Life and animals on the island. Yann Martel "Life of Pi" - a book about survival and great fortitude
"Life of Pi" - film adaptation famous novel about the adventures of an Indian teenager in the ocean. Director - Ang Lee.
The plot of the film Life of Pi
Pi is an Indian boy from a somewhat unusual family. His father owns the local zoo, so main character Since childhood, he lived a fairly prosperous life and learned to understand animals quite well.
When Pi was a teenager, his family, for political reasons, decided to move to Canada along with some of the zoo animals. During the journey, the ship encounters a storm and is wrecked. A little later, Pi regains consciousness on a small boat, where a Bengal tiger, a hyena, an orangutan and a zebra also survived. Animals feed on each other on a boat, but the hero needs to prove to the animals which of them is a representative of the dominant species. Also, the young man builds personal associations with each “neighbor” on the boat, which characterize some of his personal traits.
Then the boat docks at a mysterious island, where new unusual adventures await Pi...
About the film Life of Pi
The picture is based on novel of the same name Yann Martel, published in 2001.
Production of the film " Life of Pi"began back in 2003 - then executive producer Fox 2000 Pictures Elizabeth Gubler launched the project. The first version of the script was written by Dean Gorgaris, and was appointed as director M. Night Shyamalan. The latter was chosen because of his nationality - the director is also from India. It was planned that Shyamalan will finish work on " Mysterious forest" and will immediately begin work on the film in " Life of Pi" Having rewritten the script, he nevertheless abandoned this work and took up the film " Girl from the water", which subsequently failed miserably and was reviled by critics. Subsequently, the Indian director said that he did not like the ending of the book, so he had no desire to film it.
In 2005, Fox 2000 Pictures tried to attract Alfonso Cuarona, but he chose own project « Child of man».
A year later the film Life of Pi"should have filmed Jean-Pierre Jaunet according to the script Guillaume Laurent; filming dates were even set in India for mid-2006. However, for his own reasons, Jaune also left the project.
In 2009, he signed up to direct. Ang Lee, winner of two Oscar awards for the films “ Brokeback Mountain"(2005), " Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"(2000). The planned budget was $70 million, but due to the high cost, filming was postponed for some time. However, this time everything ended well, and the team began work at the beginning of 2011. Filming took place in India, Taiwan, Montreal, Canada and China.
Ang Lee chose main role A 17 year old student named Suraj Sharma, who had never acted in a movie before.
In film " Life of Pi"also played Tobey Maguire (« Spider-Man», « Favorite"), but the director decided to cut out scenes with the actor, since his face was “too familiar” to the audience. The episodes were re-shot with the participation of another actor - Rafa Spella.
The film premiered on September 28, 2012 as part of the New York International Film Festival. Movie " Life of Pi"received good critical reviews, in particular for the visuals and direction. The film was supposed to be released in wide release in December, but due to the premiere of the blockbuster " The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey"(2012) release was postponed a month earlier so that the film did not have a direct and strong competitor.
The start of distribution in Russia is January 3, 2013, the Twentieth Century Fox CIS company is responsible for organizing the screenings.
The film was shot in stereoscopic 3D format.
Director: Ang Lee.
Cast: Siraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Rafe Spall, Gerard Depardieu, Adil Hussain.
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? In fact, his full name is even more unusual - in honor of a Parisian swimming pool. Because of the ridicule of others, Pisin takes a new name for himself - Pi, shortening it to the letter 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 obey, 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.
In the movie Life of Pi, one of the main characters is named Richard Parker and he is a tiger. He plays important role in the story, and many viewers liked the story of this animal. You can learn about it in this article complete information based on the plot of the picture.
Beginning of the plot and first appearance in the film
The story of the picture begins with a guy named Pi telling his story famous writer Yann Martel is already in Canada, who wants to capture it. It all starts at the time when the young man was still going to school. over it full name Many people laughed at Pisin, but the guy didn’t care. At the age of fifteen, the parents told the main character that they would have to leave India. Since the father was the director of the zoo, they took some of the animals with them in order to sell them in Canada. Among their number was Richard Parker, who took his name from a hunter who caught a tiger. Initially they wanted to call him Thirsty, but it turned out differently.
Development of history
While Richard Parker and the other animals were on board, the Pisin family left India on a Japanese ship. After four days of sailing in Manila, they were caught up in a storm that the protagonist had never seen before. He went out on deck to enjoy the elements. At this time, the wave had already carried several sailors overboard, and Pi was thrown into the nearest boat. The fifteen-year-old boy was promised to find his parents, but fate decreed otherwise. There was a cook with him in a small boat, but a zebra threw him out of there. The animals broke free, and therefore in the boat there was also a hyena, an orangutan named Orange, and the last guest was the tiger Richard Parker.
The main character had already discovered all this after the storm, when the ship drifted far from their cargo ship. A struggle for food began in the middle of open water. A hyena kills a zebra whose leg was broken. After this, she targets Pi, but the monkey saves the character and becomes a victim herself. The tiger was hiding under the tripwire at that time and at the right moment jumped out at the hyena, which had no chance to survive.
Continuing the fight
Richard Parker becomes the only predator on the boat who poses a threat to the life of the protagonist. That is why the guy builds a small raft and ties it with a rope to the boat. He transfers all the supplies there, and he himself makes attempts to somehow become number one in the boat. Since Pi is a vegetarian, he could only eat biscuits, which were stored in the rescue ship. They, along with the raft, are scattered across the depths of the sea by a whale, which a careless guy disturbed at night. Starvation began, which ended in a fierce struggle for food at the time of the invasion of flying fish. A large one was thrown aboard with them. predatory representative. Richard Parker and Pi began to fight in every possible way for him, but the main character, thanks to perseverance, won. Their journey together did not end there.
Final scenes
Because of the tiger's name, it is often confused with the main character in novels. American writer Richard Stark. Parker is his last name, and therefore there is confusion in the names. In the film “Life of Pi” the main character and the animal managed to visit a wide variety of islands and see great amount sea inhabitants. One day, on a small piece of land, Pisin found a human tooth in a flower.
Fate was favorable to the two travelers, and they were able to reach the shores of Mexico. During this time, Richard Parker lost a lot of weight, but managed to jump over the guy when they ended up on the beach. The tiger immediately saw the rainforest and headed there. In front of the entrance, he stopped for a while, and then simply ran into it. The main character was upset by the fact that their relationship ended at such a moment, but Richard never returned to say goodbye.
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 Greek alphabet letter π. 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 a predator?
Revealing secrets...
The fact is that the filmmakers did not want young actor Sarja Sharma ate 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.
