In the thirteen years since James Cameron’s Avatar was released, when people weren’t riffing on how there was nothing memorable about the movie, there were non-stop jokes about the film’s use of the “Papyrus” font. There’s nothing to much to the jokes, only that the biggest movie of all-time would use such a simple font as its primary logo. The gag became the central focus of a hit Saturday Night Live sketch starring Ryan Gosling, playing a man who becomes obsessed with the lack of imagination behind Avatar’s primary font. Though the main logo for Avatar: The Way of Water is no longer in Papyrus, does the movie still use it elsewhere? Spoilers for the movie follow.
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In short, yes, Avatar: The Way of Water DOES feature the Papyrus font. It’s not seen in the film’s opening or closing credits, nor on the title card, but is featured in moments where a character is subtitled. Later in the film a surprising new character is introduced, Payakan the tulkun (essentially a space whale on Pandora). Payakan has a bad reputation apparently, as he’s considered a rogue tulkun that attacked and killed his own kind. After befriending Jake and Neytiri’s son Lo’ak, Payakan speaks to the young Na’vi warrior and reveals the circumstances of what actually happened, and every time the whale talks his underwater moans are translated on screen with font, displayed in Papyrus.
“The conceit is that the tulkun culture and the Na’vi culture are joined together with music, with singing, with dance,” James Cameron explained about the arrival of the space whales in Avatar 2. “The Metkayina, for example, would do tattoo patterns on the tulkun that will express their family story. Adult tulkun who have gone through their coming-of-age ceremony have tattooed bodies and tattooed fins, just as the Metkayina, as teenagers get their first tattoos as well.”
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