The meat of the story becomes the extended face-off between boy and beast, told through a series of frenzied manoeuvres on and under tarpaulins.Īlong the way, visual highlights include a jellyfish light show, an island teeming with meerkats and a hallucinatory underwater spectacle that is this film's equivalent of the "Stargate" sequence in 2001. In its brisk concision, the film squeezes more narrative life from Pi's ordeal than the book does: you don't have to endure long passages about which rope he unknotted when. Emigrating with his family to Canada, Pi survives a terrifying storm at sea and finds himself adrift in a lifeboat in the company of a Bengal tiger, an orang-utan, a hyena and a zebra – it's like the story of Jonah retold with the cast of Madagascar. The first half hour is a luminously shot account of Pi's upbringing at his father's zoo, making mercifully brief work of the mercurial digressiveness that is expected from magic realism in literature in a film, who really cares to know about Uncle Francis, born with too much liquid in his lungs? Mind you, it's here that the film plays some of its nicest 3D tricks, in a retro, Amélie-esque visit to that Paris pool.
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