What Movie Is 'Avatar' Really Based On? [review]

The following contains plot spoilers for Avatar and for various movies to which it will be compared.  If I mention a movie here, chances are the plot will be discussed.  None are new movies.  Proceed at your risk.

Avatar has been said to be based on so many movies that one wonders whether it is actually based on any one particular story, and instead belongs to a family of related stories.  Avatar is an imaginative recombination of existing themes and story elements, and a visually interesting realization of its story, but I do think it owes more to some movies than others.

So much so, in fact, that I think that certain movies had a noticeable impact on the minds of the story's developer(s).

Click on the picture to enlarge.

I started thinking about this when I first heard Avatar characterized as "Dances With Wolves on another planet."  The more I thought of this idea, the more apparent it was to me that it had much more close parallels with another film.  As I finally started to assemble my thoughts on the matter, I came across the meme above.   If you look at the picture, you can see some apparent similarities between Avatar and some other films.  Some are more superficial than others. 


The runner-up for most similar is Fern Gully.  I think that this one actually had a more than superficial influence on Avatar themewise, plotwise, and stylistically.  However, most of its influence on the plot is indirect, through its inspirational influences on another activism flick.

Back in the Obvious Social Activism era of Disney animation, Pocahontas may have been influenced  a little by Dances With Wolves, but owed more to Fern Gully with respect to plot and theme.  The lead man is part of a team of intruders, and will get a brief glimpse into another world, long enough to make a difference.  It is also closer to Fern Gully in its preachy sense of environmentalism.  Anti-capitalism is a more implicit theme in Fern Gully (embodied indirectly in the inherent evil of oil/energy consumption).

These anti-capitalist notions are expanded on in Pocahontas, as venture capitalists immediately destroy the spirit-inhabited environment in their greedy conquest for gold (the English version of conquistadors).  Because he is a stupid Westerner cut off from Mother Earth, John Smith's first impulse is to fire a bullet at Pocahontas... that is, until he notices just how smokin' hot she is.  Some violent capitalist impulses are so strong they can only be overcome with a tight, revealing buckskin (as also in Avatar?).  The song that shows the most creative inspiration in the whole movie, "Colors of the Wind," is a lovely, poetic sermon.  Pocahontas is a more well-rounded progressive movie in that it combines environmentalism with particularly progressive conceptions of anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism and pacifism.

Avatar is also a movie that wraps up its environmentalism with progressive conceptions of anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism and pacifism.  Perhaps the most evil G.I. Joe-type character ever leads the charge, and the gold of Pocahontas is exchanged for an even more precious mineral: the ludicrously dubbed unobtanium.  Unobtanium will prove very difficult to obtain indeed.  Unobtanium is desperately needed for some ill-defined military objective.  Despite the fact that the rain forest (as well as the unobtanium it just happens to be resting on) holds the key to bioengineered artificial intelligence, unobtanium is the only economic interest of the evil corporation's visionary leader.  There is nothing more blind to competitive edge than a competitive corporation, apparently. 

For some unknown reason, people with the motive, the desperation, and the authority to forcibly take the unobtanium have invested what must be billions in a bioengineering marvel simply to understand the Na'vi well enough to woo out of their habitat.  This sort of trepidation would only happen if this operation were that of a government beholden democratically to citizens with compunctions.  Which is apparently not the case in this movie.  Which is why the Na'vi never fear that the attack is merely the first wave of  intruders.  It's all the corporation's fault.  Because corporations are so much more evil and soulless than governments.  *snicker*  But the two-dimensional stand-in for "the military-industrial complex" is what it is. 

Okay, does it seem like more than a mere coincidence that Jern Sully--I mean, Jake Sully--communicates with a tree that is the source of the tribe's wisdom, as John Smith does in Pocahontas?!  Avatar is certainly a more sci-fi realization of the story concept, furnishing the fundamental animism of Pocahontas and Fern Gully with a sense of scientific plausibility--and ironically making Pandora a fundamentally different situation than any on Earth.  But maybe the point of the movie is less about protecting environments that it is about promoting a sort of progressive dichotomy, with anticapitalist treehugging on one side and bloodthirsty greed on the other.

If you look again at the picture meme (comparing 5 movies), I think the 'Hero's Hippie Moment' is the most telling.  The entry for Avatar really should be "Chemically bonds with tree," and then the crucial link with Pocahontas and Fern Gully becomes much more obvious.  The sci-fi novel The Word For World Is Forest, for example, is a colonization story but also a we-need-the-lumber story like Fern Gully and The Lorax.  Avatar, by contrast, is more of a tear-up-the-place-for-treasure story, like Pocahontas. The resources of the environment are just in the way of getting the treasure.  And you may notice that they gave (perhaps unconciously) Jern Sully--I mean Jake Sully--the same initials as John Smith.

And that legend-based scene where Pocahontas throws herself in front of John Smith to keep her tribe from killing him?  That is also in Avatar!  Both movies feature a central strong heroine, who, as a leader of her people, is expected to marry soon.  Neytiri and Pocahontas both have a warrior suitor who is jealous of J.S., tries to kill J.S., and dies at the hands of the evil colonialists before the end of the movie.  Both movies end with a ship transporting some of the intruders back to where they came from.  In the end, J.S. learns to paint with all the colors of the forest, and becomes willing to risk his life to save the tribe.  It is not so much Dances With Wolves on another planet, but Pocahontas on another planet.