the botany of ‘avatar’

One of the advantages/disadvantages to read­ing the Los Ange­les Times is their focus on Hol­ly­wood and their idea of what con­sti­tutes a major news story. Page 24 of the front sec­tion of this morning’s paper fea­tures an inter­view with UC River­side botanist Jodie Holt on the con­sult­ing work she did for the cur­rent James Cameron sci­ence fic­tion film, Avatar. In addi­tion to help­ing shape the look of the plants in the film, her plant descrip­tions and tax­onomies form a chap­ter of the fan book, Avatar: A Con­fi­den­tial Report on the Bio­log­i­cal and Social His­tory of Pan­dora.

avatar hometree

Above: Home­trees on the moon Pan­dora, from the Pan­do­ra­pe­dia [ source ]

Edit [Jan­u­ary 10]: I finally made it to see Avatar. While it’s not the sort of film I usu­ally take myself to I had a great 2 hours and 42 min­utes of escapism.

Some of the most strik­ing botan­i­cal things seem to be the filmmaker’s bor­row­ings from what earth’s marine life forms do already: plants with spec­tac­u­lar night­time bio­lu­mi­nes­cence, seeds that float (while glow­ing) like marine jel­ly­fish, or plants that glow when stepped on like cer­tain marine algae. Actu­ally I was sur­prised by how many plants I rec­og­nized already: ferny things, banana-leaved-looking things, tree-like things, grassy things. (Maybe that was botanist Jodie Holt’s influence?)

It made it look like Earth and Pan­dora were seeded with many of the same pri­mor­dial spawn, which might be the case since humans were able to travel to Pan­dora in just a few years. If any film­maker wants to option this com­pelling other story of diver­gent evo­lu­tion on Earth and a dis­tant planet’s moon, just e-mail me.

January 02 2010 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: • • • | 17 Comments »