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
The Art of Avatar contains over 200 full-color images including sketches, matte paintings, drawings, and film stills. The book details the production phase of set designs for the vistas, landscapes, aerial battle scenes, bioluminescent nights, and creatures featured in the film. Throughout the book are different interviews with the various art directors, visual effects designers, animators, costume designers, and creature designers about their roles in the production and insight as to how the pre-production artwork process worked for the film. In December 2009, "USA Today" chose the book as their #1 gift book in the Pop Culture category for 2009. The Art of Avatar