Lauren Montgomery on Keeping Avatar Aang 2D and Making It Work for Newcomers

Avatar Aang director Lauren Montgomery is still doing press nearly three months after release. Speaking to CBR at SCAD AnimationFest, she said Paramount's main note was that people who had never seen the series should be able to enjoy the film. SCAD screened the movie with a conversation with the director on September 23.

In an October 5 interview with Cinema Femme, she described the film's look: hand-painted backgrounds projected onto 3D environment models, with Flying Bark's Kit Rigby helping to set the style. She said she asked the animators to keep character movement a little stiffer than Disney-style fluidity, and that an early script was dropped because it played too much like an episode of television.

At Comic-Con in July, she said the team briefly considered a Spider-Verse-style 3D approach before committing to 2D. She told Cinema Femme she hopes this isn't the characters' last trip to the big screen. No sequel has been announced.