While showing off an early concept photo of the aged-up Team Avatar at a San Diego Comic-Con panel on Thursday afternoon, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender director Lauren Montgomery recalled one of the films’ earliest leaks in a rollout that’s been plagued by unfortunate leaks. The image in question was what Montgomery called the “Avengers shot,” with the characters posing together that leaked out of CinemaCon in 2024 before it was taken down.
“This was one of the very first funny stories about this image. We had a version of this image, exact same painting. The characters looked a little bit different,” Montgomery said. “Our production designer Jake [Panian] was never really happy with it. And then Paramount comes to us and says, ‘We want to go to CinemaCon.’ Jake is, like, ‘Absolutely not. It’s gonna leak.’ They’re like, ‘No, no, no, no. It won’t leak. Everything’s safe.’ Everything leaks. [Jake]’s like, ‘Well, if they’re gonna leak it, I’m gonna repaint the whole thing.’ And he did. And it looks beautiful, and it looks amazing, and we’ve used this image a lot of times. And of course, it leaked. Cell phone camera footage of it from a weird angle. And then it’s used as, like, official artwork in freakin’ interviews and posts everywhere. So, good time.”
Moving on from the anecdote, Montgomery walked through a slideshow of early character design concept art. She showed an Aang with a chinstrap-style beard, many iterations of Zuko’s hairstyle, multiple versions of Sokka (“The note was alsays don’t let ‘Sokka get TOO hot,'” Montgomery said), Toph in a “metalbending police get-up,” and a pregnant Katara. “We moved away from that for our own reasons but a lot of those versions influenced the final version of Katara we see in the film,” Montgomery said.
In mapping out how the team would then animate these rendered images for the feature film, Avatar co-creator Bryan Konietzko reflected on maintaining the importance of Avatar’s defining animation style in the same panel that was attended by his fellow Avatar creator Mike DiMartino and most of the core voice cast of the movie. “One of the first things that we talked about was what the medium was going to be. No one told us, but we just assumed: It’s a feature film. There’s incredible stuff, like Spider-Verse, Arcane… people are doing really stylized, beautiful things with 3D characters that are kind of pushed more towards to 3D. So we just assumed initially, ‘Oh, I guess that’s what we’ll do.’ And we started trying to figure out what that would look like.
“But then one day it just hit me,” Konietzko continued. “I was like, ‘What are we doing? This is Avatar. This is a love letter to Japanese anime. This needs to stay 2D. These characters need to be hand drawn.’
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