The real reason the Na’vi are blue in ‘Avatar’: “SpongeBob was yellow”
Even though I was just eight years old when the first Avatar movie came out in 2009, and quite frankly, I didn’t have the attention span to watch a movie over two and a half hours long, I still remember its release so clearly; it was unavoidable.
Besides all the huge posters and advertisements, you could find Avatar-themed toys with McDonald’s Happy Meals, while the image of these blue-skinned creatures lingered in my young mind. What were they? I wasn’t actually interested in seeing the film, but I was captivated by this new phenomenon that everyone seemed to be talking about, nonetheless. I wanted to know why the movie was such a big deal.
Of course, looking back now, just a few years off from its 20th anniversary, it’s not hard to see why Avatar was such a huge deal at the time. James Cameron had been working on this epic animated spectacle for years. His dedication to it made Titanic look like a piece of turd. Avatar not only used revolutionary 3D animation, but the world that Cameron conjured was incredibly detailed, with the director even employing a linguist who could create an entirely new language for the characters, known as Na’vi.
So, he had the language, he had his cast, he had his exciting new animation techniques. But what were the Na’vi tribe going to look like? Cameron needed this indigenous humanoid species to look incredibly striking, and since they live on the fictional moon Pandora, they’d needed different evolutionary characteristics, too.
Despite the fact that the characters are aliens, Cameron wanted them to look somewhat similar to humans, so that audiences could connect with them. “The design of the Na’vi was the result of an intensive design process with some really talented creature and character artists,” he once revealed (via Empire), “Some of the early designs came out too amphibious or lizard-like. I wanted relatability. I figured we can relate to dogs and cats emotionally, so we gave the Na’vi expressive tails and ears that had that familiarity.”
But why blue? The reason behind Cameron’s choice actually had something to do with a particular Nickelodeon character, and he wanted to pick a colour that would become completely and utterly associated with his unique world, and nothing else. He explained, “Green was taken. There was a long history of green aliens. Plus, the Hulk. And the human colours, pinks and browns, weren’t alien. SpongeBob was yellow. That pretty much left blue and purple.”
In the end, Cameron picked blue for several reasons, including the fact that his mother had dreamed of a blue extraterrestrial before, as he recalled, “My mom told me about this dream she had where there was a ten-foot-tall blue woman with six breasts. Cool image. I drew her, but the six breasts thing didn’t come out looking as good as it sounds, plus would mess with the rating. So, anyway…blue.”
Blue alien characters certainly do exist, just look at the blue humanoid creatures in the classic French animated sci-fi movie Fantastic Planet, but Avatar easily stands as the first movie that comes to mind when most of us think of blue movie characters.
Cameron made something so recognisable with the franchise, and while many of us are now facing Avatar fatigue, what with the endless sequels that the director has been churning out (and still has lined up), you can’t deny the impact of the film, both on cinema and pop culture as a whole.
