Or dances with wolves
Comment on Cultural impact
DrBob@lemmy.ca 1 day agoNumber 1 was a retelling of Ferngully the Last Rainforest. spotlightonfilm.com/…/avatar-vs-ferngully-the-las…
ol_capt_joe@piefed.ee 1 day ago
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Interesting.
I’d bet it’s an example of coincidental convergence. Take the median/average of the tropes for that premise, and I can see writers coming up with a similar story.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 1 day ago
As someone who hasn’t watched FernGully (but should), I’m increasingly skeptical of these types of “plagiarism” comparisons between movies. Lindsay Ellis recently broke down the “Aladdin was stolen” narrative and compellingly showed “it’s complicated”, and more obviously, YMS five years ago fucking eviscerated the then-popular argument that The Lion King was a ripoff of Kimba the White Lion.
okwhateverdude@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I saw both. Avatar is a marvel of VFX, but the story is definitely ferngully.
Tonava@sopuli.xyz 9 hours ago
I haven’t seen ferngully so I can’t comment on that, but at it’s basic level the plot of Avatar is so generic and bland you can take any story where a character representing the viewers culture interacts with some native, a more natural setting inhabiting people, and find multiple similarities
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
As someone who had FernGully on VHS, there are marked similarities, though it’s not exactly 1-to-1. The main conflict is resource extraction, although instead of a gung-ho colonel we get Tim Curry as literal pollution. The protagonist gets transformed to fit in with the locals, but it’s an accident by one of the locals instead of deliberate choice. Instead of a cranky Sigourney Weaver, we get a spastic Robin Williams as a bat.
Overall, Avatar is closer to FernGully than to a lot of other going-native movies. Environmental conservation is the driving theme of both films.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Was Kimba also based on Hamlet or something? As far as I’m concerned that plotline is in the public domain. Or is it just using lions to tell the story that was supposedly stolen?
Also, how could Aladdin be “stolen” when it obviously takes direct inspiration from several stories in 1001 Arabian Nights? Are people claiming that it was stolen from some other story that was inspired by the same book?
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 1 day ago
FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
And now people are accusing the upcoming Disney movie Hexed of being a ripoff of Owl House because apparently Owl House invented the idea of a hero being transported to a magical world.
I understand Owl House fans are mad that Disney canceled the show prematurely and made the ending rushed. I agree that Disney shouldn’t have done that. But I’m not going to fault Disney for making another story where a character is transported to a magical world. Heck, Disney did it decades ago with Alice in Wonderland and with Peter Pan. They also did it with the Chronickes of Narnia and there are many more examples, both Disney and non-Disney
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
I see. From wikipedia:
So it seems the Thief and the Cobbler was based in part on the Arabian Nights, and the original plot was also from Arab folklore.
So in other words, Aladdin is merely based on the same work of classic literature, which I believe is public domain. So allegations of plagiarism are foolish, unless all references to Arab folklore are now off the table too.
That’s pretty funny. I might watch the video another day. From your comment I gather enough to conclude that the main premise of the accusation is “Shakespeare told by animals,” and I concur that that’s laughable.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
The Aladdin bit is that there was another project in the Disney pipeline by a famed director that also had a lot of Arabian aesthetics, and I think a lot of the people upset are bitter that the other one just didn’t turn out very well.
You should watch the Lindsay Ellis video, it’s pretty good.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
TIL that the Arabian aesthetic can only be one person’s intellectual property /s
And yeah, I just read about The Thief and the Cobbler. The reason it didn’t turn out well was because it was in production for 40 years, changed plots/themes/characters multiple times, was started and finished by different producers, and there was a falling out early on with the owners of the original story it was supposed to be based on.
So that had nothing to do with Aladdin incidentally also borrowing themes and tropes from 1001 Arabian Nights.