| My kids Sadie (five) and Wolf (twelve) had nothing to say in review of this Japanimation series because their minds were so freakin' blown. Their mouths hung open, their eyes wide and dry. It's the story of the Avatar Ang, who would, were he to mature and purify his chakras, command the four elements: Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. (I'm guessing he's nine.) For the last hundred years, there's been a secret war to control the underworld city. Ang and his friends want to invade the rogue fire nation during the solar eclipse and quell the rebellion.
This cartoon series uses fantastic historical flashbacks, acid-like lessons from ancient and dry-humored gurus, and superpowers erupting across the screen, all as allegories to deal in a very visual way with the issues of social hierarchy, corruption, bribery, conspiracy, brainwashing, transformation, forbidden romance, repressed memories, unattachment, duty, honor. In a word, control: from within and from without. That might not sound like a topic to interest the five-and-up set, but what else is compelling to children besides trying to navigate the mysteriously-ruled world they landed in, small and without armor, and which they soon must rule?
The Avatar storyline is so complex, so cool, so time-bending. What American cartoon comes close? Do you want your children's tiny brains to slowly expand and contract into adolescence and then adulthood without the truly kooky influence of Avatar? That would be  like only giving them McDonald's and never, ever sushi.
Two days after viewing this, Sadie said to me, with a rather insane leer, "I'm sorry, Mommy, about the bad, bad thing I did that I have no memory of."
Frightened, I said, "What are you talking about?"
She said, "I listened to the red dragon whispering in my ear. I should have listened to the blue dragon. And then I fell into a pit of ancestor bones. The transformation has begun."
This was really creepy. It's always unsettling to witness consciousness expanding, especially in our own offspring — but so heartening, after we get over the initial shock. America is a big country, but in some ways it's so small. Destiny, and whether it is being chosen or forced upon one, is another frequent theme in Avatar. Ang the Air Avatar's choices and consequences are not so different from our children's; they just play out more often in the sky. We can't control our children's destinies, but we can control how many potential destinies they are exposed to early on. The Buddhist philosophies illustrated by the lives of Ang and his friends and their teachers and enemies offer a radically different way to view our relationship to this life, this Earth, this era. I had to wait till I was seventeen and happened upon a collection of zen koans at the library before I ever knew there was a way of looking at things other than the one way. I had to wait till I was practically old and ossified before "the transformation had begun." — Lisa Carver
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