Jennifer Hale voices Avatar Kyoshi and June.Mae Whitman voices Katara, Lu Ten and the Painted Lady.which leads to a scene where Azula banishes herself. Grey Delisle voices Azula, Kya, Ta Min, Michi, Actor!Katara as well as the unnamed maid in the penultimate episode.Jessie Flower voices Meng and Toph Beifong.Mark Hamill voices both the Big Bad Ozai and the Baboon Spirit.Actor Existence Limbo: After Mako's death, Iroh was relegated to only two silent appearances for the first half of season 3, before Greg Baldwin was introduced as his new voice.And for an outside example we have GanXingba's Avatar: The Abridged Series. The Abridged Series: "The Ember Island Players" is a sort of meta-example.The original characterization they had in mind for him was largely rolled into Bolin in Korra. Toph was originally envisioned as a boy but the writing team thought it'd be funny to make the show's resident Boisterous Bruiser a cute little girl.Others claim it's an older Aang (a theory largely debunked by older Aang's appearance in The Legend of Korra, who looks much different), and still others suggest it might be one of the unnamed monks from "The Storm." Some argue that the Airbender in the opening is Monk Gyatso.The earthbender was Toph's original design, which ended up inspiring later characters such as The Boulder, Sud (Roku's earthbending teacher), and the actor playing Toph in "The Ember Island Players.".Two of the benders shown in the opening titles are actual characters from the show: Master Pakku for water, and Azula for fire.On a side note, there is also the Greek word "Katharos," which means "pure" and "KatarassÅ," which means "to spill." Word of God stated Katara's name was inspired by the French word "Cataracte," which is synonymous with "Waterfall".Because of that, Katara's name is changed to Tamara in the Greek dub.One would suspect that the character was so named because a Katar is a type of Indian dagger, though. Of course, this is just a weird coincidence, but it's too odd to not mention. "Katara" means "curse" (both as in "hex" and "swear") in Greek.You can probably catch some differences between Katara and Pakku's waterbending styles since Southern and Northern are legitimate tai chi variants.Extra points for lightning redirection being explicitly based on waterbending techniques.Even better is that all of the above are unique martial arts styles compared to the respective culture's norms because they are all unique to a certain character or (in the case of lightning redirection and bloodbending) a very small group.Redirecting lightning is the only style taken from a sword technique, the obscure tai chi sword discipline, which is appropriate given that Iroh created the technique by watching waterbenders.Bloodbending, based on Qin Na Shou, which was also quite appropriately a grapple-based technique.Metalbending, based on Xing Yi Quan, which was quite appropriately developed in captivity as well.Toph's own Earthbending style, taught directly by the badger-moles, is actually based on chow gar (southern praying mantis style, to be exact).As mentioned on the main page, the bending styles themselves are based on actual Chinese martial arts (waterbending is tai chi, mainstream earthbending is hung gar, firebending is northern Shaolin kung fu, airbending is baguazhang).The entire concept is awfully similar to animal-based martial arts in Real Life, made famous by Hong Kong martial arts movies like Jackie Chan's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow or Tiger and Crane Styles (best known for being edited into Kung Pow! Enter the Fist).
Waterbenders are said to have learned from the moon in contrast, earthbenders learned from the badger-moles, airbenders learned from the sky bison, and firebenders learned from the dragons.
Waterbending is the only bending skill that was not learned from an animal.You could also technically count Aang as Ursa's grandfather and Azula's great-grandfather, as odd as it sounds.Zuko's great-grandfather is Avatar Roku - therefore, via reincarnation, Aang.