Strange Waters: Filming Imagined Spaces in Fantasy Blockbusters

Had Disney’s Strange World (2022) made more of an impact the internet might well be flooded with articles comparing Don Hall’s latest work with James Cameron’s behemoth sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water (2022). Both explore magnificent simulated environments, examine the complicated dynamics arising from father-son relationships, and tackle the destructive land-grabbing hunger associated with colonial sentiment. Yet, while Avatar dominated at the box office, Strange World’s inauspicious beginnings settled into relative obscurity. This, I believe, is a slight injustice. That’s not to argue Strange World is an underrated, underappreciated masterpiece- it isn’t. It’s more that, when it comes to the fundamental practice of crafting and representing imagined spaces, Strange World simply does a better job. 

Why judge these particular films in this way? Partly it’s because the themes and narratives of both ultimately hinge on the audience’s delight at discovering new worlds. Indeed, this is the very thing that establishes them as part of the contemporary cultural landscape. Bob Rehak, in his 2018 missive More than Meets the Eye, suggests that we exist within “a popular culture dominated by movies whose huge budgets are part and parcel of the advanced technologies involved in their production- a smorgasbord of spectacles” (Rehak 2018, 2). He asserts that “Special effects are always heightened, excessively noticeable elements of moviemaking” (Rehak 2018, 23) which can be isolated from the initial text and utilised across transmedia platforms to “create settings, characters, creatures, and events whose unreality coexists in pleasurable tension with the detail brought to their visualisation” (Rehak 2018, 17). In other words, the visual effects of imagined spaces are the very fabric connecting and legitimising the world-building of a franchise both interdiegetically and in external touchpoints like marketing materials and social media. Therefore a recognition of the special effects used to depict Pandora or Avalonia is crucial for the understanding and reception of the film.

The difficulty is that these special effects are so pervasive within both Strange World and The Way of Water that it’s almost impossible to separate them from the film as a whole. For some guidance in this area, we can turn to Julie Turnock, and her 2015 book Plastic Reality. Turnock identifies 1977 as a turning point for special effects, when the release of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) led to a major cultural shift. This shift, she suggests, can be characterised as one in which we focus on cinematic photorealism, which “builds, often from scratch, a stylised conception of how the camera lens, film stock, light patterns, movement and so on translates images into cinema” (Turnock 2015, 10). Put simply, the aim of special effects in the modern era is to match contemporary cinematography styles and accurately depict something not simply as if it existed, but as if it existed and had been photographed.

Fig 1- The underwater marvels of Avatar: The Way of Water.

Avatar: The Way of Water is filled with special effects, the apotheosis of the modern blockbuster characterised by Rehak. Pandora is a visual feast of colour, movement and spectacle. And just in case you missed any of the manifold effects laid out for your delectation, the film insistently directs your attention towards them. At several points throughout the film, there are extended sequences in which characters, themselves CGI creations, gaze in wonder at the natural world around them. Sometimes, this is diegetically sound. When Jake Scully’s children are introduced to a hidden world of underwater marvels for the first time (Fig. 1), we can forgive their entrancement. The sweeping panning shots, swelling music, extreme close ups on open-mouthed faces and cuts to unfurling aquatic fauna feels justified. Earlier in the film, however, an almost identical sequence has already been played while these same characters are exploring the forest. Given that the forests of Pandora are the very environment they supposedly grew up in, this feels somewhat excessive. At this point, the camera is not being used to follow a story set within a consistent, established world. Instead, it is being used to present this world as a spectacle, a visual experience that implicitly draws attention to its constructedness, undercutting any sense of reality, however imagined it may be.

Fig. 2- The presence of the live-action human Spider clashes with the CGI Na’vi.

It is this excess that consistently undercuts Avatar’s attempts at constructing a believable diegetic world. Despite the majority of the film originating within animation software programmes, it is still classed as a live-action film, one in which the wondrous and unusual is constrained within pro-filmic, indexical laws of physics. Scott Bukatman has suggested that the hyper-realist modes of animation currently dominating cinema have forsaken slippery cartoon physics, found in the likes of the Tom and Jerry cartoons, for something more grounded in reality. He identifies the resultant physics of films like Avatar as “constrained plasmastic” (Bukatman 2014, 314), a mode of filmmaking in which “the emergence of a physics more like the cartoonish becomes a more temporary thing that occurs at more or less predictable intervals when danger threatens” (Bukatman 2014, 314). The Way of Water asserts this not only by subjecting Pandora to relatively consistent, indexical physical laws, but by incorporating prominent live-action elements into their otherwise entirely synthetic world. Most notably, this is centred on Spider, a human orphan left over from the war for Pandora detailed in the first Avatar film. The issue is that Spider’s inclusion is essentially the only consistent live-action element. Almost every other character is Na’vi, with every scene featuring some kind of augmented image (Fig. 2).

As a result, the film is constantly flitting between different modes of filmmaking, creating a dizzying mosaic of styles in which the camera is operating very differently. The character of Spider, when static, is filmed before a camera and in front of a green screen. When he comes into contact with Na’vi characters, they are usually filmed using motion-capture. This means an actual indexical human being is interacting with them, their image enhanced or augmented during post-production. In both these instances, a standard digital film camera can be used, one which operates on a single plane and shares the space with the actors. As a result, the pseudo-eye of the spectator is immersed within the film world and the spectator themselves is drawn into an accessible realm. Except, The Way of Water is an action film. Any point at which movement occurs, incorporating these disparate, differently filmed elements requires a switch to multiplanar cameras in which everything happens not before but beyond the lens. Of course, when it comes to special effects, this is nothing new. Countless films, including the wildly popular Marvel Cinematic Universe, employ this technique all the time. In Avatar however, the switches between one style and another, one camera to another, occur so frequently, so frenetically, that the differences between shots are laid bare. So distinctly, in fact, that the switch to animation loses its relative indexicality, and the imagined spaces become increasingly evident as synthetically composed illusions.

Fig. 3- Strange World mixes traditional cel animation with CGI.

Much like Avatar, Strange World focuses on the exploration of an imagined environment in which real-world physics and geometry is applied to non-indexical forms. Like Avatar, a comparison is drawn between the humanoid, recognisable surface world and the mystical subterraneum explored throughout the film, but given that the entirety of Strange World is animated, the film retains a simple consistency that serves to enhance, rather than undercut, these differences. Early on, during diegetic exposition, the film utilises an alternate style which harkens back to traditional cel-animation (Fig. 3). Firstly, this serves a diegetic function, introducing the old-fashioned explorer Jaeger Clade using traditional techniques. More than this, however, it provides a deviation that serves to unify the rest of the film by emphasising its homogeneity. The bizarre sights of the Strange World might be unfamiliar but they are in no way different to the rest of the film world, and are therefore grounded in a pro-filmic reality.

Fig. 4- Jaeger’s staff is routinely obscured by the static boundaries of the camera in Strange World.

Of course, it would be easy to argue that such a consistency is easier to achieve within animation because it doesn’t require special effects to insert fantastical, unfilmable events into the image. Except that, on some level, all animation is a special effect as it creates the illusion of movement and thereby gives life to the inanimate. Without getting too bogged down in contemporary debates about animation, however, I would argue that the main special effect utilised by Strange World in creating a consistent imagined space is the simple illusion of a camera. Even though the world of this film is all happening within the camera, the animators assign a standard frame which at no point alters or deviates. Consequently, as characters wander in and out of frame, parts of the image are cut off, as in the image below where the top of Jaeger’s staff is routinely obscured (Fig. 4).

As Julie Turnock points out, this mirrors recognisable cinematographic techniques and ultimately stabilises the special effects, making them more believable. This is, obviously, a small detail but it relies on one of the basic principles of cinema as a whole. It implies the continuation of the space beyond the camera, granting it a permanence that enforces its reality. If the camera can consistently operate within this imagined environment, no matter how absurd the components of that environment might be, it appears more lifelike, inherently more real.

Special effects and vast imagined spaces are clearly here to stay, and now more than ever, consistency is key. If anything can happen on screen, then extra care needs to be taken in ensuring that fundamental cinematic practices are maintained, that the world we experience feels possible. As Strange World proves, this can often be achieved by something as simple as cutting off the side of your character’s face. 

**Article published: May 12, 2023**

References

Bukatman, Scott. 2014. “Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon Physics; or, The Cartoon Cat in the Machine.” In Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Redrobe, 301-316. London: Duke University Press.

Rehak, Bob. 2018. More Than Meets the Eye. New York: New York University Press

Turnock, Julie, 2015. Plastic Reality. New York: Colombia University Press

Biography

Markus Beeken graduated with a BA in English Literature from Brasenose College, Oxford and an MA in Film Studies from King’s College London. He is now studying for his PhD at King’s College London.