Yes mike we are in complete agreement. Mononoke came out a year before Cameron wrote Avatar so there’s no doubt that there’s some influence. They are both about human beings mining for precious metals in forest wilderness. Of course in both films nature gets very angry and rises up against the humans culminating in an epic battle.
Regardless Avatar is still a fantastic achievement in cinema.
Hey let’s continue this game:
Up in the Air = Intolerable Cruelty
i agree S. but he took it deep, both protagonists even went to the forest because of a “disability.” sully’s legs and the main character in mononoke’s demon on his arm.
More like Fern Gully.
Well, he was planning on making the manga Battle Angel Alita into a film at one time so he is probably up on his anime.
i was more thinking about new world than mononoke…
even same composer
same “message”
it would not surprise me if in avatar 2 sully takes his girlfriend to his world and she will be unhappy…
Avatar = Nausicca of the Valley of the Wind + Princess Mononoke
Anything I read about Avatar is pretty intensely negative in some kind of loving, tender light. We all agree that it’s contrived, borrows from every movie under the sun, does all kinds of things wrong, yet we accept it as some kind of marvel, some kind of way forward in filmmaking, even though no other filmmaker could realistically achieve the amount of support and money James Cameron required in order to make it “work.”
I’m sorry, I’m kind of putting my foot in this discussion, but what’s the deal? Why do people instinctively “like” this movie even when they constantly notate the flaws?
Avatar wishes it had a fraction of the beauty in Mononoke.
Mononoke is much better than Avatar. Avatar was not bad though but the story was a little flat. I still don’t believe the helicopter pilot would have helped them. In Avatar the lines between good and evil were much more plainly drawn, in Mononoke there was really no bad guy.
Cody Avatar was good because it looked beautiful and had good action scenes. It also had the most taste full 3d I have ever seen.
Avatar seems more like a futuristic Pocahontas to me.
I’d say Pocahontas wins, though, because it had a way better soundtrack.
But I might be full of shit since I’ve never seen Avatar.
I do believe the blue people were modeled on the American Indians so you are not as far off as you may think.
“Avatar wishes it had a fraction of the beauty in Mononoke”
- um, you mean a subfraction?
and the Mononoke score by Hisaishi was a REVELATION.
$400 spent making this?! (Avatar) Over a billion dollars and counting?
Doesn’t matter. Avatar wants to be a work of art, whereas Mononoke IS a work of art.
Mononoke took the archetypes and actually did something useful with them, made them work, made them real, made us care.
Avatar is a lusty, new-agey war film where there is no hope.
@D.
>was good
>because good action
wut
_
P.S. Mountains in the Sky…remind you of anything?
http://cheeserland.com/images/laputa13.jpg
“Avatar = Nausicca of the Valley of the Wind + Princess Mononoke”
I said the same thing to my brother after we watched it. The floating islands reminded me of Laputa too, as Jeffrey says. I didn’t think anyone else would notice!
thnx god there are other people thinking the same thing! avatar=mononoke… what a shame
by the way I loved the FxS.
gb
RE: D: I do believe the blue people were modeled on the American Indians so you are not as far off as you may think.
I think the same thing, do you remember the songs, so american inidans way…
btw it also reminded me of Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet, not just because the aliens were blue
Miyazaki ripped off Fantastic Planet. Cameron ripped off Miyazaki. Miyazaki needs to write screenplays instead of drawing himself into a corner; only then, can Cameron crib a better movie.
yeah, had the same feelings.
i dont think they were modeled after each other. mononoke was just about the forest against man, and it looked at both sides of the stories and showed you no one was evil. In avatar the entire movie was a reference to the trail of tears, and was more a message of humans have done evil things and will continue to do evil things as long as we keep taking things forgranted and killing whats around us. thats why the lines of good and evil were so finely drawn. it was all about the message. they were bound to be similar when there message is similar. but though they are similar they are not the same.
also i loved both movies pretty equally
“Miyazaki ripped off Fantastic Planet”
Absolutely not true. You can’t state something false just to prove something true (that Cameron picked Mononoke, among other films).
Fantastic Planet and Mononoke are very different in both content and vision.
Zeke M – Mononoke was exactly that (humans doing evil things, taking things for granted, killing what around us). Please clarify the difference. We’re talking about development versus nature, the inorganic versus the organic. We’re talking about a “civilised” man who tries to tame a wild girl, a forest “god” versus the new agey god of the Na’vi, a resolution befitting the natives (and nature). So many themes copied over, in bad form!
remember the song “always with me” from Spirited Away?
“The wonder of living, the wonder of dying
The wind, town, and flowers, we all dance one unity”
there are very few “bad” characters in miyazaki’s works.
Muska of laputa is one of them, Eboshi is not.
Miyazaki looks at good and evil differently.
it is true that Eywa who protects a place, commands mysterious creatures, and revenges after being attacked by human is very similar to シシ神 in Princess Mononoke. also the helicopters reminded me the war machines in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. nevertheless they are different sort of stories, different forms of art.
if anyone of you have read the manga version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, you will understand miyazaki’s logic and his perspective on the world.
Ah.. finally someone agrees! I only watched Avatar today and I was like, WTH! It was like watching a “hayao miyazaki rip-off”. Only if it was half as beautiful as what Miyazaki creates.
I was so disappointed with this film. It was totally a rip-off and to even think this movie has surpassed all box office records makes me really annoyed.
If only more people had seen Miyazaki’s films.. :(
Word to every one of these posts. It’s good to see some sensitive creative people on this site, I’m liking it more all the time. Thing is, the majority is not sensitive, it would seem, or more people would boycott the filthy food the farmers are forced to farm, and the shops have to sell, along with the advertising which makes us (who live in urban environments) perpetually unhappy, and the horrific music which blasts from radios, cars and portable devices. That’s without getting into politics and all the rest of it. It has been said many times before that we seem to be building a gilded path to our destruction, one which we are paradoxically conscious of, what remains unconscious it seems is the utter defiance against mitigating or redirecting our self-destruction.
Things seem to be advancing increasingly all the time (based on the exponential model) of course this is mirrored in our ‘entertainment’ – I watch closely the subliminal messages particularly in the thought experiment realm of science fiction throughout the 20th century and especially in these CG animated films of the 21st, and what collective anxieties the creators are unconsciously venting / or intentionally pre-programming the audience with (I can never decide which it is). Particularly emphasised is military exoskeletons like all the 80s and 90s anime, (the pinnacle so far of course being District 9) and new cyber technologies and computing including man-machine interfacing a-la Ghost in the Shell. Transhumanism, post-humanism, bioethics here we come. Vexille was incredible – where a whole race of people were bioengineered into cyborgs (of course by an antagonistic scientist). Appleseed Ex Machina with the portable com devices worn by all the (human) citizens which melts onto their heads and mind-controls them into zombies. Now we have Avatar’s elegant use of organically jacking in to other organisms just like a usb link. Really fascinating stuff.
I do agree with so many good points made here – of course is it really necessary to make such an effort to produce something original when you’re pretty sure what will work and what will be reacted to. Indeed we are removing ourselves from the environment for which we evolved at such a pace that many of us will have anxiety, even one which is ‘spiritual’ if you like, as it is to do with our psyche. What can counter this anxiety better than an almost more real than life excursion into a pre-prepared fantasy of a ‘natural’ world constructed with all the archetypes, plot devices and structure required to go through the necessary stages of quest, predestination, wonder, and eventually frustration and nightmare stages before the relief of the final stage of closure and completion. The horrible irony is that through this process we are further alienating ourselves from a natural world that the experience is fallaciously supplanting. This fantasy world is realer than our own however, since it is constructed by a massive committee of people drawing upon those most perfect fantasies of the medium which have gone before. It’s pure new-age nature porn in fact, further to which I found ‘Avatar’ to be unsettlingly voyeuristic in a way that for example ‘Surrogates’ was not. I think it was because it was such wish-fulfillment fantasy and was depending so much on, as mentioned, the films of Miyazaki and of Di$ney as well (the ones which they ripped off from Ghibli since Tarzan and Atlantis) and those Miyazaki films are known intimately to many of us. ‘Avatar’ is in fact indeed Nausicaa+Mononoke with a bit of Laputa – but then since 1986 everything more or less has been Laputa, from that superb Squaresoft game or 1993 ‘Seiken Densetsu II’ (Secret of Mana) til the new Pixar movie ‘Up’. Just like everything after Lord of the Rings was published was Lord of the Rings to some extent (including all those quest fantasies, the whole fantasy literature genre – and many video games and who knows what else). Of course Tolkien was influenced greatly by the literary giants of past ages and the legacies left behind for keen eyes and minds to draw from. Miyazaki also was greatly inspired as we know by (but not limited to) J. Swift, the Fleischer Bros., French animation like ‘Le roi et l’oiseau’, Kabbalistic mythology (the golem is mirrored in his ceramic robots) depictions of the babylonian tower and …the Welsh countryside.
Following on from the effects of Avatar I was troubled bythis topic which mentioned an article Audiences experience ‘Avatar’ blues. Very sad ;o( -thankfully those who have seen Mononoke Hime etc. which are far more powerful, are basically immune. I ought to post them as an antidote ^_~
I read one time somebody suggest that Miyazaki should be named a World Heritage Site. Makes sense to me. Now try to make that suggestion about Cameron without giggling.
That’s all I got to say.
LOL@DOWNBYLAW
Mike Volpe
Is it just me or was it EXACTLY the same just longer.