Movie Analysis film showing:
Title: Life of Pie
Genre: FICTION -FANTASY
Characters:
Piscine Molitor Patel
(Pi) - The protagonist of the story. Piscine is the narrator for
most of the novel, and his account of his seven months at sea forms the bulk of
the story. He gets his unusual name from the French word for pool—and, more
specifically, from a pool in Paris in which a close family friend, Francis
Adirubasamy, loved to swim. A student of zoology and religion, Pi is deeply
intrigued by the habits and characteristics of animals and people.
Richard Parker - The Royal Bengal tiger with whom Pi shares his lifeboat. His
captor, Richard Parker, named him Thirsty, but a shipping clerk made a mistake
and reversed their names. From then on, at the Pondicherry Zoo, he was known as Richard Parker. Weighing 450 pounds and about nine feet long, he
kills the hyena on the lifeboat and the blind cannibal. With Pi, however,
Richard Parker acts as an omega, or submissive, animal, respecting Pi’s
dominance.
The Author - The narrator of the (fictitious) Author’s Note, who inserts
himself into the narrative at several points throughout the text. Though the
author who pens the Author’s Note never identifies himself by name, there are
many clues that indicate it is Yann Martel himself, thinly disguised: he lives
in Canada, has published two books, and was inspired to write Pi’s life story
during a trip to India.
Francis Adirubasamy - The elderly man who tells the author Pi’s story during a
chance meeting in a Pondicherry coffee shop. He taught Pi to swim as a child
and bestowed upon him his unusual moniker. He arranges for the author to meet
Pi in person, so as to get a first-person account of his strange and compelling
tale. Pi calls him Mamaji, an
Indian term that meansrespected uncle.
Ravi - Pi’s
older brother. Ravi prefers sports to schoolwork and is quite popular. He
teases his younger brother mercilessly over his devotion to three religions.
Santosh Patel - Pi’s father. He once owned a Madras hotel, but because of
his deep interest in animals decided to run the Pondicherry Zoo. A worrier by
nature, he teaches his sons not only to care for and control wild animals, but
to fear them. Though raised a Hindu, he is not religious and is puzzled by Pi’s
adoption of numerous religions. The difficult conditions in India lead him to
move his family to Canada.
Gita Patel - Pi’s beloved mother and protector. A book lover, she
encourages Pi to read widely. Raised Hindu with a Baptist education, she does
not subscribe to any religion and questions Pi’s religious declarations. She
speaks her mind, letting her husband know when she disagrees with his parenting
techniques. When Pi relates another version of his story to his rescuers, she
takes the place of Orange Juice on the lifeboat.
Satish Kumar - Pi’s atheistic biology teacher at Petit Séminaire, a
secondary school in Pondicherry. A polio survivor, he is an odd-looking man,
with a body shaped like a triangle. His devotion to the power of scientific
inquiry and explanation inspires Pi to study zoology in college.
Father Martin - The Catholic priest who
introduces Pi to Christianity after Pi wanders into his church. He preaches a
message of love. He, the Muslim Mr. Kumar, and the Hindu pandit disagree about
whose religion Pi should practice.
Satish Kumar - A plain-featured Muslim
mystic with the same name as Pi’s biology teacher. He works in a bakery. Like
the other Mr. Kumar, this one has a strong effect on Pi’s academic plans: his
faith leads Pi to study religion at college.
The Hindu Pandit - One of
three important religious figures in the novel. Never given a name, he is
outraged when Pi, who was raised Hindu, begins practicing other religions. He
and the other two religious leaders are quieted somewhat by Pi’s declaration
that he just wants to love God.
Meena Patel - Pi’s
wife, whom the author meets briefly in Toronto.
Nikhil Patel (Nick) - Pi’s son.
He plays baseball.
Usha Patel - Pi’s
young daughter. She is shy but very close to her father.
The Hyena - An ugly,
intensely violent animal. He controls the lifeboat before Richard Parker
emerges.
The Zebra - A
beautiful male Grant’s zebra. He breaks his leg jumping into the lifeboat. The
hyena torments him and eats him alive.
Orange Juice - The
maternal orangutan that floats to the lifeboat on a raft of bananas. She
suffers almost humanlike bouts of loneliness and seasickness. When the hyena
attacks her, she fights back valiantly but is nonetheless killed and
decapitated.
The Blind Frenchman - A fellow
castaway whom Pi meets by chance in the middle of the ocean. Driven by hunger
and desperation, he tries to kill and cannibalize Pi, but Richard Parker kills
him first.
Tomohiro Okamoto - An
official from the Maritime Department of the Japanese Ministry of Transport,
who is investigating the sinking of the Japanese Tsimtsum. Along with his assistant, Atsuro Chiba,
Okamoto interviews Pi for three hours and is highly skeptical of his first
account.
Atsuro Chiba - Okamoto’s
assistant. Chiba is the more naïve and trusting of the two Japanese officials,
and his inexperience at conducting interviews gets on his superior’s nerves.
Chiba agrees with Pi that the version of his ordeal with animals is the better
than the one with people.
The Cook - The human
counterpart to the hyena in Pi’s second story. He is rude and violent and
hoards food on the lifeboat. After he kills the sailor and Pi’s mother, Pi
stabs him and he dies.
The Sailor - The human
counterpart to the zebra in Pi’s second story. He is young, beautiful, and
exotic. He speaks only Chinese and is very sad and lonely in the lifeboat. He
broke his leg jumping off the ship, and it becomes infected. The cook cuts off
the leg, and the sailor dies slowly.
Setting: India,
Pacific Ocean, Mexico and Canada.
Plot:
Life of Pi is divided into three sections.
In the first section, the main
character, Pi, an adult, reminisces about his childhood. He was named Piscine
Molitor Patel after a swimming
pool in France. He changes his name to "Pi" when he begins secondary
school, because he is tired of being taunted with the nickname "Pissing
Patel". His father owns a zoo in Pondicherry, providing Pi with a
relatively affluent lifestyle and some understanding of animal psychology.
Pi is raised a Hindu, but as a
fourteen-year-old he is introduced to Christianity and Islam, and starts to follow all three
religions as he "just wants to love God.He tries to understand God through
the lens of each religion and comes to recognize benefits in each one.
Eventually, his family decides to sell their zoo over a land dispute with the
government, and sell the animals to various zoos around the world before
emigrating to Canada.
In the second part of the
novel, Pi's family embarks on a Japanese freighter to Canada carrying some of
the animals from their zoo, but a few days out of port, the ship meets a storm
and sinks, resulting in his family's death. During the storm, Pi escapes death
in a small lifeboat
with a spotted
hyena, an injured Grant's zebra, and an
orangutan.
As Pi strives to survive among the animals, the hyena kills the zebra, then the
orangutan, much to Pi's distress. At this point, it is discovered that a Bengal tiger named
Richard Parker had been hiding under the boat's tarpaulin; it kills
and eats the hyena. Frightened, Pi constructs a small raft out of flotation
devices, tethers it to the boat, and retreats to it. He delivers some of the
fish and water he harvests to Richard Parker to keep him satisfied, conditioning
Richard Parker not to threaten him by rocking the boat and causing seasickness
while blowing a whistle. Eventually, Richard Parker learns to tolerate Pi's
presence and they both live in the boat.
Pi recounts various events while adrift, including discovering an island of
carnivorous algae inhabited by meerkats.
After 227 days, the lifeboat washes up onto the coast of Mexico and Richard
Parker immediately escapes into the nearby jungle.
In the third part of the novel, two officials from the Japanese Ministry of
Transport speak to Pi to ascertain why the ship sank. When they do not believe
his story, he tells an alternative story of human brutality, in which Pi was
adrift on a lifeboat with his mother, a sailor with a broken leg, and the
ship's cook, who killed the sailor and Pi's mother and cut them up to use as bait and food.
Parallels to Pi's first story lead the Japanese officials to believe that the
orangutan represents his mother, the zebra represents the sailor, the hyena
represents the cook, and Richard Parker is Pi himself.
After giving all the relevant information, Pi asks which of the two stories
they prefer. Since the officials cannot prove which story is true and neither
is relevant to the reasons behind the shipwreck, they choose the story with the
animals. Pi thanks them and says, "and so it goes with God".
Theme:
Religion
At
times, Life of Pi reads like a defense of religion. Has
science proved religion wrong? Here's a protagonist who believes passionately
in both zoology and religion. What about the fact of multiple faiths? Don't
these faiths contradict each other, cause wars, and other problems? Here's a
protagonist who is Muslim, Christian, and Hindu – all at the same time. The
book defends not only the common spirit behind these three religions, but the
rituals and ceremonies of each. It's as if all three religions find harmonious
common ground in this character. Seems unlikely, but then again, the
protagonist argues passionately that the miraculous happens in our darkest
moments.
Literature and Writing
In his essay "How I Wrote Life of Pi," Yann
Martel says, "I had neither family nor career to show for my 33 years on
Earth. [...]. I was in need of a story. More than that, I was in need of a
Story." Martel's novel is full of ruminations on writing and the meaning
writing and literature give to our lives. In fact, Martel's character, Pi,
argues we should choose the most compelling story when we have no confirmation
of actual events. Suspicious? Intrigued? You've fallen right into Martel's
trap.
Man and the Natural World
There's an interesting blurring of divisions between man and the natural
world in Life of Pi. Human
beings become more animalistic; animals become more human. The novel warns
against projecting human values onto the animal world. However, the novel also
admits it's impossible to experience anything without a way-of-being. The
trick, therefore, is to make concessions to other species. Animals in the zoo,
while essentially retaining their instincts, take on certain domestic,
human-like traits. Human beings in the wild, while still retaining a few human
traits, become more animalistic. Through this exchange human beings may learn –
dare we say it – a spiritual truth or two about themselves and the natural
world.
Spirituality
This theme often brings to mind more ethereal subjects like the soul or
the soul's rebirth. You'd be both right and wrong applying such lofty thoughts
to Life of Pi. In this
book, spirituality grounds itself in the everyday. The most ordinary activities
take on a level of spiritual intensity (granted they happen in an extraordinary
setting). Often, the protagonist describes – perhaps with a little jealousy –
animals engaging their surroundings with an almost yogic discipline. Of course,
this is not to say spirituality is always fun and games. Sometimes suffering
and duress actually bring about the protagonist's spiritual insights. In fact,
except for the protagonist's suffering, spirituality might have a more limited
role in the novel.
Suffering
Suffering brings out the best and the worst in Life of Pi's characters. On the
one hand, the characters care for each other when they very well could have
killed each other. On the other hand, suffering drives a few characters to
murder and cannibalism. There's a moment in the book when the protagonist
catches a dorado fish. To subdue it, he beats it with a hatchet. He says,
"I felt like I was beating a rainbow to death" (2.60.31). Whoever or
whatever causes suffering in this novel – God or a bizarre sequence of events –
the characters' musings and fortitude through it all recall the sheen and flash
of a rainbow
Science
Don't get us wrong. The protagonist of Life
of Pi loves science. Science,
along with reason, helps us control and manipulate the world. It's how we
survive in the world. But Pi points out that like religion, science has an
element of faith in it. Unlike agnosticism, where the person doesn't commit to
either faith or disbelief, the scientist often commits to a worldview of
atheism and to the methods of his discipline. For the protagonist of Life of Pi, though, this isn't
enough. We have to embrace the irrational and miraculous if we're to have a
full picture of our universe. Science can explain the world up to a certain
point, but its usefulness ends. According to Pi, when things get really hairy,
religion has to step in with a good old-fashioned story.
Fear
If we have nothing to fear but fear itself, what about the fear of fear
itself? Does that count as two fears or is it still one fear? It's this type of
mind game our protagonist has to avoid on the lifeboat. Pi has to fight against
being crippled by fear, as he goes about the everyday business of survival. He
definitely has a lot of things to be afraid of – bone-crunching waves, man-eating
sharks, and conniving tigers, to name a few. Of course, fear also takes on an
existential component in the novel, meaning that Pi also has to deal with the
terror of isolation, meaninglessness, and boredom. When faced with the latter
types of emptiness, maybe fighting off sharks and tigers doesn't sound so bad
Mortality
The protagonist in Life
of Pi battles death for so
long, his relationship with death becomes very complex. Death is the thing he
must push as far away from himself as possible. Death is also part of life, and
our protagonist begrudgingly admits this fact. He seeks death. He runs away
from death. By the end of the novel, our protagonist might as well have dated
death. They love each other, but used to hate each other. They've broken up a
couple times. They've gotten back together. They're together but seeing other
people.
Madness
You knew we were going to say this: madness is a little complicated inLife
of Pi. Is faith a form of madness? Is the madness that causes animals to
leave a warm, secure home the same as the madness of murder and cannibalism? Is
the predator-prey relationship, so common in both natural and man-made worlds,
a form of madness? Of course, like the good novelist he is, Martel leaves most
of these questions open. If believing in beautiful stories, and in fictions
that guide and explain our lives, counts as madness, then Martel suggests a
little madness will do us a lot of good.
Symbolism:
Pi
Piscine Molitor Patel’s preferred moniker is more than
just a shortened version of his given name. Indeed, the word Pi carries a host
of relevant associations. It is a letter in the Greek alphabet that also
contains alpha andomega, terms used in the book to denote dominant and
submissive creatures. Pi is also an irrational mathematical number, used to
calculate distance in a circle. Often shortened to 3.14, pi has so many decimal
places that the human mind can’t accurately comprehend it, just as, the book
argues, some realities are too difficult or troubling to face. These
associations establish the character Pi as more than just a realistic
protagonist; he also is an allegorical figure with multiple layers of meaning.
The Color Orange
In Life of Pi, the color orange symbolizes hope and
survival. Just before the scene in which the Tsimtsum sinks, the narrator
describes visiting the adult Pi at his home in Canada and meeting his
family. The color of the tiger is orange Richard Parker, who helps Pi
survive during his227 days at sea. As the Tsimtsum sinks, Chinese crewmen give
Pi a lifejacket with an orange whistle; on the boat, he finds an orange
lifebuoy. The whistle, buoy, and tiger all help Pi survive, just as Orange
Juice the orangutan provides a measure of emotional support that helps the boy
maintain hope in the face of horrific tragedy.
1.
What does the title mean in relation to the film as a whole?
The title LIFE OF PI mean in relation to the
film that it shows how PI suffering in he’s life at sea.
2. Among the characters, to whom can you relate to?
I can relate to PI because I really admire of he’s strong personality
that it shows in me that no matter what happen in life I will be strong to face
the situation and it can attract me most
on how he can handle the situation at sea of what hardship he face he had still
fate in GOD.
3.
Which part of the presentation struck you the most? Why?
In part that I struck me most when he can’t do it to kill JOHN PARKER so
many times because he so much pity to that animals.
4. What is the movie’s message?
Movie’s message in me that no matter what happen in our life we still
strong because the hardship it’s only trials in us that we are encounter is can bring in us
the experiences and so that we can move on. The only way to survive in life and need some help is our
faith to GOD. It give me a message that I will be able for being a positive
person all the times.
5. Did I like this in general? Why?
Yes because it shows me what is the reality in this world that if we lose
hope we give up for nothing. So I must consider life is God given and so
precious if we know on how to treasure it for most of the times. I also
thankful to watch this movie that it shows in me that it is also happen in real life and I so much amaze in some part that I could
not believe that I only see this in the fantasy or in the fairytales. Anyway, I
just believe in the saying that “everything happens for a reason but sometimes
I wish I knew what that reason was.” There are some says Life stops when you
are stop dreaming while other says Hope ends when you stop believing. So I must
enjoy my life here on earth so that I consider it so precious.
6.
Did I agree with the main theme/purpose? Why or why not?
YES, simply because it shows about feelings/emotion, experiences, about he’s
surroundings and moral aspect of PI.
7. What specifically did I like/dislike? Why?
I like the strong personality of PI though he struggle at sea in 227days
he still have faith in God.
8.
Are there any aspects of theme which are left ambiguous at the end? Why?
When PI stranded in one island that have different kinds of animals there
and when he going to sleep he found out that there’s a teeth inside the flower
and that time he leave the island cause maybe he thinks that island is not safe to stay there because an island are carnivurous.
9. How does this film relate to the things
that are happening in your life?
It can relate in me for being a strong person all the times, have courage
to face the reality, being knowledgeable, open- minded, being positive person ,
don’t lose hope and most important is faith
in God.
