Tag Archives: James Cameron

Friday Fundas: Inspiration for Avatar

In the 2009 hollywood blockbuster Avatar the Na’vi’s the inhabitants of Pandora had a blue body, tall, with four fingers in each of their hand. In a 2007 interview with Time magazine, James Cameron  said “The name Avatar is an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods taking a flesh form. In this film what that means is that the human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human’s intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body.” His inspiration for this appearance of the Na’vi was from a dream his mother had. She had seen a blue skinned woman who was 12 feet tall which he considered to be apt for Na’vis.  He said ” I just like blue. It’s a good color … plus, there’s a connection to the Hindu deities, which I like conceptually.”

The floating “Hallelujah Mountains”, was an inspiration from the karst limestone formations in China. According to production designer Dylan Cole, the fictional floating rocks were inspired by Mount Huang (also known as Huangshan), Guilin, Zhangjiajie. James Cameron had noted the influence of the Chinese peaks on the design of the floating mountains.

Cameron said  “the Na’vi represent something that is our higher selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are” and that even though there are good humans within the film, the humans “represent what we know to be the parts of ourselves that are trashing our world and maybe condemning ourselves to a grim future”

Source: Wikipedia

The movie was a treat to watch and the one that had re-defined the movie experience for the audience…!