Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is a pretty dark, adult take on the Nickelodeon cartoon that preceded it, which makes sense as it ages up Aang and his friends into young adults who are looking at the world through a more grown-up lens. But it turns out the sequel movie could have gone even harder on some of its violence based on some of the earlier drafts of one of its most important fight scenes.
At the end of the film’s second act, Tagah (Dave Bautista), a long-dormant airbender who has won over Aang with promises of bringing back the practice of airbending to the modern day, betrays our heroes and starts by killing all of Aang’s friends. In the movie we got, the fight scene of Tagah facing Katara, Toph, Sokka, and Zuko is one of the coolest in the film, and though the crew does lose the fight, they all manage to shine through, and it brings home just how powerful a foe Aang will have to face later in the film. However, the actual killing of the quartet happens mostly off-screen or in flashes. At one point in development, though, Avatar Studios was considering something much more blunt and kind of horrifying.
Animator Tom Barkel has been posting some of his animatics from the film on Twitter, and though he has since deleted the one showing Tagah slaughtering the main cast, fans were able to save and share it on social media.
Unused Exploratory Animatic from "Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender" by Tom Barkel
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Odds are the team had to go with something less explicit to maintain the movie’s PG rating, and Barkel seems to have no hard feelings about it. The scene is so overt in its violence that I’m surprised it was even conceptualized this way at some point in development, but it’s a fascinating look into a timeline where Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender was at least a PG-13 movie that made fans watch horrific things happen to their faves. Later in the film, the gang is revived and rallies to defeat Tagah, saving the day and the Avatar fandom from collective trauma.
While this version of the scene isn’t in the final movie, it is a reminder that a lot of talented animators worked on a film that is stunning to look at and that has been thrown under the bus by both Paramount and fate at nearly every turn
