James Cameron's "Avatar" (grading and discussion)

[AnyStar]

i expect that visually the Warcraft film will be much better, at least on the characters and their animation. environments might be a different story however.

the Na'vi came off WAY too cartoonish, the game engine itself of warcraft is already better than what avatar had as end-product.

 

[Hyperspace05]

the Na'vi came off WAY too cartoonish, the game engine itself of warcraft is already better than what avatar had as end-product.

Eh... OK... I'm sorry, that just does not parse at all. Did you see a pirated version at youtube lowres?

 

[Hyperspace05]

One thing I have forgotten to mention... The job they did on Sam Worthingtons thin legs in the film was amazing. I have no idea how they accomplished it, but I assume it had to be CG'd legs in every scene where they show them.

 

[AnyStar]

the Na'vi came off WAY too cartoonish, the game engine itself of warcraft is already better than what avatar had as end-product.

Eh... OK... I'm sorry, that just does not parse at all. Did you see a pirated version at youtube lowres?

nope, imax 3d... and if you can say they looked realistic, you need to go see it again.

ive got nothing against the movie, i just wish the character modeling had been as good as the environment work.

 

[melancholymecha]

you know whats funny, I thought the Navi looked more realistic than the creatures, which is odd when you consider that its supposedly harder to make humanoid characters look more realistic than non-humanoid ones, due to the UV effect. The creatures were cool but sometimes they looked too much like shiny plastic toys.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

The Na'vi looked just fine to me, and in any case, claiming a PC game has more realistic-looking characters is nothing but an absurd exaggeration.

 

[Gryffindorian]

I thought the Na'Vi version of Jake Sully was cuter than his human counterpart, and it's not like I'm into furries or anything. (Technically the Na'Vi aren't furries, but close).

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I thought the Na'Vi version of Jake Sully was cuter than his human counterpart, and it's not like I'm into furries or anything. (Technically the Na'Vi aren't furries, but close).

Technically, they aren't even close to being furries. They're humanoid aliens.

Even if we just accepted them as anthropomorphic animals, they wouldn't be furries. Furries are the fans of such things, not the things themselves.

 

[Thespeckledkiwi]

A further thought: This film really has set the bar by which Sam Raimi's Warcraft will be judged.

I've seen more than a few comparisons to Warcraft (invariably disparaging - but hey, I like Warcraft!); but seriously, that film needs to get in on this new technology. I can't see the Tauren being done any other way and not seeming laughable, and this probably would be a better route to take the Orcs than prosthetics.

Besides, I hear Teldrassil is going to be in that movie, and if you want your giant hometree to look good, anyway...

This was the first thing I noticed, as I used to be a rabid World of Warcraft player. It really felt like Azeroth and Outland come to life, like Nagrand, Teldrassil, and any number of Jungle zones. Its not a knock as I thought it was really cool to see the Nagrand-esque floating chunks of land. For a while i thought the Na'vi were night elf ripoffs, but after giving it some thought I think they were just sort of cliche'd "mystical tribal" types using the same tropes as night elves.

I thought at first I had gotten into a sneak peek of World of Warcraft. Heh
Hopefully WoW will be a better story.

 

[Lt. Trull]

when he say's furries... i think H. Bean Pipers Little fuzzies...
which wouldn't be a bad movie itself...
it'd have the cute factor down pat at the beginning...

 

[Jax]

Avatar keeps on treking after a really good opening weekend...

Monday - $16.385 million

Tuesday - $16.086 million

Domestic - $109,497,762
Foreign -$191,811,230
Worldwide - $301,308,992

 

[S. Gomez]

I wrote a review and posted it to my blog, which you can see here. I have a feeling a lot of you aren't going to like it, though.

I don't want to vote yet, because I'm somewhere between "Average" and "Above Average".

 

[Gepard]

Even if we just accepted them as anthropomorphic animals, they wouldn't be furries. Furries are the fans of such things, not the things themselves.

Objection, your honor!

Way back in the mysterious early days of the furry fandom, the term "furry" did indeed apply to the characters themselves, coming to replace the earlier term "funny animal." It was later gradually applied to the fans via association, and is still used to refer to the anthro characters; sometimes, the people involved call themselves "furry fans" to accentuate the difference.

Carry on your discussion of Dances With Night Elves.

 

[Kegg]

I wrote a review and posted it to my blog, which you can see here.

I don't want to vote yet, because I'm somewhere between "Average" and "Above Average".

I went for average.

Just curious:

but rather a movie (as I like to put it) made by hand.

What do you mean by that?

But what scared me even more was his excitement at the prospect of a major digital human character that was indistinguishable from the actors surrounding it. Now that is truly horrifying.

Are you kidding?

That's exactly why I love this technology. We can have Napoleon Bonaparte or Julius Caesar in a movie, based on the likeness that exist. We can have JFK. Richard Nixon. Adolf Hitler. Jesse Owens. We can design human faces based on how we want them to look; simulacra can be done wholesale if I may slip in some Dickisms for no reason.

If this pans out, we can do anything. At last. Cinema which is literally limited only by the imagination. That's what SFX has been striving for since George Melies, no? Pure, boundless creativity. I am first and foremost all about images because I am a very shallow person; I crave stimulation and exotic vistas and strange creatures.

Has anyone mentioned Fantastic Planet in this thread yet? Blue-skinned aliens who are way bigger than humans (and have a conflict with them), really bizarre alien world, trippy imagery? Let me be the first or anyway one of them. There have been imdb.com rumours that a remake is in the works, which always sounded stupid. You could only do that wonderful, twisted thing as an animated movie.

Now, though, perhaps not. Maybe it could be done 'for real', in live action. Maybe John Carter of Mars will be done and look real.

Just Imagine! And I don't mean the 1930s sci-fi musical either.

This quite simply is something I've wanted to see since as long as I can remember. I've been patiently waiting for its fruition since Jar-Jar... and we're still not there yet. We won't be there until you can put a CGI human alongside some real humans, have him star in a movie, and be unable to tell he's a fake.

The only thing real about a movie is the emotional impact it can have on the viewer, and that’s only going to be achieved with a great story. So why do they try so hard to achieve it with technology?

This is obvious. It's a dividing line, you either enjoy fantasy or you do not. If you're uninterested in film making the unreal real, then I really don't understand why you'd like sci-fi or fantasy at all. What's the point in having bugs in District 9 elicit sympathy when real actors can do it? And why the makeup? Let's not tell stories of whimsy and bizarre happenings, let's just focus on emotional resonance.

You know, not all movies need emotional resonance even to be great. 2001 leaves me awed, but cold. Not to say Avatar is a great film (most certainly not), but I wouldn't consider emotional resonance always important beyond drama films. I like to remark that one film that got the strongest emotional resonance out of me ever was The Old Maid, a 1930s melodrama... and I'm not going to stick my neck out and say that's one of the best films I've seen.

Right, I know I've bored you with an irritating name-dropping rant, but I'm a pretention whore and not a smart one either. Thoughts, criticisms, witty ripostes?

 

[Greylock Crescent]

Thoughts, criticisms, witty ripostes?

You mad buggin, yo.



Seriously, though, I think the advent of photorealistic VFX will only be a boon to movies if the stories themselves manage to be innovative (or, at least, compelling). The whole point of unfettering the imagination isn't simply to throw visuals at the screen -- if you want to do so, why go through the pretense of characters and dialogue? Why not just make it a silent film, with pretty colors and trippy music?

Or, to put it another way, the further we go with unearthly visuals, the greater the need for a "human" story to allow a film to connect to the audience.

 

[Gryffindorian]

I thought the Na'Vi version of Jake Sully was cuter than his human counterpart, and it's not like I'm into furries or anything. (Technically the Na'Vi aren't furries, but close).

Technically, they aren't even close to being furries. They're humanoid aliens.

Even if we just accepted them as anthropomorphic animals, they wouldn't be furries. Furries are the fans of such things, not the things themselves.

Well, in any case, I thought he looked hot in a loincloth.

 

[Kegg]

Seriously, though, I think the advent of photorealistic VFX will only be a boon to movies if the stories themselves manage to be innovative (or, at least, compelling). The whole point of unfettering the imagination isn't simply to throw visuals at the screen

Well, the important thing is the existence of the visuals and technology. Everything is possible. Eventually, I'd hope, people could make fantastic visuals in their basement with some stuff that's affordable. That's what really exites me - a film like Avatar is super expensive so it has to appeal to a wide audience, but what bizarre, personal stuff will people make for cheap?

-- if you want to do so, why go through the pretense of characters and dialogue?

Same reason porn does, of course.

 

[S. Gomez]

Or, to put it another way, the further we go with unearthly visuals, the greater the need for a "human" story to allow a film to connect to the audience.

I couldn't have said it better. Obviously, or I would have.

Kegg, you and I are just too different I think to ever see eye to eye, so I'm not going to pretend we can change each other's mind. Of course, it doesn't mean we can't have a good discussion about it.

The review was written relatively quickly and, as I noted in it, wasn't meant to be too in-depth about the film itself. It ended up emphasizing some points more than others because they seemed more important to make at the moment. So if I came off as sounding like I hated pretty pictures and imaginative visual effects, it was by accident rather than design. I love beautiful imagery, especially in a science fiction and fantasy film. But that doesn't mean that science fiction or fantasy needs to be all about the visuals--if it were, what would we be doing with prose novels in the genre?

As for making hyperrealistic CGI human characters... Honestly, what would you get out of it that you couldn't get out of just filming a regular actor with a camera? We've had Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Adolf Hitler, and the others on film more times than I can count without a computer's help. King Kong? Gollum? The Na'Vi? Obviously it can be a wonderful tool in those cases, as it already has proved itself to be. But it shouldn't be used to do something that a person could do just as well--and for a bit less money!

I forget if there was something else I wanted to say. Oh well, time for it later.

 

[Arrqh]

Now that I've finally seen the movie, I can go into this thread!

you know whats funny, I thought the Navi looked more realistic than the creatures, which is odd when you consider that its supposedly harder to make humanoid characters look more realistic than non-humanoid ones, due to the UV effect. The creatures were cool but sometimes they looked too much like shiny plastic toys.

This isn't really true. It's (relatively) easy to make human-like or stylized human characters look real. Making something that's exactly human is the hard one. The Navi were firmly in the human-like category... close enough that we read them as human, different enough so that all the tiny things that are wrong aren't noticeable. Even something as simple as changing the skin color to blue makes a huge difference in how easy it is to make something appear "right".

 

[Greylock Crescent]

Well, the important thing is the existence of the visuals and technology. Everything is possible. Eventually, I'd hope, people could make fantastic visuals in their basement with some stuff that's affordable. That's what really exites me - a film like Avatar is super expensive so it has to appeal to a wide audience, but what bizarre, personal stuff will people make for cheap?

I wholeheartedly agree about giving Average Joe the same power to craft visually stunning films ... to go along with their stories. Let's hope Average Joe is able to craft a better story than Avatar.

-- if you want to do so, why go through the pretense of characters and dialogue?

Same reason porn does, of course.

Touché.