Marcus Parcus spotted the similarity between James Cameron's lithe, catlike aliens and a character from the sixth issue of Timespirits, a short run comic by Steve Perry and Tom Yeates published in 1985. The long ears, the blue skin, the stripes, the lack of clothes all bear a striking resemblance to the Na'vi and Neytiri in particular. She even takes down her fair share of military men in the course of the issue. Parcus wonders, was Cameron a fan of the series?

You can see more pages from the issue, compared with shots of Neytiri at Marcus Parcus' Livejournal.

[via Super Punch]

As part of his worldbuilding for Avatar, James Cameron sought to create an actual language for the Na'vi to speak on screen. So he tapped Paul Frommer, a Hollywood linguistic consultant and a professor of clinical management at the University of California's Marshall School of Business. Cameron has a few dozen Na'vi words including characters' names, and he looked to Frommer to build a language that was melodious and exotic, but still pronounceable by human actors.

Frommer developed syntactical rules for Na'vi as well roughly 1000 words between the movie and the video game. He limited the syllables spoken by the Na'vi in order to shape the language, and added ejectives, voiceless consonants that occur in a minority of the world's spoken languages. Of course, there were limits on what Frommer could bring to the language:

"The constraint, of course, is that the language I created had to be spoken by humans," Frommer said. "I could have let my imagination run wild and come up with all sorts of weird sounds, but I was limited by what a human actor could actually do."

Like Klingon, Na'vi could be learned and spoken, and Frommer hopes Avatar fans will take to the musical Na'vi the way Star Trek fans have learned the more gutteral Klingon. He says that information about the language will be made available online, and he's looking forward to the day when he can converse with another human being in Na'vi.

It may be too early to start translating Hamlet into the language of Pandora's blue aliens, but it's fascinating to read about Frommer's process and the detail that went into creating Na'vi.

USC professor creates an entire alien language for 'Avatar' [Hero Complex]

[via Screen Crave]

This morning, the folks over at /Film received and posted the photo above, which depicts Sam Worthington as paraplegic war veteran Jake Sully as he sits in front of the tank holding his Avatar. The Avatar, a body grown using a combination of human and Na'Vi DNA, requires a "driver," whose brain is hooked up to the Avatar. The Avatar not only allows Sully to blend in with the Na'Vi, it gives him the opportunity to walk again.

The picture offers a fairly good, if water-logged, sense of how Cameron's Na'Vi look, although we don't get the full effect of their lankiness (or their dexterous tails). It's also worth noting that Fox has actually approved the release of this images, suggesting as we get closer to Avatar Day, we might be seeing more images and information from the tight-lipped production.

You can also check out the hi-res version here.

The First Official Photo From James Cameron's Avatar [/Film]

So what have we learned from these silhouettes of Avatar? They have three toes, long hair, possibly cat ears (see small bumps on their heads). They have a tail (excellent!). They can control a massive bow and arrow and never eat — ever (look at that waist!). According to Marketsaw, these t-shirts were raffled off by actor Sam Worthington who stars as Jake Sully, a paralyzed marine who undergoes a medical procedure to live his life through his Avatar, a 10-foot tall blue alien. There is plenty of talk that this image is the silhouette of Zoe Saldana's alien love character, who in an interview with io9 told us that this lady will kick some serious ass. Zoe's character is totally alien and completely CG, and falls in love with Jake Sully.

[Marketsaw]