"On Learning to Fly at the Movies: Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon"1

"The cinema isn't I see, it's I fly."—Nam June Paik²

In a familiar sort of Hollywood coincidence, two 3D, computer-rendered, animated movies about learning to fly dragons hit multiplex screens only three months apart. Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) and How to Train Your Dragon (Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, 2010) not only share a central drama, they also both specialize in a particular perceptual effect that has been with the cinema since its earliest years. Starting from their very first shots, they both elicit from viewers a giddy, as-if sensation of flying through space: the illusion of bodily movement. Flying in these films is not merely a narrative or thematic point; it is a matter of technical, formal, aesthetic, and perceptual elaboration.³ In particular, each film offers a remarkable and remarkably effective sequence in which their protagonists—Jake Sully and Hiccup—learn to fly their dragons. In what follows, I submit these "learning-to-fly" sequences, and their attendant visceral, immersive illusion of bodily movement, to sustained analytical and phenomenological scrutiny.⁴

As both Philip Rosen and John Belton have argued, "digital cinema" is indeed a false revolution: these films each use an impressive array of digital technologies in the service of the old-fashioned, quintessentially cinematic business of manifesting a world onscreen in which to immerse viewers. The widespread adoption of digital technologies in the cinema nonetheless once again raises the problem of technology in the cinema. The flying sequences in Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon show that, as the cinematic impression of reality stubbornly persists (even after digital technology's ostensible liquidation of photography's strong indexical bond), the impression of reality must not in the first instance be a matter of an ontology of the cinematic image.⁵ Rather, the impression of a world unfolding before us arises from the cinema's perceptual modulation of its viewers. Drawing on Vivian Sobchack's phenomenological account of camera movement and Stephen Prince's account of "perceptual realism"—albeit with each account qualified by the ecological approach to perception pioneered by American perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson—I argue for an outline a method that I call "ecological phenomenology," which underscores the ways in which films such as Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon modulate the embodied perception of their viewers to elicit an immersive sense of a world onscreen. In short, animated and computer-rendered films, instead of leading us to articulate a strong difference between photochemical and digital ontologies of cinematic images, can occasion an understanding of the cinema, even across its long history, as a specifically perceptual technology.

Of course, Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon are markedly different films, and not only in terms of the intended audience. Avatar was from the first seen as an objective correlative for, and possibly the apotheosis of, the technological transformation of the cinema by digital technologies (at least, until it was superseded by Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity [2013]). In place of the traditional movie camera, Cameron innovated significant 3D-camera and motion-capture technology.⁶ Avatar follows on the by-now humdrum affair of what Julie Turnock (2015) has called "composite mise-en-scène": the composited image, frequently green screened, of actors, props, animated characters, and sets (both built and rendered) to create a (hopefully, usually) seamless world. To this, Cameron adds his "handheld 'virtual camera'" and the "SimulCam" system, which really do radically change how such composite blockbusters are made—to the point, perhaps, where their mise-en-scène may no longer be said to be composite, but wholly, plastically synthetic.⁷ Indeed, Cameron deploys all of this bleeding-edge tech to manifest onscreen his astonishing world Pandora (technically, a moon) and to immerse his audience in it. That evident virtuosity lies precisely in how deeply Avatar immerses us a world, one richer than ever before. Avatar is emphatically cinematic cinema—the sort of film that viewers must see on the big screen.

How to Train Your Dragon, on...