“Avatar: The Last Airbender” is a franchise beloved globally. I first learned about it when I was in high school from one of my best friends, who grew up watching the show. Many people around my age did, and it’s become a franchise that’s nostalgia ridden for all who remember it fondly. Unlike other nostalgic properties though, “Avatar” holds up through the test of time, with it’s distinct 2-D animation style, beloved character, and unforgettable storylines.

Now, in 2026, Avatar is back, but this time it’s as a feature film. “Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender” follows Aang, the world’s last Airbender, as he learns about an ancient power that could save his kind from extinction. He sets out on a journey to find this power, before it falls into the wrong hands.

Returning to the franchise after working on the original series and it’s spin-off show “The Legend of Korra”, Lauren Montgomery is right at home as the director of this film. With years of experience in series animation, this is Montgomery’s first feature length film. Cinema Femme sat down in Montgomery to talk about her film directorial debut, as well as all things animation and “Avatar”

You have a long history with animated work. How did you first enter that field? What has your journey been like?

I’ve loved animation since I was a kid. I was very much into all of the Disney movies, I loved cartoons, so it was just something I really loved. Once I figured out that you could actually do it as a job there was really no going back.

My first job in the industry was in storyboards on the 2002 version of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe”, and I got that job through my teacher. I went to Loyola Marymount University, and I had a teacher who worked in the industry. He was a professional and he taught us how to storyboard for the industry. I think during my time in college I realized I really have a love for storyboarding, even more so then animating. Originally my goal was to be an animator, and I very quickly realized that’s very difficult, and I’m not good at drawing things on model or keeping my volumes consistent across many drawings. But storyboarding gave me everything that I loved about animation but with less hassle.

I worked as a storyboard artist and kind of worked my way up. I became an episodic director, and continued up the ladder until I did some show running. I did end up working on the “Avatar: The Last Airbender” series as a storyboard artist early in my career, and then came back to the sequel series “The Legend of Korra” as a supervising producer. Really what that means is that myself and Joaquim Dos Santos and Ki Hyun Ryu, we were all kind of overpaid revisionists. We were in charge of making sure all of the storyboards looked as good as they could before they ultimately became the episodes.

When this movie kind of came along the guys, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, called me up and asked if I would be interested. We talked about it a bit and there was some maneuvering I had to do since I was working at another studio at the time, but it ended up being the right fit, so I came over and this was really my first time directing a feature.

Like you mentioned, I know you have deep connections to the “Avatar” world. What has it been like for you to return to this franchise?

There’s a lot of familiarity, but also a lot of first times. Knowing the world and the franchise and the characters, that was all great and really beneficial that we had so many people on our crew that had experience with these characters and we could keep the tone and sensibility the same. So it felt like we were continuing that story and meeting these characters again.

A lot of the first-time experiences had to do with the feature process. There is a massive difference between telling a story for a season of twenty episodes, versus one singular 85 minute adventure. In a series you can kind of go off on side journeys and have cute, little anecdotal moments, and in this movie every minute, every frame, every second, has to count. And it all has to go towards this one central story, you can’t take an aside and be like “Hey, what is Zuko doing over here?” unless whatever he is doing is very meaningful to Aang’s story. That was our biggest learning curve. We had to double down on the Aang story and not spend any time on anything that isn’t vital to that.

I feel that we don’t often get to hear from directors that create animated work. We more frequently hear from live-action directors. What is the process like directing an animated work, for those who are unfamiliar?

We always start with a script. That script can be in great shape, or not so great shape. Either way, we take it and start with it and we move into our storyboards. A lot of things are worked out in the baords. My co-director, Steven Ahn, was also the head of story. He did a crazy amount of work on this movie, there’s reason why he’s co-director. So much of what he did was vital to the film, to the point where he was crafting scenes just in his boards, things that were not in the script, that he was just putting out there.

Our editor comes and she puts that all into animatic form. We watch it down and discuss, like if things are feeling slow, or if things aren’t lining up, or if we aren’t understanding characters. Then you go back, and we identify fixes that need to be made and start fixing them. Those get launched to board artists and it goes back into edit. At a certain point, you get it to a place where we want to put it in front of an audience, whether it be public or internal leadership in the studio, or a crew. You’re always trying to get input. Put it in front of the eyes of people that haven’t seen it as much as you have. I’m the director, I’m watch the scene a million times, at some point I’m losing objectivity. So you always need to get fresh eyes on it.

We had moments where we threw the entire script out. There was a moment at which we realized the story we were pursuing was a story that was more appropriate for a series, and wasn’t appropriate for film, for one, 85 minute adventure. We needed a story that was more emotionally poignant for Aang. The arc of the story was an Avatar problem, but it wasn’t an Aang problem. Aang’s the Avatar, he should solve it, but he didn’t need to. We really needed to find that story that pressed very hard on Aang emotionally. So we started from ground zero again.

It’s a crazy process, it really is. And you have to have a team of people that you trust. It was a departure for me from series. In a series you’re constantly checking in with your artists, with your episodic directors. In this I really had to trust my team. I had a production designer that was checking in with the artists, and then he would come to me, he was the go between. I’ve never been less hands-on with the artists, but he had it on lock. He knows how to do his job and was very good at it. I could trust him to take my notes. Same with Steve Ahn and him doing head of story, I could give him the vague note and he would get it. He would take that, go back to his board artists, and give them more specifics. It really took a lot of nitty gritty work off of my plate so I could focus on the larger picture. All of my leadership folks really targeted and attacked the tasks. It was crazy but rewarding.

The visuals of this movie are incredible. I would love to know more about the approach you took to preserve the hand made style of the original series, while also bringing it to the cinematic format. 

The guys wanted to continue the 2-D tradition from the series, and I whole-heartedly support that. I’m a big lover of 2-D. We knew to do that…well, it’s a bit of a lost art. There are studios that still do it, but not a lot of them. Very few, if any of them, actually work in the feature space. We partnered with studios that were from the TV pipeline but had the ability and talent to scale up for the feature with us. We used Flying Bark in Sydney, and also Studio Mir in Soel, they worked on “The Legend of Korra”. Studio Ppuri, they were new to us, but they did an amazing job.

They all did an incredible job of making the characters feel leveled up and elevated. The animation is fluid, but it isn’t so fluid it felt like a Disney movie, which is a thing we had to work on a little bit upfront. We had these amazing animators at Flying Bark, Tom Barkel was helping us do these animation tests, and his earlier approaches were a little more Disney, where things were super flowy. We gave him the note of “More starch in the fabric,” and he got it. From then on it was great, and they passed that on to their animators so everyone could be in the same boat.

I can’t even begin to explain how the backgrounds come to be. There’s so much that goes into that that the art team could explain, but it’s a lot. The paintings are so beautiful and so elaborate, Jake Panian, our production designer, and Aaron Loftis, our art director, they did a ton of painting. They worked with Kit Rigby at Flying Bark to set the style, getting these beautiful, well-lit, voluminous backgrounds. Then they worked with an asset team to kind of model out the environment. They projected the paintings onto the models, sometimes they paint the models themselves. They used a different approach for every shot. Whatever the shot needed and whatever approach helped us get there the best, we would use. It was always a different pathway, there wasn’t one way a shot was done. It was a little bit crazy, but it ended up making very beautiful results.

You’re obviously working in a franchise that is very important to a lot of people, but you’re not a stranger to doing so. How do you handle those expectations? Does that pressure influence your process at all?

Yes and no. Definitely there are expectations, and we know there are going to be expectations, but we can’t allow ourselves to ever get paralysis or handcuffed by that. Ultimately if a hard decision has to be made, it gets made. It’s always made with the final story in mind.

I knew we were going to try to make something good. I knew having worked in this before, I wasn’t coming into this with any notions of “Well this is my Avatar, screw the old Avatar.” No, we want to make the thing that we love. Not only did I work on it, but I’m also a fan of it. I had a fan experience with these characters as well. I just had faith that as long as we were making something that was really good and true to these characters, that the fans would love it and they’d understand that not everything was going to make it into this movie. There were larger things at play, like time constraints and the story we have to focus on. But the hope was always that this is a franchise, this isn’t the beginning or the end of it. Who knows where we can go from here, and hopefully this isn’t the last time these characters get to grace the big screen.

Speaking of the big screen, what did it mean to you to get this film shown in theatres?

It meant a lot. Everyone who was working on this film, for the four years we were working on it, we were working to bring it to the big screen. We were told from the start to keep that in mind. It was part of our entire process of making this movie. There were certain notes Paramount had, like “If this goes to theatres, you need to accomplish this” and one of those things was we needed to make a movie that wasn’t purely for fans, it had to invite new viewers. It had to be something that you could watch and enjoy without having to know all 60 plus episodes of the original series. So we put a lot of hard work into that.

We also put a lot of hard work into the visuals, and this epic scale and scope, and these wide panoramic shots. These things that we couldn’t always do in a series where a screen is smaller, or you don’t have enough time to dedicate to individual pieces of artwork.

So, to have all of that go away and be on a small screen was really heartbreaking for us. When we got the limited theatrical release, it was meaningful to a lot of us, a lot of the crew who worked on it. At least all of the ones located in LA, we all got to go and see it in a theatre. We all would have loved for it to be a larger release, and just to get people experiencing it how we intended, but we’ll take what we can get, and we’re thankful for it.

My publication Cinema Femme focuses on uplifting female and gender expansive creatives. How has being a female creative affected your career journey at all?

I’m sure it has affected my journey, but I don’t always recognize it. I always say “If anyone was sexist to me, they didn’t do it to my face.” But, I have always wanted to tell more stories about female characters, and that’s always been a little bit of a struggle to get people, studios, to recognize female characters are worthy of being able to carry a show and have that be marketable and profitable in their eyes. That has been frustrating for me. I was trying to do that at a studio, even before I ended up coming over to this project, and was experiencing a lot of frustration in how they were expecting this female character to be depicted. I ultimately left that to make another movie about a man! But at least here I had more control over how things were being shown.

In more recent years, like after the #MeToo movement as people really cried out for more representation, and it’s been recognized more by studios, I have noticed people wanting more of my opinion and input. Before it was just kind of like they’d do their job and not necessarily care tremendously about whether or not a female character was being well represented. It was just like “There she is and her personality is that she punches people,” and that’s not a personality.

You take it one day at a time. The great thing is, when I came into this industry it was very much a boy’s club. It has shifted pretty dramatically, and I think the vast majority of people coming into animation now are women, and that’s been really lovely to see. More women embracing this space and being seen in the space, and valued in the space. It’s a good direction to be headed in.

“Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender” is now streaming on Paramount +.