I was bored yesterday and wrote a little summary of my thoughts for the future. This was partially inspired by the upcoming Singapore General Election taking place tomorrow and a certain online conservation I had with someone. After I finished writing it, I realized that it bears some similarities to the Dune timeline, so perhaps I was just agreeing with Frank Herbert.

In a future when all jobs of lower complexity than astrophysicists have been replaced by robots, conglomerates that own robots and their patents will reap the benefit of virtually all economic activities on the planet, while regular people can offer no value to the system. A tiny number of humans hold the few high-complexity jobs needed and are genetically superior in those roles due to generations of selection.

The masses soon realize that they have been made obsolete. A neo-Marxist revolution sweeps across the planet and great wars are fought, but the many cannot defeat the few. The corporations have centuries of technological advantage in their favour and their self-replicating machines swiftly put an end to the insurrections. The rebels are disarmed and ejected from the system.

With its obsolescence made official, most of humanity slowly regresses to pre-industrial subsistence-level economies. Civilization for most returns to small isolated communities. Even basic technology like fossil fuels and computers disappear with time because the exploitation of the planet’s natural resources is monopolized by the corporations whose robotic armies forcefully defend their subjectless fiefdoms.

The corporations wall themselves off in massive robotized vertical cities and mostly ignore the rest of humanity, occasionally sending expeditions into the wild to harvest feral human specimens for body parts and genetic material or clearing land to make room for industrial expansion.

Eventually, the corporate overlords evolve into a symbiotic relationship with machines and cease to be fully organic, gaining in the process physiological traits suitable for deep space voyages that cannot be duplicated organically. The evolved humanity leaves Earth after its crust has been almost completely emptied of useful compounds and before it is consumed by a dying sun. To the stars!

In the alternate timeline, Earth takes a hit from a giant meteor and humanity goes extinct in 2012.

I suppose the real alternative scenario is some kind of socialist paradise where the combined productivity of machines is more than sufficient to be distributed evenly across a humanity and free it from its eternal struggle to earn a living to either drown in hedonistic pleasures or pursue knowledge and science.

And I suppose this is more likely to happen if advancements and breakthroughs in technology are made accessible to everyone rapidly enough that no single sub-community has enough time to build a giant army of self-replicating killer robots before the rest have at least learnt how to build regular killer robots. Perhaps this is the real reason why patent terms should be as short as possible.

Just think about it. One day, a corporation similar to Isaac Asimov’s U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. will be making tons of robots and conducting massive research into robotics and A.I. Everyone will think that robots are super awesome, so whenever Robotics Inc. sues some small-time robotics lab for infringing one of its ten trillion patents, people will just go “oh Sony Robots Inc., you so crazy” and return to enjoying their cup of coffee brewed by their robot butler while posting silly crap like this on Facetablet (because the concept of books no longer exist of course).

Eventually Robotics Inc. decides that it is no longer in its economic interest to have customers when they reach the tipping point where they can just make robots to create wealth passively. And before you know it, everyone else has been made obsolete.

Okay, so the real future will probably be somewhat different. But putting aside the details, let’s consider the big picture and the natural of power dynamics in human societies.

Kings and emperors derived their power from the people. People were stupider and more ignorant in the past, so this mandate was easy to get through coercion. Eventually, this transformed into a more democratic and equal relationship and we now have the idea of a “social contract” between the government and its people. But still, the point is that people living at the top of social hierarchies are rich and comfortable only because people below them are economically productive. Smart kings, presidents, CEOs and even dictators all recognize this fact and therefore seek to retain the loyalty and productivity of their subjects, citizens and workers through either incentives or threats.

But technology changes this relationship. Every worker replaced by a robot is one whose opinions and needs no longer matter to the person at the top. Today a person can operate a crane to do what once required dozens of people to perform. With an army of robots, it is not inconceivable for a single person or corporation to someday run an entire economy. Capitalism kind of breaks down in that system, because that corporation will no longer need consumers. Money and wealth are ultimately just means to secure an end in an economy of many productive parties, but this hypothetical corporation is basically omnipotent and needs nothing from others.

Sure, we are far from this scenario as long as artificial intelligence remains as crappy as it is today. But consider the effects of globalization: we have increasing rich-poor divides because people higher up in the economic hierarchy benefit greatly from moving low-skill jobs to the third world while people at the lower end are mostly screwed. Think third-world sweat shops are unfair competition? Just imagine what will happen when we have self-replicating, self-maintaining robot workers.

Everyone needs a college degree to get a job now. When the economy becomes fully automated, every remaining job will require at least a PhD. There certainly won’t be enough of such positions to go around for 10 billion people unless we expand massively into space.

Actually this is sounding more and more like the fundamental ideas behind Marxism, but with robots. Oh shit.

Sometimes I think crazy. I think I’m probably missing some key argument. The future can’t be that bleak.

Clichés make a show boring. The more clichéd a story is, the less interesting and enjoyable it becomes. But my theory is that this relationship only holds true until you hit a certain magical event horizon where the laws of the universe break apart, one gets divided by zero and clichés become art.

How people react when I tell them I enjoyed IS

Infinite Stratos was my guilty pleasure from last season. I actually caught the last episode in Japan last month and have since read volumes 4-6 of the light novels, picking up from where the anime leaves off. Hence, I speak on good authority when I say that IS is one huge clichéfest. But for some reason, it’s enjoyable.

Only in anime: girls fight to feed you food

The basic premise of IS is one of the oldest stories ever told by anime: some lucky bastard ends up in a situation where he is constantly surrounded by sex-deprived girls who lust for the first man they bump into in the hallway. The inclusion of fighting mecha is initially reminiscent of Sakura Wars, but the storytelling is closer to Tenchi Muyo.

Hey wasn’t this from Gundam 00?

The Chosen One

In the story, IS are personalized powered armour suits, equipped with insanely powerful weapons ripped straight from the Gundam multiverse that — for very feebly conceived reasons — are not used for warfare but given to teenagers for unspecified purposes that no one really bothers explaining. They can only be piloted by girls, except for the one single exception, chosen by the almighty plot device, that is the main character, Ichika Orimura. As a science fiction, IS is pretty terrible, so it’s a good thing that the author is not trying too hard to make it one.

Spot the tsundere

The cool part about the character interactions is the fact that almost all the heroines are tsundere! Okay, it sounds lame when I articulate it in words, but really it is an impressive feat. Probably.

Of the five female IS pilots chasing after Ichika, only one can be categorically excluded from the tsundere classification, while each of the remaining four represents a different sub-division of tsundere. I am pretty sure making 80% of the characters tsundere violates some kind of international convention governing harem anime. This is either a work of madness or genius.

How people react to IS‘ storytelling

Just to be clear, the story is absolutely terrible. But the story is really not that important when it comes to having a good time with IS. You must enjoy the characters and relish the ridiculous situations they create when they get together. It’s one of those shows.

Of course, such a formula only works well for some quick laughs. The lack of an engaging story is definitely unsustainable in the long run.

Tatenashi Sarashiki is introduced in Vol. 5

The light novels injected life into the post-anime story by introducing a new character, Tatenashi Sarashiki (the playful but capable head of the student council), into the mix, hence covering the previously unoccupied teasing-senpai (i.e. Tama-nee) spot, but it is clear that constantly introducing new characters is not a viable long-term solution to generate interest. The author does take a huge step in advancing the overarching story in Volume 6, but so far it has failed to impress.

Beach episode: the forward pass of harem anime

But for the length of 12 episodes, the formula works just fine. In fact, the anime’s excellent pacing is almost sublime in its execution, like the well-timed punchlines of a skilful comedian. I was particularly impressed by episode 9, the fan-service episode, where the writer has somehow managed to fit an unbelievable amount of character and visual fan-service into one tight 20-minute package. That is truly the work of artisans.

So much armour and yet so little is covered

The animation and art quality is also surprisingly decent and consistent across the 12 episodes, all things considered, especially when you compare it to the typical cookie-cutter low-budget adapted-from-game titles found in great abundance in the same genre. Okay, maybe my bar was just set very low.

Ultimately, it takes a particular kind of mindset to get into IS. In my case, I started with very low, almost non-existent, overall expectations and found myself liking the characters, hence a good story was never within my range of considerations and its absence was not disconcerting. It also helps a great deal if you love tsundere, because the show is full of them… XD

More screencaps

Ichika’s teacher/sister is kind of tsundere

As IS technology advances, the skin exposure increases

The kendo-girl childhood-friend tsundere

The twin-tail childhood-friend Chinese tsundere

The twin-drill refined-lady British tsundere

The stoic tough-yet-naive flat-chested German tsundere

Three tsundere caught in an infinite loop of mutual contempt

Tsundere rule: smiles like this are usually followed by swift violence

Possibly the boss character of some fantasy RPG

Floating shoulders, how do they work?

This is a job for Admiral Ackbar’s brother

Some kind of futuristic mating ritual

I think this is what people call a reach around?

Okay so this is my favourite character in the show…

●__◎

Unlimited?! That’s over 9000!

Okay not twin drill. More like quad drill. It’s the future

Bunny ears…

How people react when I told them I was going to Tokyo last month

Eye-patch moé?

Mecha designs in the IS universe are often suspiciously convenient…

tl;dr version: Infinite Stratos is for people who appreciate the finer subtleties of tsundere.

Hollywood has its flaws. Cookie-cutter scripts and commodification of art can often ruin beautiful things. But at least Hollywood gets the cinematography right and doesn’t usually suffer from the pandemic of awkward overacting rampant in Japanese mainstream cinema. 2011’s Space Battleship Yamato live action movie is anime-comes-alive, but in a bad way that constantly reminds you how stupid the world would be if everyone behaved like manga characters.

Still, it’s not a total disaster.

Space Battleship Yamato will be out in Singapore cinemas on 24 March, but I caught a preview screening of it a few days ago.

Although I do enjoy the classics of anime from time to time, Yamato has never been one of them. I also don’t care a single bit about soap actor and SMAP member Takuya Kimura. If you are a fan of either, I suspect that what I write in this review will not matter and you will watch the movie anyway.

But for the rest of us, there are a few things I want to talk about.

This picture cracks me up for some reason

Story

The general gist of the story is that some unknown alien race has turned Earth into a radioactive wasteland for unknown reasons and mankind has been driven into underground bunkers much like in Fallout 3.

Thoroughly beaten in space, the United Nations for Space Exploration (which apparently consists solely of Japan) pools all its remaining resources to construct the Space Battleship Yamato using warp technology provided by another unknown alien race. The ship sets off on a last-ditch voyage to retrieve radiation-scrubbing technology from the unknown alien benefactors in order to make Earth habitable again, but nobody mentions how anyone plans to deal with the hostile invaders who created the mess in the first place and who are still right there in the solar system ready to do it again if necessary. As a wise man once said, “Fuck it, we’ll do it live!”

And for unknown reasons, the design of the ship that is to be humanity’s last hope is based on a Japanese WW2 battleship that was overwhelmingly out-teched and sunk by US carrier-based torpedo bombers. Though, interestingly, there is a hole in the bow where the Japanese imperial seal would’ve been.

I am pretty sure those facial hairs are against military regulation

Okay, so the story has more holes than the moon, but I suppose that is not just expected but required of such a production.

Visual Effects

Digital special effects in the movie are actually better than I had expected given the track record of the Japanese film industry, but the rest of it still bears an unfortunate sentai vibe. The bridge in particular, where it feels like most of the movie takes place in, wouldn’t look out of place in an Ultraman movie. This problem is further exuberated by Japanese cinema’s habit of filming entire movies from one single camera angle.

It feels like the producers blew the effects budget on a few scenes that account for maybe 1/100 of the movie because some of the special effects going on in the second half of the movie look downright comical.

I think it’s really weird how Japan, a country known for its anime and video game industries, still has difficulties producing industrial-grade special effects for its movies when New Zealand has Weta and ILM’s Singapore subsidiary worked on Ironman 2.

If those shades were really needed, they would’ve added shutters to the bridge’s windows

Execution

Yamato does take a page or two from Tinseltown’s playbook with some degree of success. There are few shots in the movie (the aforementioned budget busters) that evoke the kind of grandiose and awe big-budget US titles are very good at creating. You can actually see most of them in the trailer if you want to save some money.

The first quarter of the movie is easily the best part of the movie. This is where we are introduced to the post-apocalyptic Earth and a human race on the verge of extinction hiding beneath its surface. Children grow up in bunkers devoid of proper sanitation and hope. The hero of the story, played by Kimutaku, goes up to the surface in a ghetto hazmat suit to collect scraps for a living. The Yamato, humanity’s last hope, is unveiled.

All great moments in the movie, some of them are unintentionally poignant in light of recent events in Japan. The movie was right on the cusp of greatness and my cold cynical heart was ready to be moved.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the story that follows this fast-paced Hollywood-style introduction quickly degenerates into an endless series of mind-numbingly bland conversations between boring characters taking place in generic enclosed cabins. The existential threat facing humanity becomes tangential to the predictable interpersonal drama taking place between uninspired character stereotypes drifting around the bridge in various stages of comatose. It comes as a huge relief when many of these unbearable automatons are gradually killed off over the course of the movie.

My friend was sniggering at the corny dialogues throughout the movie, but the cheese gets so bad towards the end that even the more-reserved individuals in the theatre laughed aloud.

The male and female uniform designs have Freudian implications if we consider grey to be negative space

Overall

It’s a run-of-the-mill product of Japanese mainstream cinema with relatively better special effects and decent entertainment value. Imagine a Japanese take on Armageddon but replace every Hollywood trope with its equivalent Japanese idiosyncrasy. It even comes with its own Steven Tyler love ballad.

In my completely professional opinion as a person on the Internet, the best part of the movie is Meisa Kuroki in the role of Yuki Mori, the heroine. She brings the fictional concept of tsundere to life in all its meme-licious glory.

“It’s not like I needed you to save me or anything.”

She has Brazilian blood in her

Recently, renowned sci-fi writer William Gibson of Neuromancer fame annoyed a bunch of Miku fanboys when he tweeted, “Hatsune Miku doesn’t really rock me. I want higher rez, less anime.” This was immediately parsed by some to mean that he hates all things anime and wishes horrible things to happen to otakukind and hilarity ensued.

Coincidentally, I have been spending some time thinking about the concept of virtual idols recently and just picked up a copy of Gibson’s Idoru novel that touches on this exact issue. Incidentally, it has a pseudo anime-style cover.

While Gibson’s delivery of his message was highly ambiguous (we can all thank the ubiquity of Twitter in contemporary discourse for that), I think what he actually meant by his statement is that he believes a true virtual idol should emulate reality to a higher level of accuracy. This of course includes higher resolution graphics and the display technology to match it. I think there is some merit to that argument that goes beyond a matter of personal preference.

Idols throughout history have always been artificial constructs to varying degrees, but today idol-making has become a precise science. Outfits like Johnny’s and AKB48 assemble each idol from a list of proven ingredients and find a suitable host body to bring theory to life. They are basically idol factories, managing hundreds of manufactured personas and with hundreds more on a conveyor belt ready to replace them. These idols are actors whose talents are not singing or dancing but to give the fans exactly what they want to see. Auto-Tune fills in the rest.

The real game we are playing is the illusion of intimacy. The best idols are not the prettiest or the best singers, they are the ones who can convince the most number of people that a special connection exists between them and their fans.

This argument may sound overly cynical, but it’s only slightly. I’m not saying that all idols are being intentionally deceitful in order to be popular (only most of them), and indeed many of them probably truly believe in what they do and say in front of their fans. Some of them may even feel the special connection. But that all just means that even idols themselves are human beings who are susceptible to the alluring mirage of false intimacy.

I suppose the more astute reader would now argue, “But DM, by that line of reasoning is there really such a thing as real intimacy?” Let’s not open that can of worm, but I’ll just quickly add that at the very least, I think that real intimacy cannot possibly arise from a relationship in which communication is mostly unidirectional and systematically managed.

Now the problem I have with the idea of Hatsune Miku as an “idol” is not the art style or her glass-shattering voice, but the difficulty of maintaining this illusion with what is essentially an open-source meme. Her screen-projected concerts are not so much endearing as amusing; It’s something fresh and flashy, but after the first time it offers no obvious value over watching this YouTube video twenty times. That’s because seeing Hatsune Miku as an idol requires a suspension of disbelief far greater in magnitude than that required for a typical mass-produced humanoid idol. This is why virtual idols (and I suppose this does include anime characters in general) will remain a tiny niche for as long as display and rendering technology fail to convincingly fool our brains into giving willing fans an easier time to live in our selfish fantasies.

Of course, my obsession with the idea of emotional intimacy as part of the definition of an idol is subjective and probably too stringent for some. However, I find the distinction significant because a line, hard to define as it may be, must exist somewhere between regular fame and idolatry, or the concept of idol ceases to have relevance.

This reminds me of my current addiction: Valkyria Chronicles 2

In addition, the crowd-sourced nature of Hatsune Miku further complicates the situation. Everyone can participate in the creative process and all works produced can potentially be incorporated into the collective idea of what exactly constitutes Miku. The trademark leek she holds for example originated from a Bleach parody video. Given that idols, according to my cynical worldview, consciously calibrate their self image in a way that panders to fan expectations, letting fans have direct creative control over the entire process should arguably represent the ultimate form of idol creation, at least in theory.

I am undecided on this one, but I lean towards scepticism. If fans get exactly what we want because we helped to create it, doesn’t that just makes it more difficult for us to maintain the illusion that the virtual idol is an existence worthy of our worship? After all, how can the creator idolize his creation when he can see all through all the magic taking place behind the scene?

Personally, I see Hatsune Miku as a meme. The sense of joy we derive from watching her comes from shared experiences between fans more than it comes from her. It’s more like an open-source software community where everyone contributes something and we all feel happy with the result and less like Steve Jobs coming up with an awesome iThing and we all grovel at his feet. There are tons of shaky bits in that analogy, but I think it conveys my general feeling.

So that’s why they named her Apple…

So all in all, I do not see Hatsune Miku as a virtual idol. She’s more like the Laughing Man except less anarchistic and more merchandising. But in all likelihood, the idea of idol itself may be the one that is changed in this great social experiment. We’ll see.

Actually, I wonder why no one has yet to make a serious attempt at manufacturing a classic virtual idol. We already have the technology to render photorealistic people (at least for the purpose of making music videos or advertisements). Throw in some anonymous voice samples with Auto-Tune and some masked body doubles for concerts (perhaps even special effects make-up or plastic surgery) and you have an everlasting star who will work for as long as you need and who will never betray your corporate interests… Hmmm.

As for William Gibson, he eventually tweeted a follow-up message and said, “Hatsune Miku is clearly a more complex phenomenon than I initially assumed. Requires further study.” I wonder if he truly believes that or if he’s just saying that to get the fanboys to get off his back.

P.S. It’s interesting to note that a lot of Miku fan art is basically recoloured/traced illustrations of other anime characters. Perhaps Miku is more like the Borg: she absorbs and assimilates all our individual fantasies…

Up until recently, I had been under the impression that industry giant James Cameron was reduced to making a movie adaptation of this. This misconception was finally shattered when I saw the trailer for Avatar and it piqued my interest.

Fast forward to a few months later, I have watched the movie in cinema four times and now believe it to be one of the defining works of the decade. Though not perfect, (is anything ever?) Avatar is an awe-inspiring viewing experience that far exceeds any other productions of similar scale. And though it has done remarkably well in the box office, I still consider it to be a highly underrated title.

Keeping alive my tradition of writing about things only after everyone stops talking about them, here are my thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar.

Story

Avatar has a pretty typical soft sci-fi kind of story. Large future corporation wants to exploit newly-discovered resource on an alien planet and intrudes upon and screws up the life of the native indigenous inhabitants. Maybe it’s influence from American history, but this kind of setting seems pretty common. In the movie, the planet is Pandora and the indigenous people are the Na’vi, a race of 3m-tall wide-eyed blue-skinned elfish-looking people who live in tribes harmoniously with nature. (Where have we heard that one before?)

The name “Avatar” comes from a science experiment being conducted as a side project by the mega-corporation, where human and Na’vi DNAs are combined to create Na’vi-like bodies that a human operator is able to remotely control. The goal of this experiment is to find a way to negotiate with the Na’vi and steal their planet’s resource legally, with Plan B being to blow every shit up. Of course, beyond the liberal tree-hugging scientist folks who seek knowledge and coexistence and all that jazz, the rest of the human colony on Pandora consists of former US Marines who seem to overwhelmingly prefer Plan B. America, fuck yeah!

The main character Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a crippled ex-Marine who ends up operating an Avatar due to the death of his brainier twin brother. He (or rather his Avatar) is sent to live among the Na’vi and learn from them. His love interest is Ney’tiri (Zoe Saldana), the daughter of chief of the Omaticaya Clan. Their romance follows the textbook boy-meets-alien-girl trope that is common in Hollywood and absolutely pervasive in anime.

The story is without a doubt the weakest part of Avatar. Highly predictable and formulaic, it is serviceable but nothing ground-breaking. The perceived liberal bias underlying the story has also drew criticisms from conservative commentators ever vigilant for Hollywood propaganda, who accuse the movie of being anti-technology, anti-humanity and anti-capitalism.

Personally, I find nothing wrong with the message of the story. It doesn’t preach against technology, but merely the abuse of it — after all the Avatars are themselves products of bio-engineering. It is also rather far-fetched to accuse it of being anti-humanity, considering not all human characters in the story behave selfishly.

Everyone cheered for the triumph of the human spirit over the technological might of the resource-hungry aliens in Independence Day (or was that movie anti-technology too?), so why not for the Na’vi who, in their brave stand against human colonists, display the very same spirit that we as sentient beings value so highly. To me, it is no different from cheering for the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in a WW2 flick. No one would accuse those films of being “anti-German”, and for good reason.

That said, I do think that the story could have presented a more balanced perspective of the conflict, particularly the fear and anxiety of the human colonists who find themselves besieged in a foreign land. In a way, in its current form, Avatar resembles an early WW2 movie where the moral superiority of the Allied forces is undisputed and the viewer knows exactly who the “bad guys” are. WW2 movies have since moved on and taken on subtler approaches in depicting the emotions of war. Perhaps the Avatar franchise will last long enough to do the same.

Visual

The main selling point of the movie has to be the visuals. Instead of filming in exotic tropical jungles and throwing in a few CGI alien creatures, James Cameron decided to digitally create the entire planet of Pandora. Such an undertaking is pretty insane compared to the industry-standard practice of digitally enhancing live-action footages (à la Lord of the Rings), a much cheaper method that usually produces more realistic results. The fact that James Cameron chose to do it all digitally at great expenses is testament to the strength of his vision.

That said, though the amount of effort that went into conceptualizing and animating the flora and fauna is impressive to ineffable extends, the alien-ness of the setting is somewhat dampened by the fact that almost every one of the critters has an Earth-bound equivalent. And don’t even get me started on how every planet in Hollywood history has two-eyed bipedal humanoid aliens. Still, the creature designs in Avatar were creative and detailed enough to make me overlook this fairly standard complaint.

More impressive is how the life-action footages and motion captures are integrated with the purely CGI environment. Actress Sigourney Weaver talked about her experience during a recent appearance on The Daily Show and from what I understand, Na’vi expressions were animated using facial data captured by head-mounted cameras on the actors. So not only do the actors do motion captures and voice overs as in traditional CG methods, they actually have to act out the scene with real expressions. I’m not sure how much of this is promotional hype and how much of it is actual working technology, but it does point to the future direction of such productions. (Are we looking at the primitive ancestors of Holodecks?)

Traditionally, there is a stigma against CGI characters amongst actors (somewhere between “they took our jobs!” and “they are destroying our artform!“), but Avatar’s filming technique presents a possible solution to this age-old conundrum, an opinion that is apparently shared by Signourney Weaver. In fact, not only does this technique help to mend the bruised egos of actors who are given CGI roles, it has the excellent advantage of overcoming the uncanny valley effect that is all to prevalent in such productions. Though not entirely perfect, the facial expressions of the Na’vi are very convincing and occasionally allow the audience to forget the fact that they are merely 3D models.

As a result, though the scenery of Pandora and the aerial battles are all very visually extravagant, I personally find Ney’tiri’s facial expressions and body gestures to be the most well-animated part of the entire movie. Zoe Saldana did an excellent job depicting the character and every single one of her facial nuances is perfectly captured by the fluid animation. Having watched the movie four times (once in 3D), Ney’tiri’s close-up shots always manage to fascinate me in how well they manage to naturally engage the audience without being conspicuous. Animation technology has come a long way since Gollum and the ill-fated Polar Express.

CGI characters have traditionally been relegated to take on the roles of villains and sidekicks, because the audience finds it difficult to empathize with animated characters bearing uncanny expressions. James Cameron challenged and defeated the status quo by not only making the Na’vi people believable and likeable, but having the audience emotionally associate itself with their struggle against human invaders. For that feat alone, Avatar deserves a ton of recognition.

Of course, the technology still has some way to go. Though the 3D environment and the characters look extremely realistic and believable during the daytime shots, night-time lighting still feels like a video game, partly because real-life night lighting is pretty much non-existent.

There are also very few scenes in the movie where both human and Na’vi characters appear on-screen at the same time because there still exists a jarring contrast between the two that serves to disillusion and emotionally distant the viewer from the Na’vi. This effect is most noticeable in three scenes: when Jake first wakes up in his Avatar body, when Ney’tiri touches the face of Jake’s human body and when Grace is being carried by Jake’s Avatar body.

This problem will have to be resolved by future technology advances if any Avatar sequel or prequel is to go into the intricate back-stories of human-Na’vi relations, where physical contact between the two races (and not just through Avatar medium) are inevitable. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole concept of “Avatar” was born to bypass this particular technical limitation by giving the story a reason to minimize contact between humans and Na’vi.

Setting

For a sci-fi epic, the back-story of Avatar is currently not very well developed. It is quite clear that a lot of planned content had to be cut from the movie due to its already lengthy 162-minute runtime. Although a few lines in the movie hint at the current state of Earth and past interactions between humans and Na’vi, much is left unexplained. However, I chalk this up to the limitation of the feature-film format rather than a lack of planning.

For example, the humans are on Pandora to mine for a mineral called Unobtainium. Though not explained in the movie dialogues, unobtainium is apparently a superconductor at room temperature, which explains the floating mountains of Pandora and their magnetic interference on electronic equipment. When considered in that context, it can be deduced that the giant artificial-looking ring structures that surround the Tree of Souls are in fact the hardened form of molten metals shaped by an underground magnetic field.

From such unmentioned details, it’s quite clear that a lot of background planning went into creating the world of Pandora and I can only hope that the subject will be further explored in future works.

Some questions that I have off the top of my head:

• Are the night-time lighting effects real light as perceivable by human eyes or a visual representation of Na’vi extra-sensory perceptions? I’m leaning towards the latter due to the fact that their footprints “glow”.
• Did the symbiotic relationship between the Na’vi people and their mounts evolve naturally? It’s hard to see how they manage to retain their inter-compatible organs through years of natural selection, especially in the case of the predatory flyer who has no survival incentive to enter such a relationship. That said, the concept is actually not that far-fetched.
• What happened to the English school that Grace founded for the natives?
• How did humans first discover and come to Pandora?
• What happened to Earth?

Another thing that absolutely fascinates me is the Na’vi language. Created by Paul Frommer, a Linguistic PhD at USC, it is a fully functional language that the actors had to learn for their roles in the movie. Based on a few interviews and articles by Dr. Frommer and the dialogues found in the movie, language enthusiasts have already assembled a partial learning guide to Na’vi.

Due to contractual issues, the full grammar and vocabulary of Na’vi are unlikely to be made available until a licensed language guide is published (which it eventually will be), but it’s amazing how much progress has been made so far by reverse engineering. For example, we know that the Na’vi have an octal number system as they only have four fingers on each hand. (By the way, the Avatars, being a mix of Na’vi and human genomes, have five fingers.)

A rich and imaginative back-story is the hallmark of any successful sci-fi epic. Although the movie Avatar has an apparently simple story, it can be seen from the examples above that there is much potential for the franchise to expand into a proper fictional universe, much as how Star Wars grew from Episode 4 into a full-fledged epic.

James Cameron mentioned that he has enough materials planned for three movies. I can certainly see potential for at least a prequel and a sequel to Avatar.

Conlusion

Avatar is a ground-breaking piece of work in its ability to create believable CGI characters that the audience can emotionally invest in. James Cameron has managed to break down a long-held line between live action and CGI and it is this achievement that Avatar should be remembered for. The movie was a huge gamble on the prowess of modern animation technology and its high-risk production method probably forced James Cameron to be more conventional in its other aspects (i.e. typical Hollywood blockbuster story-telling).

Hopefully, with its now established credentials and matured production techniques, the franchise can move on to more subtle storytelling and further explore the intricate history and culture of the Avatar universe.

By the way, I recommend everyone watch Avatar at least twice, especially if you watched the first time in 3D. In my opinion, the lost of visual fidelity and details for such a beautiful movie is not worth the gimmicky 3D effect that is only really effective in a few “long hallway” scenes. Watch the movie in 2D and take some time to appreciate the amazing details found in Ney’tiri’s every expression.

P.S. I want to learn Na’vi. Who’s with me?