Wednesday 24 April 2019

"At just a little under a dollar a word, becoming fluent in Na'vi is a very expensive investment."

Re: the implausibility of humankind ever actually visiting another inhabited plane... Avatar!

Commenting on the previous post, @tealin wonders if our hopes of encountering higher intelligences might be as much about a kind of "looking-glass colonialism" as they are about angelic conversations, and of course she's right. But the success of "Avatar" suggests a third and opposite fantasy - the desire to re-encounter the "Noble Savage". Were that ever to happen, the video below is probably as accurate a prediction of that encounter as we'll get. Some of my happiest recent viewing has come from discovering and then bingeing upon the work of youtubers who share my fascination with theme parks, and if that sounds niche let me inform you that Lindsay Ellis's piece on Hobbiton was just nominated for a Hugo, so keep up, old-timers! I'll share more of Ellis's stuff in another post - but what we're here to enjoy today is the work of Jenny Nicholson, specifically her hilarious fifty-nine-minute-long account of a visit to the newly opened Avatar theme park in Disney's Animal Kingdom.


Why not search for images of "Avatar theme park", and see if you can immediately distinguish
the concept illustrations from photographs of the finished park?

Now, I appreciate this might not sound like everyone's cup of tea - an hour-long monologue about a theme park based on a nine-year-old movie - but the sustained simplicity of the presentation is part of Nicholson's genius. My favourite detail is the Jordan Peele-y ambience of dread she notices pervading the park as a result of its invented backstory: the world's indigenous Na'vi have welcomed this second human invasion, we're told, there's statues and framed photographs everywhere celebrating human and Na'vi cooperation... but no Na'vi. Nicholson also just describes the rides, and I like just descriptions of rides, but these too add to the portrait of an idea that has over-reached itself just enough to be ceaselessly entertaining. Enjoy...



2 comments:

  1. Wow.
    ... Wow.
    . . . . WOW.
    I went from a state of blissful ignorance this park even existed, to rather intense discomfort at the 'meta' as she describes it – that very 1950s idea of one watching films glorifying the founding genocide of one's country and then going to a summer camp themed with stereotypes of that people. One might expect Disney's hyper-vigilant PC brigade to have raised some concerns about the implications, but apparently not!

    I have to wonder how much of it was repurposed from scrapped plans for Atlantis tie-in attractions ... they certainly sank a lot of world development into that movie, which arguably might have made a better theme park than a movie. (I still love it, I just really really want to fix it.)

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  2. Iiiiiinteresting! I've still not seen Atlantis, but was very nicely surprised by Treasure Planet.

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