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[Aaron Gerow]

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
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