I mean the film has been compared to Ferngully, Dances with Wolves, The New World, Last of the Mohicans, Pocahontas’s real life story, Lawrence of Arabia and Dune.
But does anyone think there’s also elements of Ghibli’s films in it? i mean Cameron adores teh works of Hayao Miyazaki as he is a fan of animation and Ghibli. There’s elements of Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa, Castle in The Sky, Pom Poko and My Neighbor Totoro in this movie.
Even the storyline is a little similar to Mononoke.
I understand what you are saying. I really do. But I think Avatar drew inspiration from just about every movie ever made. But I still love it. 
Say Virginia do you think Avatar is a combo of Nausicaa, Dances with Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, Princess Mononoke, castle in The Sky, Dune, Star Wars Trilogy, Pocahontas/New World, Fifth Element, Heavy Metal, Jurassic Park, My Neighbor Totoro, Ferngully, Wizards, Starchaser Legend of Orin, Last Samurai, Man Named Horse, Broken Arrow (1950 James Stewart movie), etc.?
It was influenced by a lot of things, Ghibli films perhaps being among them. But people who dislike the film tend to describe it in the most unflattering way possible, hence “Dances with Smurfs”
I’d say so. I mean, it’s similar to almost any “peace among the races” movie, I think.
@Tribefan: That’s funny. 
I like Avatar, but that’s still funny.
Yeah, now that you say it, it ALSO has a lot of similarities with Princess Mononoke and maybe some other Ghibli film.
If only it had a script as solid as one of those movies… 
I thought the storyline, while familiar, was excellent from a traditional scriptwriting point of view. James Cameron’s movies are very well thought-out, and like Miyazaki, he tends to have strong female protagonists.
James is also good at world-building much like Miyazaki. You can see a lot of thought went into the characters, their personalities, the places they live in, the everyday activities they partake in, the clothes, the weapons, the wildlife, etc.
And Avatar, for me, achieved the same sense of wonder and awe as the best of Miyazaki. It’s right up there with ‘Spirited Away’ for evocative moments and indelible images for me.
Meh, considering the time he had for polishing the script, he did a terrible work.
It’s probably the least original piece of fantasy that I’ve seen in the last years (that if you forget the awful Eragon, a compelte rip-off)
I watched Eragon and it had good intentions (I liked the relationship between Eragon and Saphira for example) but its storyline is overly simplistic and offers nothing new to the genre. The characters are not really distinctive and most of the ‘character conflict’ feels forced (or what I call ‘manufactured tension’).
In Avatar, the characters are more developed and have their own personal motives that bring them into conflict. Jake is a blank slate, but he is cynical of humanity because of his brother’s death, the destruction of Earth, etc. Neytiri is equally cynical of the humans because of how they’ve been encroaching upon her homeland. Selfridge has financial motivations, he wants to be the hero at the next shareholders’ meeting. Grace has an interest in studying the Na’vi, and Jake may be her ticket into that world where she once failed before.
Only Quatrich is the least well-developed, because he basically hates Na’vi for the sake of it. Maybe he had a backstory, but it wasn’t explored thoroughly in the film.
The storyline, yes, is very conventional. But it works because you care about the characters (or at least, I did) that you want the heroes to succeed, the villains to lose, etc. Grace getting her wish fulfillment, the battle between ‘man and machine’ represented by Jake and Quatrich’s showdown, the mediation of love through technology- as Jake effectively falls in love with Neytiri while ‘dressed’ in his Na’vi avatar, the full circle narrative of “You’re a baby” and Jake being cradled in Neytiri’s arms at the end…
I (and a lot of Avatar) fans picked up on these themes. Some people might feel, yes, it’s cliched, it’s familiar, it’s been done before, but this is Cameron’s vision, and he has delivered something familiar, but it feels new at the same time.
…
Another thing I would like to compare Cameron with Miyazaki is the attention to detail. When you watch Ponyo, for example, there’s this wonderful moment where the mum carries a huge bag of groceries into the house, and she drops a piece of fruit on the ground. She struggles to keep her balance, bends over, picks the fruit up, and places it back into the bag.
A ‘normal’ animation studio would take the shortcut and just have the mum walk into the house with the grocery bag with no difficulty. But Miyazaki and his team went the ‘extra mile’ to give that sense of realism. How many times have we struggled to bring our worldly possessions back into our humble abode? Pixar also did something like this with Linguini stuffing his bike into his apartment in Ratatouille.
In Avatar, one of my favourite moments was when Selfridge was asking one of the jarheads to scroll through the holographic map. He asks the guy to keep going, and going, and then the jarhead overshoots and Selfridge cries out for him to stop, before chastising him (“Stop! Stop! Jesus…”). That makes it all the real for the audience, because we’ve encountered that sort of thing before when we scroll through Google Maps, or flip through our iTunes album covers, etc.
There’s another shot where the helicopters lift off for war and the wind turbulence knocks off the hat of a cheering soldier, who proceeds to curse the helicopter. That was another ‘realism moment’ for me.
As you can tell, I love it when there’s ‘devil in the details’. 
^ Sorry, I’m an Avatar non-believer
Whether or not I adored Avatar, your analyzations on the movie never cease to impress me, TDIT. I love those subtle details as well. Maybe that’s another reason I had trouble loving Tales From Earthsea - the movie is devoid of those lifelike little moments that I’m so used to in a Ghibli film. It felt like there was too much action and not enough silence or contemplative scenes for us to truly absorb the plotline and get into the story.
I’d like to point out that Pocahontas’s real life story has very little resemblence to Avatar or the Disney film Pocahontas. Historians have virtually debunked John Smith’s account of Pocahotnas ‘saving’ him, and they were no way romantically involved, nor did she create much peace between the settlers of natives. Just letting people know.