His family owns a zoo and he becomes fascinated by various religions early in his life, from Hinduism and Christianity to Islam. He tried to make a spiritual connection with their zoo’s tiger named Richard Parker. He believes animals have souls but his dad says they’re nothing but wild beasts and stops him from doing so.
When his dad decides for their family to move to Canada due to economic constraints, at a time when Pi experiences first love, they take all their animals along with them aboard a freighter crossing the Pacific Ocean. But their ship encounters a violent storm along the way. Pi is the only one who survives on board a lifeboat, along with a zebra, a baboon, a hyena and the ferocious tiger Richard Parker who looks at him as his next meal. It’s to the credit of Ang Lee’s storytelling prowess on film that he’s able to hook our attention with only the boy and tiger interacting most of the time while they’re lost at sea. With the vast ocean as his canvass, he fills up the screen with glorious spectacular imagery best seen in 3-D, like a huge whale shooting up from the water, thousands of glowing jellyfish that light up the night, schools of flying fish, a deadly floating island overpopulated with meerkats. The movie couldn’t have been made without today’s state of the art CGI technology. The way the storm and the sinking of the ship was staged is surely awesomely achieved, but even more so is the tiger who is even shown losing weight in the course of the film.
Several actors play Pi on the various stages of his life, but the one given most screen time is the teenage Pi, Suraj Sharma, a total newcomer. Since the tiger is CGI, he’s mostly interacting with no one in their supposed scenes together. The special effects work on the living, breathing tiger is so realistically persuasive you’d never suspect for a moment that it’s all CGI. Suraj does a splendid job with the imaginary tiger whether he’s screaming his lungs out in fright or anger, or even when he’s not saying anything while they’re on screen together.
The film’s themes are both spiritual and psychological. One is easily touched by the mystery of faith shown here but when insurance investigators refuse to believe Pi’s story after he’s rescued in Mexico, he comes up with another one that makes everything psychologically plausible. This includes the casting of Gerard Depardieu in a short role as a rude chef as part of the alternative explanation, which sounds so anti-climactic while Pi narrates it. As an engrossing adventure story of survival, no doubt the film comes out so full of marvellous and wonderful scenes, but it fails to achieve the deeper meaning it aims to convey to its viewers due to the rather weak ending.
