Avatar

Fantastic! is the exact word to describe the movie Avatar. It was indeed a fantasy with... just...just great revolutionary 3D effect.
The story (spoiler warning!) is about avatars of the native humanoids (human-like creatures: for those compiling a vocabulary list) called Navi living on a planet named Pandora, some light-years away from Earth. There is a human project going on on the planet to mine a precious rock that is worth some billion yen per kilo and considered to save Earth from energy crisis with its power to cancel out the gravitational force.
Jake Sully, confined to his wheelchair for his paralyzed legs, is sent to the planet to join the project. Since the atmosphere of the planet is toxic to human beings, they have launched the Avatar Program, in which they create a hybrid creature between a human and a Navi by mixing their DNAs, so that, having the body of the Navi, they can survive the toxic air. The avatars are so made to be driven by the consciousness of the human who provides the DNA. Jake has been called because an avatar was created with his deceased brother's DNA and he, as a similar DNA holder, has been considered the only one to be able to drive the avatar. He is now reborn in the avatar's body and feels free when he finds himself walking and running to anywhere he wants. He, as avatar, is given a mission to infiltrate the Navi, who have become a major obstacle to mining the gravity cancellation ore.
From then on, the story gets a bit formulaic. He falls in love with a female Navi instructor, is taken in by her clan, learns to become one of them, and stands up against humans who wages an epic battle with Navi. But even while this predictable story line was being told, the display with 3D technology kept me riveted. It was just fantastic. I sometimes got in the illusion that I was inside the picture, instead of being just an audience watching something irrelevant to me.
By the way some ideas in the movie looked quite familiar to me. It was Hayao Miyazaki's animes that I remembered; "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind(風の谷のナウシカ" and "Laputa, Castle in the sky（天空の城ラピュタ）". It seems fairly certain that James Cameron watched them and perhaps stole(or should I say got inspired by?) some ideas from the mangas. The scene of huge rocks, with trees on top and roots hanging out from under, floating in the air was exactly like what I have seen in Laputa (and for that matter the convoy of planes flying among them), and the gravity cancellation ore is like "flying stone (飛行石）". The fightback of Nature by calling out all the animals in the forest reminded me of the counterattack of the armada of huge caterpillar-like insects called オーム that got raged with the attack from greedy humans in Nausicaa. The forest populated with lots of fantastic plants and animals is also a resemblance to 腐海の森. As far as I saw, there was no name of Hayao Miyazaki in the end title credit. That's not polite and I disrespect James Cameron for it.
Am I the only one who see the resemblance?