You might not expect that the man who directed three of the four highest-grossing movies in history would spend much time on the defensive. But before the press got their first look at the new Avatar movie, Fire and Ash, James Cameron wanted to clear something up. In a video introduction to early screenings, the most successful director of all time wanted us all to know: “Avatar movies are not made by computers.”
It’s been 16 years since the first Avatar, and untold thousands of words in print and hours of video have been devoted to educating audiences, journalists, and, perhaps most critically, Oscar voters, about the process behind the movies. And yet Cameron and his actors are still at pains to underline the nature of their contributions. “I can imagine how people would think, ‘Oh, it’s cartoons,’ ” Kate Winslet, who plays the Na’vi priestess Ronal, says in the official documentary Fire and Water: Making the Avatar Films, in a clip that also appears in that videotaped preamble. “But it is really those actors, putting life and blood into every single one of those characters. … Everyone’s really doing it, more than you could possibly imagine.”
With Fire and Ash, Cameron has the added burden of convincing viewers that the movie was made entirely without the use of generative A.I. (The “generative” part is key, since Cameron’s movies have employed machine learning techniques for decades.) But his most longstanding gripe is when people confuse the films’ revolutionary production method with a different kind of film altogether. “It drives me nuts when people say, ‘Oh, Sigourney voiced Kiri,” he says in the documentary, referring to the teenage alien Sigourney Weaver plays in both The Way of Water and Fire and Ash. “On an animated film, you sit at a podium, it takes you a day, maybe two days, to voice a character. Sigourney worked on these movies for 18 months.”
A year and a half is a very long shoot for a live-action movie, but it’s not the longest part of making any of the Avatars. According to Cameron, filming for both The Way of Water and Fire and Ash was mostly complete in the fall of 2020, but it took two years to finish the first and three more for the second, a period during which visual effects artists were creating what, for large chunks of the films, amounts to virtually everything you see on screen. And so, while I don’t want to pick a fight with the most powerful person in the movie business, that fact leads us towards a controversial but inescapable conclusion: Avatar is an animated movie.
The distinction is a particularly sensitive one for the actors. Studios tend to shy away from releasing behind-the-scenes footage of scenes involving large amounts of visual effects, mostly because it tends to make the process look a little bit silly. (Could you stay wrapped up in the latest Marvel movie, for example, if you knew that Tom Holland’s Spider-Man suit was actually a hairnet and a beige leotard?) But the Avatar series has graced us with a comparative wealth of material, particularly with Fire and Ash. In what amounts to an illustrated lecture on the performance-capture process, Stephen Lang, who plays the bellicose antagonist Quaritch, says in a featurette released last week that for the earlier movies, Cameron was reluctant to reveal too much, like a magician concealing the technique behind his tricks. “The mystery was maintained, the magic preserved,” Lang concludes. “But the price paid was a lack of understanding and appreciation,” a trade-off he admits to finding “both wearying and frustrating.”
It’s astonishing to watch the footage of Ronal emitting bone-deep wails over the death of a majestic tulkun and learn, via Fire and Water, that Winslet’s scene partner was a pool noodle zip-tied to a metal grate. Even moments that look entirely practical, like the footage of human tulkun hunters piloting their boats through Pandora’s seas, involve some element of digital reality; according to Cameron, not a single shot was filmed on the open ocean. (The director of The Abyss and Titanic may love the deep sea, but he’s learned better than to make another movie on it.) So it’s understandable that Cameron wants those actors to get full credit for their efforts, and for his. In making the Avatar films, he told Fire and Ash’s audience, “I work as hard with the actors as I have on any live-action film.”
To James Cameron’s way of thinking, the Avatar movies “basically created a new form of cinema,” and it’s true that nothing made before, or even after, the first Avatar feels anything like it. (There have, technically, been other attempts to make movies so extensively reliant on motion capture and virtual environments, but most, like The Polar Express or Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, are so dreadful they’re better off forgotten.) So perhaps they do belong in a category of their own, but right now, that category doesn’t exist, and I’m not sure it’s wise or helpful to concede the point, at least without a little soul-searching. Big-budget action movies regularly include shots and even full sequences that are created entirely with digital effects, but they’re still considered live-action because they’re mostly composed of things that exist in the real world. You’re watching a real person drive a real car—or at least pretend to drive one—even if the scenery outside their window might have been shot somewhere else, or never shot at all. Even the Planet of the Apes series shoots its simian actors on physical sets and in real locations. In animated movies, by contrast, nothing you’re looking at is real. That’s obvious when you’re looking at, say, a mystical K-pop star slicing a glowing sword through a room full of otherworldly demons, but it’s equally true when you’re watching a pride of real-seeming lions prowl across a virtual savannah. Disney’s attempt to rebrand a photorealistic mode of digital animation as “live-action” doesn’t obscure a simple fact: Nothing you’re looking at ever existed.
The Avatar series’ process differs substantially from the way most digital animation is made. But back in the mid-’90s, you could have found plenty of people willing to argue that real animation involves drawing by hand, not tinkering with algorithms. And while some consider it insulting to lump performance capture together with the expressive practice of building an animated performance from scratch—fine-tuning not just a character’s facial expressions but their body language, making innumerable decisions about how natural or exaggerated you want them to be at each moment—animators have often taken their cues from actors’ physical performances, whether it was tracing over their movement one frame at a time or studying footage of them in the recording booth.
That is, of course, not the same thing as applying what Cameron has called “digital makeup” to the faces of Avatar’s actors. But while Cameron and his actors insist that, as Sam Worthington puts it in Fire and Water, “there is not one thing that you see us do that is animated,” the production footage tells a different story. When you watch Weaver side-by-side with Kiri or Winslet next to Ronal, they don’t line up precisely. The latter character doesn’t even look much like the actress who plays her; when I saw The Way of Water, I kept wondering when Kate Winslet was going to show up, until I realized I’d already been watching her for several minutes. That’s not to say Winslet doesn’t deserve credit for the performance, but it might mean she shares it with the artists who created what we actually see on screen.
In practical terms, it might not matter much whether we think of Avatar as live action or animation. The Oscars are certainly happy to include it out. Even before the first movie was released, the Academy’s animation branch rewrote its eligibility rules to deliberately exclude movies like Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, defining an animated movie as one “in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique.” (It was the same year that Ratatouille was released with an end-credits guarantee that the movie was “100% genuine animation,” with “no motion capture or any other performance shortcuts” involved.) They’ve also taken issue with the “interpolated rotoscoping” technique used in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and Apollo 10 ½, the latter of which was initially rejected for relying too heavily on live-action footage.
Where the Oscars are concerned, these arguments have as much to do with protecting existing power structures—and, frankly, jobs—as they do with issues of aesthetic purity, which is why the award has often gone to a middling studio movie produced within the Hollywood system rather than a more accomplished one produced outside it. (Am I still mad about Soul beating Wolfwalkers in 2021? Maybe.) And Avatar does present a challenge to those structures—although, given their astronomical budgets, there’s not much danger of anyone flooding the market with knockoffs.
But it’s a challenge to which the industry could stand to rise. Of the highest-grossing movies of 2025, five of the top seven are either animated movies or live-action remakes of them. But the highest by far is one most Americans have never even heard of: Ne Zha 2. The Chinese sequel has already amassed the fifth-highest box-office gross of all time—it’s only $115,000 shy of Titanic—and while its wacky remix of 16th-century mythology can be unabashedly goofy (there is plenty of room for fart jokes), it also features a sense of epic storytelling that feels more like The Lord of the Rings than the soft-edged family fare of most American animation studios. It’s not a coincidence that filmmakers such as Cameron and Linklater are pushing the boundaries of what techniques count as animation at they same time they’re expanding the kinds of stories that the medium is allowed to tell. Watching majestic ships sail through the air, held aloft by giant balloons that glow with opalescent light, you’re in a world that only the combination of Cameron’s visionary imagination and the talents of the world’s greatest visual artists could bring to life—and never once do you think, “Oh, it’s cartoons.” If we can convince James Cameron that he’s a great animation director, maybe he’ll admit to being one.