Fox Films’ Avatarmakes a blatant comment on humans’ exploitation of the environment, arguing against “fair use” and economic approaches to ecology that promote the over-consumption of resources, especially the mining of a profitable mineral, unobtainium. Humans have left their own dying Earth to rip the mineral from the core of another planet, Pandora, where its people the Na’vi, illustrate how to build effective interdependent relationships with nonhuman nature in a biotic community that sustains them all.
Avatar, on the other hand, seems to reflect the same focus on interdependence found in the 7 minute cartoon, Molly Moo Cow and the Butterflies. As in Molly Moo Cow, nonhuman nature must combat exploitation to maintain interdependent relationships, not between a cow and her butterflies, as in Moo Cow, but between the Na’vi people and the humans who invade their world to extract unobtainable beneath their home tree. Although 40% of the film is live-action, the other 60% relies on photo-realistic CGI using motion-capture technology, linking the film explicitly with animated shorts and features that came before it.
Like the first animated feature, Snow White, Avatar awes its audience with the effects produced by ground-breaking technologies. It is, according to Roger Ebert, “a technical breakthrough” that “like Star Wars … employs a new generation of special effects.” Multi-plane animation technology used in Snow White transformed the “ more than 1,500,000 individual pen-and-ink drawings and water-color paintings” (Boone) to produce “depth, a sense of perspective and distance hitherto seen only in `live action’ pictures, sprang into being for cartoons,” according to Andrew R. Boone’s 1938 Popular Sciencearticle. Boone describes the “novel picture-taking device” used to produce this effect, which looks like a printing press and “consists of four vertical steel posts, each carrying a rack along which as many as eight carriages may be shifted both horizontally and vertically. On each carriage rides a frame containing a sheet of celluloid, on which is painted part of the action or background.”
With the addition of Technicolor film stock, the images of Snow White were breath-taking, just as the world produced for Avatarinspires awe. Using motion-capture technology, James Cameron transferred live-action movements to CGI. He also created a new “picture-taking device” for the film to create better 3-D effects, “a filming rig that is more advanced than anything that has gone before,” Bobbie Johnson explains in a Guardian article. According to Rigg, “The setup consists of a number of stereoscopic cameras that each use a pair of lenses built to mimic human eyes.” These techniques create a spectacularly breath-taking world in which conflicts between ecological values are resolved.
Pandora, the world produced for Avatar, embraces interdependence and a biotic community. The Na’vi people of Pandora remain connected to plants and animals of their world. Their hair, for example, forms a bond with the horse-like creatures they ride and the banshees they fly. At night, plants light their way. Pods close up to form closed hammocks for sleeping. As Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) explains, they have a “deep connection … to the forest.” Dr. Augustine teaches them that each tree has 104 connections to each of the other trees, more connections than those in the human brain. To emphasize the interdependent nature of these connections, the Na’vi believe all the energy found in these connections is borrowed and must be returned.
Espousing fair use policies and economic approaches to ecology, human invaders disrupt these interdependent connections when they invade Pandora to extract unobtainium, a mineral that is most abundant beneath the Na’vi’s home tree. With help from Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former Marine now gone native as an avatar, and a natural world fighting for its life, the human invaders are defeated, leaving Pandora to the Na’vi and a few chosen avatar humans.
The film’s narrative, however, is derivative, “a weak patchwork of [Cameron’s] other films,” according Onion A.V. Club reviewer Scott Tobias, including Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Aliens 1986), and of films with similar references to Native Americans (see Dances with Wolves [1990]), rainforest annihilation (see Ferngully [1992] and The Emerald Forest [1985]), and battles over resources (see Tank Girl [1995], Total Recall [1990], Pale Rider [1985], and countless anti-mining and oil drilling films). For Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.Com, “for a movie that stresses how important it is for us to stay connected with nature, to keep our ponytails plugged into the life force, Avatar is peculiarly bloodless.” Although technology does overshadow the blatant environmental message on display, however, its Dances With Wolves-like pull toward interdependence attests to the continuing influence of environmental history, especially a biotic community manifested in Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and organismic approaches to ecology.
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