The great success of ‘Avatar’ at the box office did not free the film directed by james cameron of certain accusations. The most common is probably that it is too similar to titles like ‘Pocahontas’ or ‘Dances with Wolves’, something that is still being discussed today, when there are only a few months left before ‘Avatar: The sense of water’ reaches theaters .
Cameron’s version
However, Cameron clearly responded to these accusations of plagiarism in an interview with FX Feeney more than ten years ago. Regarding the similarities with ‘Pocahontas’, he did not hesitate to respond jokingly that “we discussed including the song ‘Colors in the wind’ in ‘Avatar’. It’s almost there, at the end we put a song“.
The point is that, according to its author, ‘Avatar’ has a lot of original history, rooting itself in myths and traditions in order to make the complicated concepts that Cameron wanted to include in the film easier for the public, explaining it himself as follows with ‘Dances with Wolves’ as an example:
A big part of the myth is familiarity. The myth has to seem to have roots in earlier art, going back, through the traditions of storytelling, quite a long way. Approaching ‘Avatar,’ I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got a horribly large amount of exposure. You’re going to go to another planet; the guy’s a paraplegic; he’s got a backstory, and what’s going on on the planet? They’re mining “unobtanium”. Unobtanium is a superconductor at room temperature, floating in a magnetic field. In the meantime, they have this “avatar” program and our hero is going to move to a link – in hard technical terms, “a psionic link psionic” – and it’s going to go into another body, and through that body into another culture. And people are going to ask, “If you die in that world…”, etc.
And when I started writing the script, it was probably 60 pages long before I went into the jungle. So I said, okay, this shit is not working. I have to go back, make the movie a lot more visual, a lot less dialogue – pages of dialogue flew across the room – and retell the story in a much more familiar and archetypal way.
However, it always amuses me when someone says, “Wow, that’s like Dances with Wolves.” Yeah, sure, because ‘Dances With Wolves’ took place on another planet where people projected their consciousness onto 10-foot-tall blue bodies, but it’s like, no. We wanted to intentionally use the familiar touchstones of storytelling that were historical, and reflect them through a lens of the future. In this way, we could take some of these more difficult concepts, plant them there, and let people pick them up along the way. The only thing they would have to trip over would be those ideas, and not the great gestural material.
It is very clear that Cameron here left his opinion on that barrage of comparisons to make less of the highest grossing film of all time. Of course, once the foundations are laid, with the sequels he has no choice but to further expand that world of Pandora. Let’s see what surprises us but even Cameron himself is afraid that they will end up failing…