Avatar (2009 film) and Boris Strugatsky, which are set in the 22nd century on a forested world called Pandora with a sentient indigenous species called the Nave. Various reviews have compared "Avatar" to the films "", "Pocahontas" and "The Last Samurai." NPR's "Morning Edition" has compared the film to a montage of tropes, with one commentator stating that "Avatar" was made by "mixing a bunch of film scripts in a blender". Gary Westfahl wrote that "the science fiction story that most closely resembles "Avatar" has to be Ursula Le Guin's novella "The Word for World Is Forest" (1972), another epic about a benevolent
Avatar (2009 film) with paintings and physical sculptures when Cameron felt that 3-D brush renderings were not capturing his vision, often working together in the kitchen of Cameron's Malibu home. In , Cameron announced that he would film "Avatar" for a mid-2008 release and planned to begin principal photography with an established cast by . The following August, the visual effects studio Weta Digital signed on to help Cameron produce "Avatar". Stan Winston, who had collaborated with Cameron in the past, joined "Avatar" to help with the film's designs. Production design for the film took several years. The film had two different production