inspiring Avatar
James Cameron's film Avatar (website, Wikipedia) has been criticized for its strong thematic parallels to Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas, and another of its debts is also attracting attention. Vanity Fair asked back in October "Did Cameron spend his college years seeding pot with the double-album dust jacket of Tales from Topographic Oceans?" and stated:
Avatar's production design seems to have been strongly influenced by the trippy album cover art Roger Dean used to supply for Yes and other prog-rock bands in the 1970s...
The film's multiple visual borrowings from the imagination of Roger Dean (website, Wikipedia) do indeed deserve some scrutiny. There's a great selection of Roger Dean images at io9, and Signal to Noise reproduced some of Dean's images side-by-side with stills from Avatar's moon Pandora that drive home the similarity. Here are a few samples of Dean's art:
Roger Dean did far more than design landscapes for progressive rock albums. His eclectic designs were featured in three books to date: Views (1975) and Magnetic Storm (1984) were reissued in hardcover last year, along with a new volume entitled Dragon's Dream. Check them out for a look at his incredibly fertile imagination. Entertainment Weekly asked Avatar's writer/director James Cameron about whether he was inspired by Dean's work:
Where did James Cameron get the idea for the floating mountains? Was that from a Yes album cover?''It might have been,'' the director says with a laugh. ''Back in my pot-smoking days.''
I haven't seen the film yet, but have contented myself with repeated viewings of the trailer and several YouTube clips. The ten-minute "Making of..." is my favorite (sorry, embedding has been disabled) with the Sigourney-Weaver-narrated piece "Pandora Discovered" a close second:
To go full circle from art back to nature, here's a shot of China's Huang Mountains:
I look forward to spending a few hours on James Cameron's Pandora, but the Huang Mountains could easily absorb much more of my time.