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) universe in early 2006. "Avatar" was officially budgeted at $237 million. Other estimates put the cost between $280 million and $310 million for production and at $150 million for promotion. The film made extensive use of new motion capture filming techniques, and was released for traditional viewing, 3D viewing (using the RealD 3D, Dolby 3D, XpanD 3D, and IMAX 3D formats), and for "4D" experiences in select South Korean theaters. The stereoscopic filmmaking was touted as a breakthrough in cinematic technology. "Avatar" premiered in London on , 2009, and was internationally released on and in the United States and Canada