Ellora’s walls rise beside sun-scorched canyons in Avatar: Seven Havens, a new series that gives the world of bending an almost alien appearance. Its ruined landscapes draw on Moebius and Hayao Miyazaki, artists whose imagined worlds can be beautiful without ever feeling safe.
Available on Paramount Plus, the series leaves behind the familiar scenery of The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. In its place are craggy orange mountains, sprawling deserts, and ominous green storms. Unidentifiable ancient structures protrude from barren ground, suggesting a history far older than the people now struggling to survive there. Polygon describes these environments as hauntingly beautiful, with the feel of an illustrated science-fiction epic rather than a ruined fantasy kingdom.
Avatar creator Bryan Konietzko cited French comics artist Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius, at New York Comic Con 2026. During the same panel, co-creator and producer Ethan Spaulding named Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind as another inspiration. Together, those references help explain the series’ approach to cultures, ecosystems, and the traces of a largely forgotten past.
Moebius gives the ruins room to speak
In Arzach and his work for the science-fiction anthology magazine Métal Hurlant, Moebius developed alien settings that felt desolate yet rich in culture. A lone person might occupy just a small part of a vast composition. The surrounding architecture and terrain supplied the story, reducing the need for lengthy explanations.
That effect also depends on his drawing technique. Precise, crisp lines paired with flat color gradients give his impossible worlds a tactile, dreamlike quality. Fine hatching and immense scale work alongside bizarre geometric geology: sharp sandstone arches, carved monolithic ruins, and endless pastel horizons dwarf the figures below them.
For Polygon, Ellora and the sprawling Harshlands offer the clearest examples of Seven Havens adopting this visual grammar. Instead of painterly backgrounds, the series uses clean linework and strong contrasts between palettes. Its wide shots place Ellora’s walled structures near baked canyons; beyond the massive settlements, empty wastelands stretch beneath green-hued storm clouds. That use of open space recalls Moebius, making the landscape seem ancient, mysterious, and eerily quiet while emphasizing its enormous scale.
The wilderness therefore serves a purpose beyond blocking the path of twin Avatars Pavi and Nisha. Polygon reads it as a monument to a deep, lost history that existed long before either of them. Their surroundings carry a story of their own, rather than simply providing terrain for an adventure.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind offers a related way of looking at a damaged world. Its people survive among the remains of a collapsed civilization, living alongside uncanny ecosystems that are breathtaking and menacing at once. Polygon finds the same balance in Seven Havens: danger doesn’t prevent a landscape from inspiring awe.
There’s a connection between the artists themselves, too. Moebius and Miyazaki admired each other deeply, and Miyazaki often identified Arzach as a profound influence. Polygon sees their shared fascination with otherworldly environments as a fitting foundation for a story about life long after an apocalypse.
A world that no longer trusts its Avatar
The comparison with Nausicaä may extend beyond visual design. A toxic fungal forest chokes the dying world of Miyazaki’s film, whose pacifist heroine learns that humanity must understand and coexist with nature’s destructive forces to survive. Fighting those forces isn’t the answer.
Against that premise, Seven Havens reverses the promise of Korra’s legacy. Although Korra fought for balance, people living centuries later remember her as the catalyst for the world’s destruction rather than its savior. Pavi and Nisha face the consequences of that belief in a society that actively rejects their role as Avatars.
Polygon’s interpretation divides two sides of Nausicaä between the twins. Pavi represents her gentle empathy and desire to heal a scarred world, while Nisha reflects her fierce resolve to defend humanity against immediate threats. Nausicaä could act as a bridge between a wounded planet and desperate people; Pavi and Nisha must try to do so while being rejected. This reframes the earlier film’s central question. Beyond finding out what destroyed the planet, the twins must discover whether the Avatars can restore trust between humanity and a world that regards them as its annihilators.
Speaking to Polygon at NYCC, Spaulding also situated the art direction in a wider animation tradition. “Just in general, 1970s anime and the worldbuilding that they have; fantasy elements that were bigger in this version of Avatar than the other two,” he said. “I think that would encompass all of it, yeah, that’s the melting pot that we were using just for the art direction.”
During the 1970s and into the next decade, growing ambition in science-fiction anime helped make settings more than scenery. Creators used space operas, dystopian futures, and post-apocalyptic landscapes to imagine lives and histories beyond their heroes’ immediate adventures. Backgrounds could carry emotional weight, conveying melancholy, hinting at vanished civilizations, or showing how precarious human survival was. Polygon places Miyazaki’s 1984 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind within that evolution, calling it one of the most enduring expressions of this expansive approach.
Spaulding didn’t specify individual titles in his answer about 1970s anime, despite naming Nausicaä elsewhere on the panel. Polygon offers contextual examples rather than further confirmed influences: Leiji Matsumoto’s Space Pirate Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999, and Space Battleship Yamato, plus Miyazaki’s Future Boy Conan. The source’s author singles out Space Battleship Yamato as a personal favorite.
In these works, sprawling science-fiction settings contain ruined landscapes, decaying monolithic relics, and layers of history. Viewers can assemble fragments of a larger world for themselves. Rather than limiting fantasy to elemental powers and magical creatures, the stories let their environments participate in the action. Polygon argues that Seven Havens follows the same approach, giving its world a scale and an unresolved mystery that seem to extend beyond the central story.
Hiroshi Yoshida’s elegant woodblock prints also appear among the artistic influences Polygon identifies. Its conclusion is that these references make the ruined world of Avatar feel full of possibility and fresh to explore, without stripping away the damage that defines it.
