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 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 took 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 a special program that helped to distinguish the muscles rolling during movement under the soft fur. 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 over time due to irregular and poor nutrition and stress, which affect the health of the animal.
"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 - 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 film is based on the novel of the same name by Yann Martel, published in 2001.
Production of the film " Life of Pi"began back in 2003 - then executive produced by 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 his 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 premiere of the film took place on September 28, 2012 as part of International Film Festival in NYC. 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.
Thematic table of contents (Reviews and criticism: literature)
The novel Life of Pi is a very successful book, which won the Booker Prize in 2002 and was filmed in 2012. In the preface, the author writes that his first novel, on the contrary, went completely unnoticed by readers and critics, which is why he fell into depression and went to unwind in the wonderland of India. There he came across a wonderful story that was told to him by a former resident of India, and now a citizen of Canada, Mr. Pi.
It is clear that this is a standard move using someone else's diary or story, which was often used by writers of the past, such as “The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, as told by himself,” but there is some truth here. The novel itself is not good: long and boring descriptions of the appearance of the characters, unnecessary details, and if not for the original plot, it would be boring to read. But the plot saves everything.
The main character Pi survived extraordinary adventure: in 1977-1978, he spent 7.5 months on the high seas in the same boat with a Bengal tiger and remained alive. This is more than original. Such an unprecedented thing attracts attention.
First, we learn about the hero’s childhood and family. They are described in a humorous manner. The boy's parents are people of the new India. They do not believe in God, share democratic values and are focused on Western standards, which they understand in a very specific way. This is evidenced by the child's name - he was named after a Parisian swimming pool. Can you think of anything more stupid? But my parents had a friend who lived in Paris in his youth and was fond of swimming. He talked endlessly about foreign countries, but he was only interested in swimming pools. So the son was named after the pool that this swimmer admired most. His full name was Pisin Molitor Patel. When the boy went to school, he was teased as a "weeper", which is why he was forced to shorten his name to Pi - Pi Patel.
The children studied at English school. The older brother was fond of sports. And Pi had his own hobbies - he believed in God and attended Hindu, Christian and Muslim religious institutions with equal zeal. In each of these three religions he found something different and did not want to choose between them. Five times a day he performed namaz, was baptized and received communion, and also performed Hindu rituals. He did this because he wanted to serve the Lord in the most different ways. In Hinduism, he valued fantasy and beauty, in Christianity, kindness and sacrifice, in Islam, the presence of God in everything he saw, especially visiting him during prayer. His parents didn't know what to do with him and left him alone.
When Pi turned 15, his father decided to emigrate to Canada. He believed that Indira Gandhi was leading the country into the past and was worried about politics. His business suffered losses, and zoos were prohibited from buying animals from hunters - they could only be exchanged from other zoos. A private zoo could not survive under such conditions. For a year they sold the animals to zoos around the world, and then loaded the cages with those destined for the USA and Canada onto an old Japanese cargo ship and set sail. The ship's crew consisted of some dubious characters who drank a lot and, unlike the Patel family, could not speak English.
The cargo ship went out to the open sea and suddenly at night near Manila, for no apparent reason, sank. There was a slight storm and it was raining. Pi accidentally managed to escape, and the whole team, father, mother and older brother, drowned in a matter of minutes. Pi found himself in a large lifeboat, and not alone, but along with a Bengal tiger, an orangutan, a zebra and a hyena. Tiger Pi himself pulled him out of the water when he saw him next to the boat (threw him Lifebuoy, then pulled him towards him), the zebra fell into the boat and broke his leg, when the ship tilted and the boat went into the water, the orangutan swam to them on a pile of bananas, and it is unknown where the hyena came from in it. Then Patel put forward the version that someone from the crew drunkenly opened the cages before the shipwreck - so they escaped.
The first 24 hours after the shipwreck are very vividly described: how Pi was thirsty, how desperate he was, how an evil hyena chewed off a zebra’s leg that was still alive, and then began to tear its insides, and the zebra still did not die, but screamed terribly, like a female orangutan. named Orange - she tried to fight the hyena and lost, and how a tiger crawled out from the bottom of the boat and ate the hyena. While the animals were fighting among themselves, the young man managed to find a supply of water, biscuits, a knife, desalination plants, a life raft, a bucket, fishing rods, spears, fishing hooks, blankets, an axe, a guide to navigation and survival in extreme conditions, and much more. He moved away from the tiger onto a raft and began to think about how to kill him. But the tiger did not show aggression towards him - he ate the carcasses of a hyena, zebra and orangutan, drank rainwater and was in a complacent mood. Richard Parker even purred a little: tigers don’t really purr, but they can make some similar sounds. And then Pi changed his mind about killing the tiger, especially since he never figured out how to do it. He decided to tame him. The tiger's name was Richard Parker. At one time, a hunter with that name killed a tigress and found a tiger cub, but the official who registered the animal for the zoo got everything mixed up and wrote in the documents that the tiger’s name was Richard Parker.
Further them living together proceeded peacefully. They divided the territory: the tiger lived at the bottom of the boat under a tarpaulin, the boy lived at the stern and on the raft. Patel checked all the knots on the raft, caught fish and turtles, fed the tiger, gave him water, which he received from 10 desalination plants, prayed several times a day in all the ways known to him, dried fish and turtle meat, admired the sea, sky, stars and on the tiger, read the instructions, and the tiger only ate and slept. Patel believed that the tiger saved him. If it were not for these worries, not for the fear that a hungry animal would eat him, then the person in distress would not be in constant good shape, he would turn sour and die. As for the boat and navigation, Pi quickly realized that he still did not know where to sail, and relied on the will of the waves. He didn't expect anyone to save him. It later turned out that he was carried by the Pacific Small Current. He didn't know how much time had passed.
One day a boat brought them to the island. Pi never knew what it was: a real island or a huge colony of floating algae. But trees grew there and there were lakes with fresh water. The island was inhabited by meerkats. And they ate sea fish, which floated up in fresh water bodies already dead. The young man realized that the island’s ecosystem is structured as follows: the algae that make up the island contribute to desalination of water, fish swimming under the island fall into streams of fresh water, which is why they immediately die, and meerkats feed on them.
The tiger has become more comfortable faster than a human. He ran into the forest, ate these unafraid rodents in huge quantities all day, and in the evening returned to sleep in the boat, which he apparently considered his lair. Pi couldn’t walk for the first days, but then he recovered. He began to eat fish, but bathing in water gave him special pleasure. fresh water. It must be said that before the shipwreck, Patel did not eat meat, and he was very worried when he was forced to kill his first fish and even still remembers it in his prayers, but then he resigned himself to the inevitable evil.
Richard Parker got fat, became active, and Pi began to be afraid to sleep next to him. He decided to build himself a hammock and sleep in a tree. To his surprise, at night every single meerkat also climbed into the trees. Some of the cubs settled on his body - so he slept in a living blanket. He liked it. Then Patel discovered that at night the algae emitted some kind of acid that corroded the bodies of fish in the lakes. Absence starts the process sunlight. That is, the island was a predator, and the meerkats only got scraps. But, on the other hand, Pi could live there for as long as he wanted - everything he needed to the bare minimum was here. But one day he saw fruits on a tree growing nearby, he picked one, but it turned out to be not a fruit. What he took to be a fruit was a human tooth covered in leaves. Pi guessed that before him there lived another poor fellow on the island who ate fish, a meerkat, slept on a tree, and then he died and the island swallowed him up. There were only teeth left, which the tree had entwined with leaves. This sad discovery prompted Pi to set sail again - it was better to die at sea than to end his life like this. He took the tiger with him - after all, it was too heavy to sleep on a tree and would have disappeared on the first night.
Then he drifted on the boat until the current carried the boat to the shores of Mexico. 9 months have passed. Right on the shore, the tiger ran into the jungle and never returned. Pi was very upset that Richard Parker didn’t even say goodbye to him. And the young man was found local residents, sent to the hospital. There he came to his senses. His story hit the media. A Japanese delegation visited the hospital to determine why their cargo ship sank. Patel didn't know why the ship sank, but he told them his story. She attracted a lot of criticism. The Japanese did not want to believe in the tiger, zebra, hyena, or predatory island. The Japanese said that tigers do not live in Mexico. They didn’t even believe that bananas could swim (the orangutan swam up to the sloop on a pile of bananas, which, unfortunately, could not be pulled into the boat, which Pi later very much regretted). In front of them, Pi threw a banana into a sink of water - he did not drown, but the Japanese still doubted his story. “Have you seen everything that can be in the ocean? Do you know stories about animals that escaped from the zoo and became comfortable in places unusual for their species?” - Patel asked them. They doubted it.
Then he told his story differently. Along with him in the boat were his mother, a young sailor with a broken leg, and a French cook. The sailor suffered greatly due to an open fracture. The cook persuaded them to amputate the sailor’s leg, supposedly to alleviate his suffering, and he himself began to eat the leg. And before that he ate all the biscuits. Then the cook completely killed the sailor. Pi's mother began to fight him - he killed her too, and the teenager managed to hack the cook to death with an ax. And he ate his meat and liver. “Do you like this story better?” - asked Pi. The Japanese replied that, perhaps, the tiger option was better, and promised to pay the insurance.
Pi moved to Canada, graduated from the university with degrees in theology and zoology, defended his dissertation on three-toed sloths, got married, and had a son and daughter. He continues to pray to Hindu gods, Christ and perform namaz.
Of course, the tiger, and the sea voyage itself, must be understood metaphorically. For example, the sea is life full of surprises and dangers, a boat is human destiny, and the relationship with the tiger is characterized by the attitude towards trials and fate. You can live in different ways: both as a three-toed sloth, and as a person who is able to cross on a boat Pacific Ocean and tame the tiger. We must fight for life, we must believe in God, who can be in anything, even in a Bengal tiger. The tiger and God are not connected by chance: for William Blake, the tiger served as proof of the existence of God:
"Tiger, oh tiger, burning bright
In the depths of the midnight thicket,
Who conceived the fire
Is your image proportionate?
In the skies or the depths
Was the fire of the beast's eyes smoldering?
Where has he been hiding for centuries?
Whose hand found it?
What a master, full of strength,
Twisted your tight veins
And I felt between my hands
The heart's first heavy beat?
What kind of forge was burning before him?
What kind of hammer forged you?
Who first squeezed with pincers
Angry brain throwing fire?
And when the whole dome is starry
Irrigated with the moisture of tears, -
Did he finally smile?
The work of his own hands?
Is it really the same force?
The same powerful palm
And she created a lamb,
And you, night fire?
Tiger, oh tiger, burning bright
In the depths of the midnight thicket!
By whose immortal hand
Has your formidable image been created?"
At one time, the parable of the seagull named Jonathan Livingston had a great influence on an entire generation. She encouraged hippies to strive for the impossible and move beyond the boundaries of the real world. I remember how some who read this book changed their lives. It’s not for nothing that Yann Martel also called the tiger by a human name.
It is unlikely that Life of Pi will be able to repeat its success, but there is still something in it.
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 philosophical parable successfully transferred to the screen. 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 the terrible turmoil, our hero, a zebra with a broken leg from the transported Zoo, who fell into the boat from God knows where, as well as a tiger and a hyena hidden under a tarpaulin, find themselves in a lifeboat thrown into the water. . 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 is already lying tear-stained in a rehabilitation center and answering questions from Japanese investigators (after all, if we remember, the ship was Japanese).
The boy's story about an unusual journey with animals does not suit the Japanese, 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, in the process another quarrel, the cook brutally stabbed the boy’s mother, throwing her into the water, where she was torn to pieces by sharks in front of her son’s eyes. 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 pure soul 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
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. 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 real symbol 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 midst of the stormy ocean of life.
