Antonio Casilli wrote a blog post about the movie Avatar. His post is a summary of a paper he wrote for the journal Communications discussing the value and meaning of the color blue in works of cyberculture. He discusses the antecedents to the avatar concept and how it has been adopted and transformed from its initial religious connotations by more modern works of our culture. He also suggests that the aliens in Avatar are blue because they are icons of mythological precursors like Krishna. I agree with what he says. I also think he’s got it mostly wrong.
Stop for a moment and imagine as many blue animals as you can. Chances are most of you thought of a bird or an invertebrate and a few of you imagined an amphibian or fish. Some of you might even have had a primate or cetacean come to mind. But it turns out blue is an unusual hue for many terrestrial animals, with very few of them able to actually produce truly blue pigments. The blue colors that you see in birds are created through structural properties of the feathers, or iridescence. That is, the colors of a blue jay are the result of the scattering of short wavelengths of incident light on the surface of the feathers and not from any intrinsic colors. If you hold up one of its feathers to the light, you will see that the blue color disappears. Most vertebrates get their colors from melanins (blacks, browns and grays), carotenoids (reds, oranges and yellows) and porphyrins (reds, browns and some greens). And so most vertebrates are a dingy sort of earth tone. The color blue is alien to life on earth. And I suspect that has as much to do with why the aliens in Avatar are blue as the reasons that Casilli proposes. It immediately sets the aliens apart as being otherworldly, like the Andorians of Star Trek.
More blue for thought
It is for the reasons above that early film compositing started with blue screens, because it is in opposition to the skin tones of actors and is easier to separate. For technical reasons, green screens are more common now. There are occasions when effects companies will use magenta screens but those shots do not usually involve actors. It’s also for this reason that food companies rarely market blue foods (except as extreme cuisines). Blue foods seems unnatural and unappetizing to many people.
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See also, the science of Avatar:
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