Simple logic said:
What does this all have to do with the argument at hand dear forum crawlers? Avatar The last air bender may not have been produced in japan, nor was it made by some Japanese guys, BUT it did hold values and ideals of that culture. Same with Samurai Jack.
Er, not really. They are vaguely inspired by asian culture, but it's comparable to how anime itself was inspired by Disney, how Lord of the Rings was inspired by scandinavian mythology, or like the video said, how rock was inspired by blues. Based on, but distincly different.
When someone creates a work of art, that has decades of personal socialization, and centuries of cultural tradition, behind it. You can't just take a look at the way art is produced on the other side of the globe, decide to really like it, and claim to be a prime example of continuing it. You can IMITATE it, and there is nothing wrong with that, but that's how new genres form: by partially attempting to imitate another, but also adding your own conscious and subconscious cultural heritage to it.
In terms of visual design, just look at Avatar's cast: They all have uniquely shaped bodies, slightly different skin tones even if they are in the same ethnicity, detailed facial expressions and lip synching, shading effects. In anime, even a praticularly high budget one would work with changing around the same basic tempelate figure with diffferent hair and eye styles (each signifying established tropes), and putting a lot more efort into the background art, and showing off aesthetic choices, than into pretending that their drawn puppets truly exist behind a fourth wall. This is the result of a deep philosophical difference in art, that can be observed in the difference between classical western and Japanese paintings, but even in tanka and haiku, vs. western poetry, bunraku, noh, and kabuki, vs western theatre, and in Japanese vs. western gardening.
The same goes for narratives. Japanese media is driven forward by thousand-year-old assumptions about the concepts of duty, romance, authority, sexuality, beauty, family, evil, religion, art, and so on, that we might try to vaguely understand, but will never identify with it as strongly as a person socialized in Japan will never fully identify with western attitudes after watching a few Hollywood movies.