Life is a real tiger. Yann Martel "Life of Pi" - a book about survival and great fortitude

Good day! Yesterday we watched the film “Life of Pi”, which has awards: 4 Oscars, one Golden Globe, 2 Emmy nominations, etc.
How do you like it? What impressions did you leave?
Brief plot:

"A man named Pi communicates with the writer Yann Martel, to whom he tells his incredible story. His father named him after a swimming pool in Paris, Piscine Molitor. At school he decides to call himself Pi after the letter Greek alphabetπ. When he was 15 years old, his father, being the director of the zoo, announced that the family would have to leave India, taking half of the animals with them, and sell them in Canada to start a new life.

On the fourth day after stopping in Manila, the ship is caught in a storm, and Pi is the only one who manages to escape. After the storm passes, Pi realizes that the lifeboat contains some of the ship's animals: a hyena, a zebra, Orange the orangutan, and Richard Parker the Bengal tiger. In the end, Pi is left alone in the boat with the tiger. The fight for survival begins."

I wondered how this film was made? How did they drag the tiger onto the boat? How was the actor not afraid to stand so close to the predator?
Revealing secrets...

The fact is that the filmmakers did not want young actor Sarge Sharma was eaten by a real tiger, so it was decided to make it virtual. Director Ang Lee's first concern was whether the computer-generated tiger would look believable in 3D. Having decided to shoot the entire film using stereoscopy, he had to make sure that Richard Parker would appear real and not drawn on a computer. To do this, in 2009, animators from R&H, led by Bill Westenhofer, took a model of Aslan, converted it into 3D, improved it a little, placed it in a boat in which a good half of the film would take place, and presented the result to the director. Ang liked the test animation so much that he no longer doubted the capabilities of modern technology.
To make the fanged character even more like a real tiger, the animators thoroughly studied the habits of these representatives of the feline family. Yann Martel’s book “Life of Pi” also turned out to be very useful, in which the author described in some detail the behavior of a tiger in various situations: how he first accepted a tarpaulin as a shelter, then conquered the territory and guarded it, then fought with a boy who was trying to train him, then accepted the role of a subordinate, and then became the boy’s friend. But it’s one thing to read about it, another thing to show it on the screen.
But all the animators, without exception, admitted that without a real tiger, the computer-generated Richard Parker would not have looked so good. Ang Lee (the director) didn’t have to search long: trainer Terry Le Portier, who supplied tigers for the filming of “Gladiator,” found for him four striped actors who had to portray swimming in the ocean, fighting flying fish, etc.. Having received a hundred-hour film With the basic movements of the tigers in place, experienced animators were finally able to begin the actual creation of a computer-generated Richard Parker. It took them about a year to complete the entire work.
Please click on the picture
They had to sweat for a long time on the tiger skin: to achieve its believable appearance they had to improve special program, which helped to distinguish under the soft fur the muscles rolling during movement. Richard Parker's skin is multi-layered: the first layer is attached to the muscles, and the second layer is placed on top. We must not forget that the fur should look worse and worse over time due to irregular and poor nutrition and stress, which affect the health of the animal.

Everything comes from childhood - behavior, habits, relationships with people and with the whole world. The film “Life of Pi” became a real treasure for me, colorfully describing the formation of an adult. This film tells through images and examples how the foundations of a worldview are formed at a tender age, and how it subsequently influences the rest of one’s life. This is a solid, multi-layered story that captivates you from the very beginning, and gives you the opportunity to reflect on the really important things.

The action begins in India, a former European colony. The main character of the film is the main compositional core of the plot. Events revolve around him, he projects his perception onto the world. Raised in a Western-minded family full of freedom of choice, he grows up under the influence of a devout Hindu mother and a materialistic father. The hero's father runs a luxurious zoo, from which the hero's research begins.

Strange name, given to the hero his uncle, Pisin Molitor Patel - main character shortens to the laconic “Pi” in order to avoid the ridicule of peers and to establish himself in a complex community of people. During the story, the name “Pi” is correlated with the mathematical symbol – π. The number Pi is the number of the golden section, the number of expression of the harmony of the circle, and therefore, to some extent, a number expressing the laws of the universe. Thus, the hero of the film is practically a character with speaking name, but let us pay attention to the fact that he chooses this name for himself.

The main character learns with interest mythological basis of the universe, unites different religious teachings in its worldview, without looking back at stereotypes. As he grows up, he learns exciting lessons that are given to him throughout his measured life.

But due to special political beliefs and the fears of the father, who does not want to stay in the country where Indira Gandhi comes to power, the family decides to move to Canada. Thus, the family of voluntary emigrants quickly leaves their homeland.

This move leads to a disaster, which becomes a turning point in the film. The only survivor of the shipwreck, Pi is left alone with the ocean and the surviving tiger. The tragedy that happened keeps him on the brink of despair and death. But, despite all the trials, the main character remains faithful to the spirit of knowledge, and his worldview becomes his salvation.

During the course of the film, several interconnected semantic chains arise that illustrate what is happening in the boy’s soul.

Tiger, dance and soul.

This is the first important chain to pay attention to. At the moment when Pi first meets the tiger - “Richard Parker”, he is fascinated by the sparkle of the predator’s eyes, in which, as it seems to him, he sees the soul. Afterwards, the materialist father convinces his son with a harsh lesson that only the soul and intellect of the person watching the tiger is reflected in the eyes of the tiger, that is, a psychological projection. But having said this, the father binds the soul of the tiger and the boy. After all, he is convinced that he may have seen a piece of his soul in the eyes of the beast.

After searching boy By the will of fate he sees the girls dancing. He is fascinated by how rhythm and grace can be used to imitate and understand the world. And through the same grace, his beloved girl explains his habits beast of prey- tiger. This is how Pi feels and knows the silent contemplation of nature expressed in the animal world.

God, the tiger and the universe.

The second interesting chain. In Life of Pi, God is first a pagan ruler, then great creator and the artist, then the cruel mythical mocker, and, in the end, the Almighty, maintaining the balance of life and death, giving and taking, giving knowledge.

At the moment of reconciliation with the predator and the proximity of starvation, the tiger becomes a guide for Pi, he helps Pi immerse himself in a bright mystical world, where everything is connected and intertwined, where everything has its own order. At this moment, the tiger becomes a kind of incarnation of God.

Pi sees God in everything that surrounds him and communicates with him through natural phenomena, animals and more. In general, such a pantheistic (pantheism is the deification of the universe) attitude towards the world is manifested more than once in Western cinema. Of the films I know, the film “Alive” contains a similar message. There, the main characters, completely deprived of any adequate hopes for salvation, trust God with their lives, and on foot, in cold and hunger, cross the inaccessible Chilean mountains - the Andes. Being in disastrous conditions, the heroes comprehend the incorporeal God, not manifested, but present everywhere around. The second film containing a similar message is “Outcast,” where the relationship with God is also not determined by religion or other dogma of human civilization. Both of these films deserve a separate review.

But personally, I have a question for the author of Life of Pi. How is it possible - why did Pi’s parents, who left their homeland, die, and he reached a land in which no one was waiting for him, and which was foreign to him? On top of everything else, Pi finds his human happiness there. Didn't God point out the fatal mistake made by the Pi family as they embarked on a desperate journey? Or was this sacrifice made for the sake of his knowledge, like the biblical sacrifice of Christ? What did the author mean by this? This ultimately remains unclear, and perhaps unanswerable.

Vishnu Island, gratitude, farewell.

Throughout the entire time of his suffering, Pi never curses God in his heart. He tries to understand his motives, tries to understand everything. At the same time, on the contrary, he thanks God for life when he is near death. Then he finds himself on a mysterious island.

The island of Vishnu is the allegory that changes the attitude towards Pi’s entire incredible journey. Only at this moment the question arises: either the boy, dying, began to see hallucinations, or initially this story of survival carried a metaphorical meaning. The island of Vishnu is the island of life and death, giving in the morning, taking away at night, the island of God. This is a subtle metaphor, a sleeping God, in whose sleep, according to legend, all people and the whole world were created.

Pi leaves the island, once again taking responsibility for his life on himself. When the barely alive Pi reaches the shore, his predatory friend, barely able to stand on his feet, leaves the hero, but does not say goodbye. It is the fact that the tiger did not say goodbye to him that causes deep resentment in Pi. However, there is another moment in this film where there is no goodbye. Namely: while sailing away, Pi does not remember how he said goodbye to his beloved girl. What could this mean?! Those who have not said goodbye forever will be able to meet again. But if everything is more or less clear with the girl, then who is this Tiger?!

For official version what happened - Pi tells for representatives of the insurance company alternative history. Instead of animals, there are people in it, and he appears as that same tiger. But can we say that Pi fought with his inner beast?! At some point - perhaps, but this beast revealed to him mental strength, which Pi did not know about before and, of course, God.

So what was the story really?! It doesn't matter. But there really is a God in the story with the tiger.

When I was re-reading reviews of this film, I came across the fact that many believe that Vishnu Island and other metaphors shown in the film are destroying the genre. That is, someone seriously decided that this was a film about a new Robinson Crusoe, about the triumph of will and the struggle for survival! As if this film is a banal (precisely banal!) victory of reason over the elements! Well, for my part, I am convinced that the film is not about that at all. And this is said literally from the very beginning.

And finally, let's return to the main character. In Hollywood they love and often exploit the image “ little man" I wrote about him in a review of the film. So, here, in the film “Life of Pi”, there is a real Big Man who inspires, who you want to understand, who you want to believe. And most importantly, you begin to feel this person in yourself.

Scenes of violence between animals that, in conditions of hunger, attack and kill each other. Absent. None.

The film “Life of Pi” is an attempt to indicate the place of man in the world, to show what humanity is, and not humanity. In the film, the author took it upon himself to destroy all the boundaries that separate people. Moreover, he destroyed the boundaries between man and nature, uniting them into a single whole.

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What does this film teach?

Review of the book “Life of Pi”

After watching the movie, I decided to read Yann Martel's book Life of Pi to compare literary work with a film. The impressions from the book were far from positive, and I had to look at the events described in the film in a completely new way.

Let's talk about the book. It is divided into three parts:

1) Life of Pi in India.
2) The story itself of Pi’s 227-day journey with animals in a boat across the Pacific Ocean.
3) Pi swims to Mexico and tells his story to the Japanese. He doesn’t believe it and Pi tells him a second story, where instead of animals there are people.

First of all, it’s very interesting to read, the book grabs you and doesn’t let go until the very end. Because of the numerous scenes of violence, you are in some shock, but you suppress your disgust and read on, because you are interested in how it will all end. The language is amazing, it’s as if the narrator becomes your friend and tells his own story. Very funny, fun and dynamic... at first.

I liked the first part at first. Even more than I liked it. Pi fought for himself and defended his name to his classmates and teachers, who always made stupid jokes about his full name “Pisin”, which means pool in French (this is a separate story in the book). You can immediately see that the boy has character. He can stand up for himself, but not aggressively, not with force, but with his intellect. Next, he plunges into religion.

First to Hinduism, then to Christianity, then to Islam. He wants to love God through all the diversity of faith, to see Him through the eyes of other peoples, and because of this, sometimes awkward meetings and discoveries occur.

The second part is the most voluminous. Reading it, you think: things can’t get any worse. A sixteen-year-old boy in a boat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a tiger. How he got into this boat deserves special attention. The sailors trying to escape saw that there was a hyena in the boat and were afraid to jump into it. So they grabbed Patel who turned up and threw him into the boat so that he would drive away the hyena, or so that it would eat him, or I don’t know what else. Actually, thanks to the kindness of the sailors, the boy remained alive.

A zebra also jumped into the boat, breaking its leg in the process. The tiger arrived later. I note that at first the boy wanted to save the tiger, help him get into the boat, but then, realizing that it was still a dangerous predatory animal, he tried to hit him with an oar. But the tiger still climbed onto the boat.

The details are monstrous and there are a lot of them, everything is colorful and bright. Then the hyena “quarrels” with the orangutan, they fight and the hyena bites off the orangutan’s head. Then a tiger enters the arena, kills the hyena and feeds on the remaining corpses. Pi and the tiger spend 227 days in the boat. Pi is trying to tame the tiger, to show that he is the boss here, and he succeeds, albeit with difficulty. He catches fish, turtles, sharks and other animals to feed himself. Everything would be fine if, again, it weren’t for the details.

Everything is described down to the smallest detail: different ways, with which Pi tried to kill sea creatures, how he enjoyed the blood of turtles, how he bit into still living fish with his teeth when he was too hungry. In fact, what I just said is one hundredth of what is described there.

Along the way, he ends up on a bloodthirsty island, which secretes gastric juice at night and devours everyone it can reach. Another scene that shocked me: the tiger and Pi went blind for a while, Pi began to hear a voice and talk to it. He thought that maybe it was the tiger talking to him, but the owner of the voice had a clear French accent, and the tiger had never been to France. Then it turned out that this was another survivor on another boat, also blind. He asked for water and food, but Pi had nothing either. The survivor climbed onto Pi's boat and tried to strangle him, saying “now I have your heart and your liver,” but accidentally stepped on the tiger, and it tore him to pieces.

And Pi lay and cried that he had lost his friend. Salty water She opened her eyes, he regained his sight and saw a corpse at the bottom of the boat. Amazing, right? This scene was cut in the film, but added love line about a girl who is not in the book. What bothered me as the book progressed was that his such an ardent desire for God was practically not reflected in the second part of the book. No thoughts about being alone with God in the middle of the open ocean, and all the other things that such a devout person could think about.

All the descriptions were very effective: Pi was building a defense against a tiger, he was catching fish, he was making a raft, he was drinking the blood of turtles, or something else. Where has faith gone? Yes, in such conditions the very first thing is to survive, but he spent 227 days there! Okay, it's not that important, basically. These were just flowers. Berries ahead.

So, the third part, and here you understand that things can definitely get worse. Pi swims to the coast of Mexico. The tiger immediately leaves and Pi never saw him again in his life. Pi is found, taken to the hospital, a Japanese man arrives there and wants to find out how the Tsimtsum ship perished and how Pi managed to survive. A transcript of the tape recording of their conversation is provided. Pi tells him that same story (the second part of the book), but the Japanese does not believe that you can survive in a boat with a tiger and asks to tell the truth.

Then Pi tells a different story. In this story, instead of animals, there are people. The zebra is a young sailor, the hyena is a cook, the orangutan Orange is Pi's mother, and the tiger is himself. And this is where you understand that no matter how terrible and cruel everything that happened between these four in the first version of the story was, what actually happened between people is so striking in its monstrosity that there are simply... no words pick up.

Because, be that as it may, animals are animals, they act on instincts and can be forgiven. They want to eat - they kill. But if you put people instead of animals... you get something completely monstrous. Again, don't read this for the impressionable. The cook turned out to be crazy. He persuaded Pi and his mother to hold the sailor while the cook removed his leg, in order to avoid blood poisoning. Naturally, there were no painkillers. The cook cut off his leg with a knife.

Then he tried to catch fish with it and admitted that there was no need to cut off the leg, he just needed bait for the fish. Great, right? Then the cook killed the sailor, cut his body into small pieces and laid it out to dry all over the boat - for bait, so he said. But Pi’s mother once saw him putting these pieces into his mouth. The cook justified himself by saying that Pi also ate. Let me remind you that Pi was a vegetarian all his life. And here you have cannibalism.

I note that in the boat there was some kind of compartment or chest with supplies, fishing gear, etc. - a whole list is given there. So there was no such need for cruelty. But this is just the beginning. The mother and the cook quarrel and a fight breaks out. Pi jumps onto the raft and from there sees the cook cutting his mother with a knife. Then he throws something to Pi, and the boy realizes that he is holding his mother’s head in his hands. Further, as Pi tells it, the cook apparently realized that he had gone too far and was allowing Pi to kill himself. Pi stabbed him with a knife, cut out his heart and ate him. After this, the scene in which Pi cries over the first fish he kills seems hypocritical to say the least. For the rest of the journey, Pi fights the killer tiger within himself.

So we have this: a boy who tried to love God in all his manifestations, trying to survive, was forced to become a murderer and a cannibal. Isn't the story too harsh to make a movie based on it with an age limit of 6+?

Man is undoubtedly the king of nature, but only his subjects are not aware of this. Finding himself alone with Infinity, a person can behave like a wild animal, or he can become a true likeness of God. How does this happen and what motivates us at the decisive moment? What is the general relationship between man, God and nature? The writer set himself these questions when creating the novel “Life of Pi”. After watching his novel, millions of viewers began to ask this question. There is only one answer: the film must be viewed on two planes at once: visual and philosophical.

Pi as a symbol of the harmony of the Universe

Why is the main character's name so strange? Actually his full name even more unusual - in honor of the Parisian swimming pool. Due to the ridicule of those around him, Pisin takes a new name for himself - Pi, shortening it to a letter of the Greek alphabet. This letter is familiar to all students of mathematics; it underlies many formulas. Thanks to it, we can calculate the length of any circle - a smooth, curved, closed line, knowing the length of a straight line segment - the radius. This letter is a real symbol of harmony. The hero of the film, trying to reconcile the ideologies of three religions - Hinduism, Christianity and Islam - is also trying to integrate himself into the formula of peace.

Having left his homeland, in search of a new life, Pi, by the will of fate, finds himself in the middle of the ocean, alone under the endless sky, and in the boat besides him are four animals. A shipwreck, like the collapse of plans and hopes, leads everyone to the brink of death. A storm in the middle of the ocean, like any storm in life, puts everyone on the brink of survival. Man builds his relationships with animals, just as God builds his relationships with people. Animals behave as expected. They do not recognize the primacy of Man, just as people deny God. They are trying to kill him - just like those people who refuse God. They kill each other, like people who are driven by a lust for blood and profit. But Pi wins, and harmony triumphs.

Man and tiger

Stars from heaven are reflected in the ocean abyss. Among this primordial darkness, in the sparkle of billions of stars, a man and a tiger drift in a lonely boat. They achieved mutual understanding with great difficulty. Man had to tame the tiger, just as God had to teach man. They never became friends, but elements of order appeared in their relationship.

There is a full range of emotions here: reluctance to submit, fear, suppression of will, care, recognition of the need for cooperation. Before us is no longer a pair of “man – tiger” or “God – man”, but one, single being. They can save their lives only through cooperation - both in the middle of the ocean and on a “carnivorous” island devouring its inhabitants.

The desired shore gives them freedom from each other. The tiger, without looking back, goes into the jungle. Likewise, a person, having received salvation from God, rarely thanks him even with a glance.

People or animals?

Having returned from wanderings to solid ground, leaving philosophical quests and finding himself in real world, Pi is faced with the need to explain everything that happened to him from a materialistic, atheistic, literal point of view. Instead of the raging elements - the walls of the hospital, instead of the boat, this symbol of movement - a hospital bed. The hero is interviewed by officials representing the interests of the owner of the wrecked ship. The story about the search for truth, self-knowledge and knowledge of God is too unrealistic for an official report.

Then Pi, as if descending from Heaven to earth, gives a completely earthly explanation of what happened. In the boat with him there were indeed not animals from a traveling zoo, but people. It was not the evil hyena that killed the wounded zebra and the female orangutan who stood up for Pi, but the ship's cook, a cannibal and murderer, who killed the wounded sailor and Pi's mother. And it was not the tiger who destroyed the hyena, but Pi himself, feeling the strength of the tiger and animal hatred in himself, killed the cook.

There was no one in the boat except Pi. There was only one, in two essences - human and animal. And if we assume that God created man in his own image and likeness, then the boy Pi was the image of the Divine principle in man, and the tiger was the animal, the bestial principle. This means that he was looking for peace with himself, with his two essences. And only by reconciling them was he able to escape.

The meaning of the film's ending

At the end it sounds main question: Which of the two stories do we accept? How do we understand what happened to Pi? What is more human or animal in us? Will we believe in the philosophical, “high”, or the generally accepted, “logical” explanation that everyone understands?

No one was surprised by the version with murders and cannibalism. No one was surprised by the fact that people behaved like animals at a critical moment. It would seem that this is what should be incredible for us, and not the possibility of swimming together in the same boat with a tiger. That's why the author of the novel, Martel, and director Ang Lee, urge us to take Pi's story at face value: they believe in people.

And for those who still hesitate, there is another explanation. Pi tried to reconcile three religions and love God, but he crossed a moral line. To find salvation, he had to fight the killer tiger that lurked within him. This means that both versions are true, and a battle with the “inner tiger” can await any person after another catastrophe in the middle of the stormy ocean of life.

Life of Pi is an adventure thriller novel published in 2001. A year later, Yann Martel received the prestigious Booker Prize for it. At first glance, the theme of the work is simple - human survival in extreme, even incompatible with life, conditions, but as you read, you understand that the author touches on deep philosophical issues in the book.

Briefly about the author

Yann Martel was born in 1963 in Spain into a family of Canadian diplomats. Thanks to their specific work, Yann managed to visit many countries of the world, on different continents . He met people of other nationalities, studied their traditions, worldview and their idea of God.

He later captured his observations in his most famous work, Life of Pi. Thanks to philosophical education and deep thoughts about life, the work turned out to be deep, insightful, intriguing, extraordinary. The book will be interesting to read for anyone who loves such a fiery combination.

Pi's father is the director of the zoo. Since childhood, the boy knows the habits of almost all animals. At some point, hard times come and the father decides to move to Canada with his family and for the most part zoo. Having completed the required documents, they finally stepped aboard the ship.

From this moment the real adventure begins . The ship was wrecked. Pi miraculously managed to escape in a boat containing a wounded zebra, an angry hyena, a female orangutan and a huge Bengal tiger. The struggle for survival led to a terrible showdown, as a result of which only Pi and Tiger survived.

The boy understands that to save himself he needs to subjugate a huge, evil animal. The 227 days spent at sea are full of trials, mutual hatred, and hopelessness. They felt thirst, hunger, and fear of being alone.

This continued until they managed to wash ashore in Mexico. Afterwards there was a trial about the tragedy that occurred. The boy told a story that was already known to us, but no one believed him. Then he told another version. Reading its details, you will be shocked.

Life of Pi became my 2105th film. Before watching, I, as a seasoned film fan, was sure that this movie would not be able to hook me (I even mentally drew a rating for it, like 6 × 7, for special effects), but I was wrong. This film, in addition to successful directorial and cinematographic discoveries, is an example of an instructive message successfully transferred to the screen philosophical parable. The film is so large-scale that it is impossible to tell about it in 2 words. So, in order. The beginning of the film is quite prosaic: a young Canadian writer comes to an emigrant teacher, on the advice of friends, looking for inspiration for my new book. The Indian promises to tell a story, during which the writer must gain not only new topic for his book, but also for God in his soul, to which the writer only smiled ironically

The history of the Indian begins with the fact that in a certain Indian province there lived a boy with unusual name"Pi." He grew up in a wealthy family that had its own small business like your own zoo. Since childhood, the boy has been in very hothouse conditions, surrounded loving family and animals.

But this idyll comes to an end when Father reports that their business is on the verge of ruin and the only way out he sees is emigration to Canada. At the same time, he also wants to take animals to Canada, which he can sell there, earning good money and investing in a new business.

No sooner said than done, and now we see how the whole family is sailing on a Japanese ship, in the holds of which there are cages with those same animals. The ship is large, so there are a lot of different people sailing on it, some of whom the family gets along with more or less a good relationship, while with others, for example, with the local cook (played by the outstanding Gerard Depardieu), relations do not work out, because he flatly refuses to indulge their Buddhist vegetarian diet.

After a few frames, we, together with the narrator, become witnesses to a monstrous shipwreck, during which, in terrible turmoil, the ship was thrown onto the water. lifeboat It turns out that our hero is a zebra with a broken leg from the Zoo being transported, who fell into the boat from God knows where, as well as a tiger and a hyena hiding under a tarpaulin. Later, in the morning, the boy also rescues an orangutan from the water.

After some time, the hyena comes to its senses and begins to set its own rules, trying to bite either a boy, a monkey, or a zebra. In the end, the slobbering beast's reflexes take precedence over everything else and she pounces on the dying zebra. The cries of the boy and the monkey did not cool the hyena's ardor, and after a few minutes she had already begun her terrible meal. After some more time, the hyena turned its predatory gaze to the monkey, beginning to court it too. Exhausted from hunger and dehydration, she periodically slapped the hyena, but in the end the predatory spirit of the insatiable creature took over and the monkey convulsed at the bottom of the boat in a pool of her own blood. The boy, out of powerlessness, with a blunt knife and screams, rushed at the hyena, which was already ready to plunge its powerful jaws into his throat, but then another participant in the drama came to the fore - the Tiger, who, as it turned out, was resting from the swing under a large tarpaulin. With a lightning strike, he breaks the giggling creature in half. However, this does not make it any easier for the boy, since sailing in a boat with an angry tiger is a more difficult task than traveling with a hyena.

And so, frame by frame, we witness how mutual respect between man and tiger grows, how step by step, thanks to the efforts of a brave young man, the tiger copes with his instincts and becomes his friend and assistant. The journey is extremely long, seasoned with philosophical reasoning, so the scope of this review is not enough to describe all this action. Therefore, we move on to the unexpected ending of the film. After all the misadventures, the boat eventually washes up on the shores of Mexico, the exhausted boy and the tiger crawl ashore and, the next moment, the tiger, without even turning around, dissolves into the jungle. Our hero is finally found by local fishermen and now he’s already lying in the rehabilitation center and answers questions from Japanese investigators (after all, if we remember, the ship was Japanese).

The boy's story about unusual journey The Japanese are not happy with animals, because there are many inconsistencies in it. And, in the end, the meticulous samurai force the boy to tell what really happened. After a few phrases from the boy, the viewer, along with the investigators, understands that the entire previous story is an allegory, an attempt by the child’s consciousness to forget the horror that actually happened to him during these long weeks of wandering in the ocean, an attempt to transform actions and consequences into forms less traumatic for the consciousness . We begin to understand that the zebra with a broken leg is not a zebra, but a young sailor who broke his leg in a fall and was dying painfully from an infection, that the kind orangutan is not an orangutan, but actually the boy’s mother, who miraculously escaped and was also in that boat . A couple of phrases and the viewer realizes that that maddened hyena is none other than that same fat Canadian cook who could not cope with his base instincts and literally turned into a monster in just a week. Having finished off the dying sailor, he began to devour him, and in response to the protests of the boy and his Mother, he only beat them. A couple of days after this incident, during another quarrel, the cook brutally stabbed the boy’s mother, throwing her into the water, where she was torn apart by sharks in front of her son. And then another insight hits the viewer in waves, that after all, the tiger is an allegory. The tiger is the anger that burst out of the pure soul of the child after everything he saw, the tiger is God, this is the a priori highest justice that forced the thin young hand take a knife and rip open the belly of a maddened hyena in human form.

At the very end of the film, the big sad eyes of the narrator (the adult Pi) appear before us again, who invites the dumbfounded writer to choose from two stories one that he considers true. The writer understands all the horror that this man experienced, who clothed this horror in metaphors and allegories, which probably helped him not to go crazy, to stay normal person and even achieve some success in life. And he rightly chooses an allegorical fairy tale story with a tiger, because it is better to believe that under testing conditions the Tiger became more humane than to believe that a person could turn into a vile hyena after a week of difficulties