oh dear- Ebert gave it half a star.

Wow, that was brutal. And I'm mildly surprised that apparently he's seen the show and knows it reasonably well--he doesn't mention the racebending, but he does hammer on the gorgeous look of the animation and the influence of Miyazaki and just how thoroughly the film's visuals have failed to draw anything worthwhile from all that juicy lovely precedent.

He does mention the racebending, JZ. There's a whole paragraph on it:

His first inexplicable mistake was to change the races of the leading characters

I've read a couple of reviews saying Dev Patel is the best thing in the movie, but not enough to make it worth seeing. And that the after-the-fact 3-D was worse than Clash of the Titans.

ETA - Not Ebert on Dev Patel, though.

Does anyone know the backstory of how the movie rights were sold? I'm surprised that the creators of such a visually stunning tv series would have sat idly by for so much fail.

The movie's production company is Nickelodeon.

Oh, der. How did I miss that? I must have gotten stuck on the rant about the clunky faux-medieval dialogue (how is that even possible, given the source material?), or possibly the rant about the ugly muddy visuals.

I don't, but I suspect Nickolodeon owned them, and the creators had no agency in the deal.

If you watch the extras on the DVDs, it's clear how much thought the creators put into the look of basically each scene. The world map is beautiful, and the element symbols were perfect.

So for the movie, they made it a post-Apocalyptic Earth? And changed everything about the visuals.

Hopefully someone will make the animated movie.

they made it a post-Apocalyptic Earth?

This makes me laugh, because...they aren't Asian because it's not set on Earth, see?

The movie's production company is Nickelodeon.

Okay. So they probably had no say.

Hopefully someone will make the animated movie.

I hope so too!

The AV Club gave it an F: [link]