I have to repeat the same question as “whowasthebirdie.”

The forward by Shyamalan has already been read, if you press “surprise me” enough on Amazon, you can see it. It's just one short page of him talking about how Avatar is a presence in his house (and how the Gaang will attack you if you're a threat to his home…or something.) But the table of contents do not reference the movie any further. It's just his foreword, which may be a PR move on the part of Paramount, Nickelodeon, or their parent company, Viacom.

You can also read a part where Mike and Byran say that they solidified Aang's design by watching a young Chinese boy who was performing with a Shaolin acrobatics group.

There was a time when we thought that Sifu Kisu was in support of the movie after a PR statement, but everything afterward lets us know for certain that he's completely against it. I'll hold off on determining Mike and Bryan's support until we see more than something that was stuffed into their book.

If you don't understand the casting problem, then perhaps you haven't taken the time to really look into the problems Asians and other minorities have with representation in Hollywood.

Memoirs was a problem because they cast Chinese and Korean actors to play Japanese characters. We here in America tend to lump Asians into a sort of Pan-Asian group, but pay little attention to the fact that they're all very different groups, it leads to the whole “All Asians look alike” stereotype and shows wholesale disrespect to groups when we're not willing to make the same distinction that we might for French, British, Polish, Italian or what have you.

That said, the distaste over the casting is a bit different. It's not just that they cast actors of races that were different from the races and cultures that the characters were based on, but that they prioritized White actors for decidedly non-White characters, only departing from an all White cast when Jessie McCartney dropped out of the movie and being replaced by Dev Patel. Not only that, but the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, who's former Vice-President was a cultural consultant so the show could avoid Asian stereotypes both good and bad, and the East West Players have also voiced concerns since the casting was announced in December '08.

They, along with many fans, were (perhaps intentionally) ignored until two months after filming started, when it was too late to make any changes to the cast. The East West Players, by the way, are an organization partially founded by Mako, the VA for Iroh, and whom Dante Basco, Zuko's VA, is a member. Their entire foundation is for the purposes of getting Asian American actors more numerous and more meaningful roles in Hollywood. For Iroh's last acting role to have fallen to the same casting policy as “Kung Fu” did to Bruce Lee is a disservice to Mako's entire legacy and life's mission.

As for M. Night being aware of what made the series special:

He isn't using the Emmy-Award winning team that did the music, he isn't using Sifu Kisu, the martial arts consultant (Whom is against the casting and a big supporter of the protest) he even went and said that they ripped off fight scenes directly from movies and that he's going to be doing something unique (which is bull, since the fights were choreographed by Bryan and Kisu themselves, even going as far as having the storyboard artists and stateside animators take a few Martial Arts lessons to properly understand them. One such session even led to Serena Williams being cast as a guest voice) he isn't using Dr. S.L. Lee, the professor Mike and Bryan hired on for the authentic Chinese calligraphy, instead they're using a gibberish language that's made to look like Chinese without the apparent hassle of actually being real, almost as if they're actually making a conscious attempt to distance themselves from the show's cultural roots. He's even claiming to have somehow “corrected” the names based on his own assumptions of what's correct.

About the whitewashing: please note three things — [1] everyone is slamming the most multi-ethnic casting of a film in years only because it wasn't ethnic enough, ie,many of the leads were noticeably caucasian. [2] in order to slam it, they're piling on an indian-american director, some calling for him never to work in hollywood again — isn't this at least a little ironic? and finally [3] be realistic. full asian and inuit casting was never going to happen; no movie aiming at mass american appeal would be greenlighted for that, not right now. so it's fine to keep the raising the bar higher, but a little realism and cynical economic pragmatism to temper that idealism with generosity would be nice as well.
Because this column's tone….? Well, let's say that for an apology, it was pretty unapologetic and harsh. Rather than using it as a chance to re-view the film from the perspective that the series creators themselves are fans of the result because convinced of its fidelity and Shyamalan's demonstrated love of the original [obviously under many pressures and constraints], Starr instead doubles down on his hatred for the whole production. Disappointing.