind of see her in episode twelve and uh, at the very end of the season, in episode twenty.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: But uh...

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Quickly became a fan favorite, I believe.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: We had plans for her since the beginning. Yeah.

AARON EHASZ: The internet, fans on the internet forums really responded to Azula immediately in twelve, and were like, oh my God, who is this, and kind of asked a lot of questions. It was really interesting.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah, and she only appeared in one shot, and didn’t even have a line or anything.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: [Referring to Sangok] That character is um, Angela Mueller's brother. She designed it based on him because he got beat up by a girl.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: There’s a lot of characters that we’ll base on people we know, or that people on the crew know.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: I’d only met her brother one time and I saw that drawing and I said, oh that’s your brother! it’s a really good caricature. So now this is like a couple of weeks after episode eighteen, and Katara’s learned a lot since last time we saw her, and she and Pakku are old buddies now. And Aang’s kind of a slacker.

AARON EHASZ: There was some kind of a sea sponge reference a second ago?

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: There was, there was.

AARON EHASZ: Which is for Nickelodeon fans, you might recognize as a friendly poke at our fellow Nickelodeon show.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Was it meant to be?

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Really?

AARON EHASZ: I think it was meant to be.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: That’s news to me.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: I like the uh, snowman trick. Just the idea that Aang doesn’t really have a fighting spirit. He’s a prodigy as a bender, but he likes to use his bending abilities to like make up the air scooter, and now make himself a snowman, so he’s just… You see that he’s got a good heart in the way that his bending skills manifest. So Appa’s eating some kelp. We figured that was the only kind of greenery they had around in the North Pole is stuff that they got from the ocean. Sokka and Appa have come a long way. They were, they were, he pretty much hated Appa in the beginning.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: That’s true, that’s a good point.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Now he’s, now he’s using him to get chicks.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yep

AARON EHASZ: I love that suave second yip. [Referring to more Sokka flirting] Nice.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: So here you’ll hear the theme coming back, the love theme, yeah, I think. Perfect acting by Jack De Sena. [Mimicking Sokka] Good Times.

AARON EHASZ: [Referring to Sokka and Yue flying into the black snow] This is a nice transition.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yeah, the music really worked out well here. I remember, I think you pitched the idea of black snow, Aaron, and I was, Ithat was a cool visual idea to show the coming of the Fire Nation. It’s a nice way to show how it’s polluted, Momo gagging on it. Lauren MacMullan, the Director of this episode did this cool shot where the water turns black. Thought that was a nice… We liked to show that the Fire Nation’s assault on the world is… There’s a lot of different levels to it. They sort of represent an industrial revolution, so there’s these cultures that are very tied in with nature, some more than others, and the Fire Nation, because of their smelting skills and whatnot have gotten into this industrial revolution before anybody else so. It’s one thing that sort of fueled their ambition and their uh, conquering spirit. They needed more resources and wanted to build up their defenses and eventually just take over the world and… So having the snow polluted by their ships is kind of a neat way to show that their conquest affects even nature, and not just um, not just these societies. And so throughout the season, we’ve had like burned down forests, and other various imprints on nature from their conquest.

AARON EHASZ: Plus black snow is just weird.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: It is weird.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Weird and scary.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: I like the staging on the stairs. I thought it was interesting, with the characters at different heights.

[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:

PRINCESS YUE: No, Sokka, wait. I can't see you anymore. Not at all.]

AARON EHASZ: A fine time to end it Yue.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Good choice.

[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:

PRINCESS YUE: I wish we could just be friends, but I like you too much and it's too confusing to be around you.]

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: [Imitating Sokka] But we’re on our way to the town meeting.

[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:

SOKKA: You don't love him, do you? You don't even seem to like him.

PRINCESS YUE: But I do love my people.

SOKKA: You're not marrying them.]

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: So Yue has a very strong sense of duty, which is you know, a good character quality. Though she’s a very divisive character. Some people really like her, some people don’t really like her so much.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: We have a lot of those characters.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: That’s okay. The world’s like that. I like the treatment that Tom did on the voices in the mix here for this kind of hall reverb. So these are these premonitions on who will.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yes, who will leave the tribe by the end, either by leaving the world, or just by leaving the North Pole. Yeah, there’s a shot of Hahn, Yue’s fiance, who we will meet later in this episode.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: He’s based on Dean Kelly.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Oh right!

BRYAN KONIETZKO: One of our storyboard artists. I’m sure he’s not happy that we said that.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: He immediately cut his hair after.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: It’s true. I made him come down to the video acting reference and flip his hair around for the Hahn scenes.

AARON EHASZ: Who the writer of this episode, John O’Bryan, a very handsome man, himself, is very threatened by Dean in terms of uh…

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: His level of handsomeness.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: So here’s the theme, the uh theme that you first hear Uncle singing in the eighteenth chapter, and it comes back as the love theme.

AARON EHASZ: We really should put out Uncle Iroh’s greatest hits.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Totally. He should do his own album.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: I think he should, he should, yeah. That’s a good idea.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: See that shot right there, there’s a bit of an homage to the main title, where Aang’s back is to the camera and we pan up to the sun.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: You know the sun in the opening title is a photograph that I took.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Oh that’s right.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: While snowboarding in Whistler in Canada.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: You’re giving away all your secrets.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: I’m not afraid to use a photograph.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: So this is a cool symbolic strike against the Water Tribe right there.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: This is a cool shot. It’s kind of reminiscent of the comet that’s coming, that you see in episode seven and eight.

AARON EHASZ: I love the mechanics of that um…

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Trebuchet?

AARON EHASZ: Trebuchet, that’s right.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yes, you know there are two different things, there’s catapults, and then there’s trebuchets, which we’ve learned are more uh, I don’t know what the difference is, but…

AARON EHASZ: We had a long explanatory thing about the trebuchets in an episode that we cut, didn’t we?

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Well Zuko’s ship in 1.07 or 1.08 has a catapult, because he kind of has the old...

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Right.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Rickety hand-me-down, and then the bigger Fire Nation ships have the trebuchets. Yeah so it’s more of a counterbalance system.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: That’s right, counterbalance. That’s the word I was looking for.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Cool.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: This sequence was storyboarded by Ethan Spaulding.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yes.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Very well. Very cool action sequence.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: I like this shot right here [Makes air gust sound]. I love that. It’s great. We love just accentuating Aang’s acrobatic abilities, since he’s an airbender. He can sort of uh, lighten his connection to the earth and float. That was great animation. It really showed the weight of that hammer. Like that.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I think too, what we try to do on the show is like, even the big action sequences, um, have a kind of story point to them? Where, for this instance, um, you know Aang is taking out this… Wee needed a big moment for Aang to kind of like, be heroic and go out there and try to save the day, and he takes out this Fire Nation ship, and we see how hard it is to do that.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Even for Aang, who is...

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah, yeah, and he does it, and he succeeds, but then you see that…

AARON EHASZ: That’s one ship.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: That’s one out of hundreds of ships, and it’s like even he cannot clearly do all this.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: That’s a good point. On Avatar, because we, we wanted the bending to be really physical, which we’ve said in a lot of interviews, and I think this is a good example, that you know, there’s a limit to how much energy they can output. [Refering to a shot of a group of waterbenders freezing a Fire Nation ship up out of the water] We, we got to just comment, this shot right here, very reminiscent of episode 1.01, where you see the uh ship in the Southern Water Tribe that was frozen up, so you get the idea that back, back in the first battle, the Southern Water Tribe waterbenders had done a similar thing to stop the ships. They went down fighting. [Refering to a shot of Hahn wearing a captured Fire Nation uniform] So this is sort of a, kind of ripping on our old costume design I think? Of the, from the pilot, where the, the, I just kept putting spikes, every draft of the firebender’s outfits, there are just spikes everywhere. Became kind of impractical for certain Kung Fu moves. Yeah.

[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:

HAHN: How do we know we can trust this guy? Such bold talk for a new recruit.

CHIEF ARNOOK: Sokka is from our sister tribe, Hahn, he is a capable warrior and I value his input.]

BRYAN KONIETZKO: So this guy is uh, the Avatar version of a jock, just… Just a boneheaded dude. I like this armory. Thought it came out really cool. I think also Garagarza did this design. That’s cool, you see the wolf, um spirit animal above the door, sort of reminicent of the wolf makeup that the Southern Water Tribe adorns when they go into battle. You see Sokka in it in one, uh, episode 1.02.

AARON EHASZ: One other minor point about that last scene is that we were seeing Sokka kind of use the experience he’s gained, and we kind of see that he’s grown, and that he’s… Kind of how valuable he is to this effort, and that, you know.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yeah yeah, because he progresses in different ways than like Aang and Katara, who have… He doesn’t have the bending skills, but he’s got other leadership and other cool qualities. I think that’s important too, because again, we, even though some of our characters have supernatural abilities, we always try to show that they’re earned, and that they have to develop the skills, and a lot of trial and error, and hard work and practice. So Sokka’s a good way to show the um, mental capacities and… So yeah, anyways, back to what we were saying earlier, it’s great to see that Aang the Avatar, you know, supposed master of all the elements, is exhausted. There’s a limit to what a human being can do.

AARON EHASZ: [Referring to a shot of Aang’s landing back in the Northern Water Tribe] And dusk, this is dusk, right? That we’re seeing here, the dusk colors are really great. So many of the coloring…

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Great color correction by Kevin Kerwin. Um, a lot of the shots, the colors were really really disparate, and he pulled them all together really well. [Referring to a shot of Zuko preparing his kayak] This was another really hard shot to color correct. We tried to do, Hye-Jung Kim, the color supervisor and I tried to do this difficult lighting situation, where there was a cooler color coming from outside from the nighttime, and then this warmer color coming from the gas lamps inside of this bay. That was pretty complex and Kevin kind of wrapped it all together nicely. Color correction is one of my favorite processes in the show, that and mixing, just because we get to put the finishing polish on everyone’s hard work.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: [Referring to Zuko’s Blue Spirit Theme] This is a great musical theme too, that first appeared in episode-

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO and BRYAN KONIETZKO: Thirteen.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: The Blue Spirit episode, that we’ve used a bunch of times for Zuko. Zuko’s more emotional moments, I guess.

AARON EHASZ: I love that scene with Iroh and Zuko. I love him telling him to wear a, telling him to keep his hood up and stuff like that. So moving.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yeah, it’s a great father-son type of relationship. Jeremy Zuckerman, the composer for Avatar, um, performed that duduk. It’s uh, the, I believe an Armenian instrument, and supposed to be very difficult to play, and he just went out, bought one, and played that theme.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: He’s an incredible multi-instrumentalist. And he uh, I believe he convolved it with a brass instrument so it took on kind of a hybrid quality.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah, it’s just a great, great theme. I love it.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: [Referring to a shot of Hahn and Sokka brawling] More egos clashing. The oldest story in the world, over a girl.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah, I like Sokka’s messed up surfer hair. Oh, a good little… If you noticed, Hahn keeps… We decided Hahn’s character trait is that he can never remember anyone’s name, so he, he calls Sokka “Sohka”, and…

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Which a lot of people who work on the show call him “Sohka”. [referring to a shot of Zuko paddling his kayak close to the Northern Water Tribe wall] This is a great sequence, also boarded by Ethan Spaulding, where they… We knew early on that this B-plot for this episode would have very little dialogue, but would be really important. I just really wanted to see Zuko’s, his drive, and what he’s willing to, the crazy situations he’ll just dive head first into, and um, for his ambition.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Those were turtle-seals I believe?

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yeah.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: That we saw? As you’ve probably noticed, all of the animals on Avatar are-

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Most of them.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Are hybrids. Occasionally, the jokes usually come in the animals that are just normal animals, that are not hybrids at all. People think those are the weird ones.

[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:

PRINCESS YUE: The legends say the moon was the first waterbender. Our ancestors saw how it pushed and pulled the tides and learned how to do it themselves.

KATARA: I've always noticed my waterbending is stronger at night.

PRINCESS YUE: Our strength comes from the Spirit of the Moon, our life comes from the Spirit of the Ocean. They work together to keep balance.]

BRYAN KONIETZKO: This is a cool little backstory on the myth of waterbending. This season is the water season, so it’s kind of nice to… We had a lot of uh, a lot of discussion in the writing process about how we could make this little trilogy in the end focus around water.

[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:

AANG: Or, maybe they'll unleash a crazy amazing spirit attack on the Fire Nation!]

AARON EHASZ: [Snickers]

BRYAN KONIETZKO: It’s funny that that’s like, um taken as like a ridiculous, you know, ridiculous pitch by Aang, and that’s exactly what happens in the next episode. But it’s cool, because there’s, you know, stuff in here that we set up early on in like episode seven, when he first goes to the Spirit World that kind of pays off here, and I think that painting of the palace was uh, by Bryan Evans. Beautiful painting. And this is the Spirit Oasis. Another painting by Bryan Evans. It’s one of the background keys that ended up being used in the show production. I love the fish designs by Angela Mueller, really cool.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: So that’s the first time we see the koi fish, who play a very important role later on of course.

AARON EHASZ: Part of the idea here was that this, that this Spirit Oasis was actually part of the Spirit World spilling into the real world, at this junct- at this place.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: I love this scene. You’ll see Zuko’s, if you pay attention, his skin color shifts as he warms himself up. And that’s the breath of fire that Uncle advises him to use. Which is cool, because it’s like a real yoga thing, the breath of fire, and it’s cool to visualize it in Avatar, and actually make it a breath of fire where you see actual flames.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I like these shots a lot.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yeah, this is great underwater stuff. Again, kind of like we were talking about Sokka, seeing how he develops without bending, I think it’s great to show Zuko. You know he’s not the best firebender, and he doesn’t have all the resources in the world, since he’s banished, but it just shows how his drive can take him so far, and uh, he can make it into this city even though the Fire Nation, it takes them a day or two to bust through.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah, I just love the kind of tension the kind of underwater thing… This is my biggest nightmare.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Mine too.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Being trapped underwater, with frozen things above you, and you can’t get out.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: This reminded me of when I was a kid, and you’d put a canoe over you, so you had like air to breathe, but you were kind of trapped, and you were in this really claustrophobic space. [Referring to a shot of Zuko swimming up to the surface] I love how the, I love how you see the light coming down in that one shot. That’s more great color correction by Kevin.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: [Referring to a shot of Zuko reaching the surface to find it blocked by ice] This is yeah, my nightmare, right here.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Because he would not have firebending to get out. Yeah, we wanted to be pretty realistic that he’s just absolutely exhausted after this feat he just pulled off.

[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:

PRINCESS YUE: Why is he sitting like that?

KATARA: He's meditating – trying to cross over into the Spirit World. It takes all his concentration.

PRINCESS YUE: Is there any way we can help?

AANG: How about some quiet! Come on guys! I can hear every word you're saying!]

BRYAN KONIETZKO: This is a cool sequence. The sound design’s really great by Ben Wynn here. It’s great being close friends with Ben. We were roommates for four and a half years, and we were always working on electronic music and stuff, so it’s great because I know what he’s capable of in terms of really expressive abstract sound, so when we get to something unusual like that, it’s actually really easy to spot Ben, you know just do some crazy sounds.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: So this is great, because this is like the first time Zuko and Katara really fought, and it’s after Katara has now learned some skills, so Zuko’s a little surprised by this.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: We l… we just absolutely love showing character development and personality, and what they learn, their abilities, and it was great. We’ve heard that a lot of kids picked up on that. They like, they appreciate the fact that Aang has to earn these talents, he isn’t just granted them.

AARON EHASZ: Kids like magic Karate, Bryan.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: [Laughs and uses a silly voice] No they don’t.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: I also like Katara’s story here, where she’s all, she’ll like protect Aang at all costs…

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Definitely.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Which is a great story point.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: We definitely play up that motherly quality in her. This sequence was storyboarded by Dean Kelly, who I went to school with, actually Mike and I both went to school with. Another great color transition.

[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:

ZHAO: It’s daybreak at last.]

BRYAN KONIETZKO: So this is another idea we’d had pretty early on, where um, natural phenomena will enhance… they’ll either augment or diminish the bend… the practitioner's bending ability. So the Fire Nation is located on the equator, and closest to the sun, and so their powers are strongest uh, during the daytime, when, obviously when the sun’s out.

[Interjection of Dialogue from the show:

ZUKO: You rise with the moon. I rise with the sun.]

BRYAN KONIETZKO: So again, just trying to show, you know, it’s magic, it’s supernatural, but we try to make it as natural as possible, and as kind of organic [Referring to a cut from Fire Nation soldiers breaking through the Northern Water Tribe wall to Zhao’s eyes] I like that cut. It really shows the, I don’t know, maniacal warmonger that Zhao is.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: Yeah.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Great sound design there when Katara opens her eyes. Anytime we get to do backwards sounds, I’m always excited.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: That’s cool.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yeah. This is a great theme, uh, Jeremy Zuckerman used this prepared piano for that kind of metallic rattle.

MICHAEL DANTE DIMARTINO: And I love this last image of just like Zuko and Aang disappearing into the blizzard.

BRYAN KONIETZKO: Yeah. Again, just Zuko’s desperation. He has no plan, but he’s just fighting for his ambition.