Avatar

[Jasper Sharp]

I wrote a little on the film on my website at the end of last year, and check-listed both Miyazaki and Oshii in my piece, as well as some thoughts inspired by reading Thomas LaMarre's new book The Anime Machine. I was going to write a bit more on the film, but simply haven't had time yet this year.

Anyway, you can read my thoughts at http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/cinematism-realism-and-spectacle-part-1-avatar/


Jasper Sharp

Midnight Eye: The Latest and Best in Japanese Cinema
www.midnighteye.com

More details about me on http://jaspersharp.com/




> Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:38:04 +0900
> From: aaron.gerow at yale.edu
> To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
> Subject: Re: Avatar
> 
> Just a quick response:
> 
> When you look at it, the similarities with Miyazaki are there: the  
> image of the forest, the non-human world, of flying, etc. But I do  
> wonder if this film doesn't have a very different vision of nature.  
> Miyazaki's paean to natural forces is not unrelated to his insistence  
> on sticking to some analog animation techniques, but Cameron's film  
> falls into the contradiction that many cinematic celebrations of  
> nature do: they praise the premodern, pre-technological world using  
> the most advanced technology there is. Avatar, I think, tries to avoid  
> this, but only by radically re-defining nature in a way I doubt  
> Miyazaki would approve. Many can of course see that the narrative  
> situation of Avatar is essentially that of video games, especially  
> online RPG where you, immobile at your station, get to roam the world,  
> kill people, and get the girl via your avatar. Avatar plays off the  
> discontent with modern technological reality by offering the fantasy  
> of really abandoning one's body for the game world. But the trick here  
> is that the Avatar planet, with its database of souls and memories, of  
> creatures with Firewire plugs, of trees that allow one access to the  
> network, is essentially the Internet rendered into a Gaia-like deity.  
> In other words, I think Avatar tries to have its ideological cake and  
> eat it too by spouting a critique of industrial technological  
> capitalism (mining and machines) and praising a natural, premodern  
> society, while all the while defining that society as precisely the  
> new media technological capitalism that we have today. I very much  
> doubt Miyazaki, regardless of all his own ideological ambiguities,  
> would buy this.
> 
> That was my initial reaction upon seeing the film (albeit at a theater  
> in Japan with a bunch of technological glitches--quite appropriate, I  
> might add!).
> 
> Aaron Gerow
> Associate Professor
> Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
> Yale University
> 53 Wall Street, Room 316
> PO Box 208363
> New Haven, CT 06520-8363
> USA
> Phone: 1-203-432-7082
> Fax: 1-203-432-6764
> e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu
> site: www.aarongerow.com
> 
> 
> 
 		 	   		  
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