Update: Flying Bark, the studio that worked on Avatar Aang, confirmed to io9 that the film was made using “traditional methods.”
“The precision of artistry and animation in every frame…should be celebrated. It is the result of incredible collaboration across every department and discipline, culminating in a breathtaking masterpiece led by an exceptional creative leadership team,” wrote CEO Barbara Stephen. “Flying Bark practices a traditionally influenced hand-drawn animation style, relying on industry software including Harmony, Maya, Houdini and Nuke. Our talented artists produced everything for Aang in the studio using traditional methods.”
Abrams Books has similarly confirmed the images from the SDCC panel “are not tied in any way” to the publisher and Zahed’s art book, or “to any of the other Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender movie tie-in titles published by [us].”
Original story: 2026 hasn’t been easy for fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender. What started off as a leak of Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, the first of three animated movies for the franchise, became a bigger web of messiness that’s doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon.
This weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con featured a panel for the Avatar franchise that included a trailer and release date for the upcoming Avatar: Seven Havens and a look into Avatar Aang‘s production. During the latter portion, the team showed off concept art of the main villain Tagah, with one section focused on his face shape. In a photo taken by an attendee since shared on social media, text in a section on “face shape exploration” begins with, “According to ChatGPT.” Fans online started questioning whether the technology was used in the making of the film, or if it at least played a hand in researching how to design some of its characters.
A swift backlash soon followed against Avatar Aang, but then things got complicated. Some folks online did some digging for further context and learned that not only was the material in question from a presentation slide about Avatar Aang‘s upcoming art book, the person who wrote it wasn’t involved with the film’s production. Ramin Zahed, who’s previously written art books for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and Dog Man, isn’t credited on the film’s production on IMDB, and art books are often outsourced to people uninvolved with a project’s development.
Kat Tsai, a visual development artist who worked on the film, wrote on Bluesky that there was “absolutely no AI whatsoever in the art / design process!” In a separate post, she said she had “no clue why it was on that slide or who put it there, and every member of the crew I worked with is 100% against AI. Every aspect of the animation is handcrafted by real artists.”
Tsai’s comments were further corroborated by Dale Drummond, a compositing supervisor from Paramount who “guaranteed” that AI “has not touched a single pixel of the film. [It] was not used at all in Visual Development. The art book was outsourced.”
On Instagram, production designer Jake Panian speculated that “very early on,” a character artist may have tried it for background research. To the best of his knowledge, that would’ve been the only incident in which this occurred, but like Drummond and Tsai, he emphasized “absolutely no artwork on this movie was AI-generated, [and] all the art was done by hand. As the AI movement gained momentum, we took a stance and saw ourselves as standing against it in the most opposite way possible. Everything in this movie is carefully and aggressively hand done by talented and amazing humans.”
At time of writing, Avatar Studios and Flying Bark have yet to issue a statement on these allegations. io9 has reached out to Abrams Books and the two studios for comment. (We’ll provide an update if we receive a response.) For now, Avatar fans are left conflicted as Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender plays in theaters and on Paramount+, while Avatar: Seven Havens will hit the platform on October 9.
Update: This story has been updated with additional comments from a production designer and compositing supervisor who both worked on the film, and a statement from Flying Bark CEO Barbara Stephen and Abrams Books.
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