During a promotional event for Ang Lee’s 2012 film,
Life of Pi, Lee speaks about the symbolic importance of water to convey Yann Martel’s novel into a cinematic experience (Kelly). As a result,
Life of Pi becomes an extra-sensory experience through the visceral realism of water to inspire awe through the naturalism of its atmosphere (ARRI). With its vivid cinematography, emotional musical score, and latent philosophical and religious themes,
Life of Pi successfully conveys this survival and coming of age story. Because
Life of Pie was shot entirely with a 3D stereoscopic camera (ARRI), water becomes an invisible character (Kelly) that challenges and illuminates the journey of its primary protagonist: Pi Patel.
As a two hour and seven minute flashback to his childhood, which originates in his father’s zoo, the film revels within the nostalgia and allurement of childhood. Pi - as an adult - recounts his childhood to a writer in his home in Montreal. Before meeting Pi in Canada, the writer (whose name remains unknown to the spectator) meets Francis, Pi’s honorary uncle or Mamaji, in the former French territory of Pondicherry, India, where Pi's journey begins in the story. While searching for inspiration for a novel, the writer meets Mamaji and is made aware of “an Indian in French Canada who has the most incredible story to tell” (Magee). With his fate encounter, the writer’s goes to Montreal, where he reawakens Pi’s memories of his two hundred and twenty-seven days struggle in the pacific ocean (Magee).
As the son of a zoo keeper and business-man, an Indian boy’s journey into adulthood begins with an honorary, and yet, misunderstood name: Piscine Molitor Patel (Magee), which he ingeniously shortens to Pi. With a name that sounds like a urinating but refers to one of Paris' most beautiful swimming pools, Pi grows into a pragmatic young boy who adapts to the traumatic transition between childhood and adulthood. In his attempt to eradicate himself from his name, Pi employs the same exact logic and scientific deliberation his father advocates. Later, however, Pi’s desire to impose order onto a chaotic universe only motivates him to search for meaning in various world religions. Ironically, Pi engages in the same critical thinking and skepticism that his agnostic father advocates throughout the film. By actively exploring the multiplicity of many faiths, he overtly avoids the impulse of blind allegiance to one past ideologies or belief systems.
Ironically, Pi’s journey to seek meaning as a young boy is highlighted by the cyclical dichotomy of water. In the search for better prospects in French Canada, Pi’s family, and their zoo animals board a Japanese cargo called the Tsimtsum (Life of Pi). Before the Tsimtsum encounters a storm and descends to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, Pi’s family meets an impolite cook and a Buddhist sailor (Life of Pi). One the Tsimtsum sinks, Pi, a ferocious tiger (named Richard Parker), and other zoo animals drift amidst shark infested waters (Life of Pi). Later, Pi, a zebra, a hyena, and later an orangutan survive aboard an intact lifeboat (Life of Pi). As a result, whether, Richard Parker survives the storm is unclear.
With it's release on November 22, 2012, Life of Pi has been the winner of a total of fifty-four awards and with seventy-nine nomination (IMDb). In the United States, the Academy Awards grants Life of Pi with four Oscar and six Oscar nominations (IMDb). In the Oscars, Ang Lee wins for Best Director, Claudio Miranda for Best Cinematography, and Mychael Danna for Best Written Music and Original Score (Life of Pi). As a result of film’s visual complexity, the Academy awards Bill Westenhofer among three others with in visual effects (Life of Pi). In addition, the Academy nominates David Magee for best writing and adapted Screenplay. David Gropman and Anna Pinnock are also nominated for Best Achievement in Production Design (Life of Pi).
In Life of Pi, Suraj Sharma, an up and coming Indian actor from New Delhi, Sharma gives an emotional portrayal of the film’s protagonist, a young Pi Patel (Life of Pi). With amazement, cynicism, and anger, Sharma embodies feelings of impotency and omnipotence that emerge from being the sole survival. Sharma’s performance cannot be appreciated without acknowledging Irrfan Khan’s portrayal of an adult Pi (Life of Pi). With his understated demeanor, Khan, a renowned Indian actor, offers the audience a confident and centered Pi, while Sharma’s portrayal conveys a Pi who is at war with himself. Because a fraction of the film deploys the real tiger, most of the poignant scenes are conveyed by the computer generated (cg) tiger named Richard Parker. Because of the story’s balance between being implicit and ambiguous, it may be quite difficult to determine who the antagonist of the film. As a result, it may be easy to perceive Richard Parker as the antagonist, but Richard Parker like Pi is also the protagonist of Life of Pi.
In addition to the two main protagonists, Pi’s life is given substance through the film’s brilliant supporting cast. Pi’s father, Santosh Patel, is portrayed by Adil Hussain, and Pi’s mother, Gita Patel is played by Tabu. Tabu is a critically acclaimed actress (IMDb), who is able to convey a balance of human emotions through her facial expressions. As a classically trained dramatic actor from India (IMDb), Hussain conveys the suspicion of religion and a desire to abandon religions in favor of more rational pursuits. For Santosh, this suspicion becomes a major frustration when he witnesses over his son’s ability to simultaneously experiment with religion and with scientific reason. Because Santosh feels abandoned form religion through his sickness, Santosh embraces modernity. Contrary, Tabu beautifully conveys Gita faith in the unknown. As an adolescent, Pi is torn between the distraction that his mother’s stories of Hindu gods and goddess with the stability his father’s empirical reasoning.
At the apex of the story when the Patels leave India, the story introduces two small supporting characters that weigh heavily on the resolution of film. Veteran French actor, Gèrard Depardieu is barely on screen, but Depardieu is able to immediately convey the violent and selfish cook of the Tsimtsum. On the other hand, Bo-Chieh Wang, a Taiwanese actor, briefly portrays a lasting impression of the happy Buddhist sailor, who comforts the Patels after their confrontation with the cook.
In the first third of the film, which consist of exposition and rising action, Life of Pi’s sound department, at times, may have placed more emphasis on artificial or non-diegetic than on natural or diegetic sound (Raj, Music 10). With an emphasis on Mychael Danna’s musical score, sound editors still manage to balance non-diegetic and diegetic sound sources. In the lush botanical gardens dense with various animals, Mychael Danna’s first musical number, Pi’s Lullaby, sets a crucial contrast to natural or diegetic sounds of the zoo (Life of Pi). According to Ang Lee’s interpretation of Danna’s musical score, Pi’s Lullaby is a combination of “French instrumentation mixed Indian sounds.”
As an example of non-diegetic sound, Pi’s Lullaby adds to the significance of the French culture to Pondicherry and vice versa. A hybrid of two distinct nations, Pi’s Lullaby combines the cultural, religious, and scientific elements of both India and France to create a pleasant synthesis. In opening credit scenes that introduce the animals in the zoo, Pi’s Lullaby deliberately fades in and out to highlight the diegetic sounds of the botanical gardens and its animals (Raj, Sound 15). As a result a pendulum that swings from the non-diegetic musical score of Pi’s Lullaby and the inherit diegetic sounds of Pondicherry, the sounds immerse and remove the viewer from the world it creates. In addition to Pi’s Lullaby, the first third of film is saturated with musical pieces that explore Pi’s spiritual and philosophical journey in Pondicherry (Lee).
As film editor and director, Tim Squyres and Ang Lee have maintained a professional collaboration for the past two decades (Hamburger). As a result, the Squyres’ and Lee’s collaboration has yielded such films as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hulk (2003), and Sense and Sensibility (1995). Because of Squyres efforts during the production of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Squyres was awarded an Academy Award nomination for best achievement in film editing (IMDb). In Ang Lee’s most recent project, Squyres oversees the composition of every shot and frame (Hamburger). Overall, because of proliferation of various film formations such as 3D, 2D, IMAX, and 2D digital/film, film editors must also adapt to working with various formats and versions.
According to Ellis Hamburger, a typical day for Squyres consists of receiving two hours worth of footage from a two minute in the script. Once filming concludes for the day, it is Squyres job to compose the footage in the best way to reinforce the script (Hamburger). Contrary to popular belief, scenes with no visual effects require more personal attention because these scenes tend to be full with cuts and jump cuts. According to Squyres, the most time consuming scene without visual effect is the dinner scene in Pondicherry, India. As a result, scenes with more visual effects tend to be scenes with continuous shots, which require less editing. In a interview conducted by Ellis Hamburger, Squyres explains the difficulty of working in 3D, which he describes as “a nightmare.” Squyres gives a glimpse into the complex and yet rewarding process of working in 3D: “In 3D, you have to have the whole space mapped and track it equally in both eyes, so it takes 20 times as long. Things that are relatively simple in 2D are a nightmare in 3D (Hamburger).
With the Tsimtsum on the high seas of the Pacific Ocean, the story reaches the climax of its straight forward plot. Once the ship sinks in the pitch of darkness, Danna introduces one of his most emotionally wrenching musical pieces named after the Japanese cargo ship: Tsimtsum (Lee). A much darker song with more grandeur, Tsimtsum’s deliberate use of choir voices and “exotic instrumentation” places the viewer in the same state of panic and anxiety that Pi is undergoing (Lee). Ang Lee clearly expresses the effectiveness of this musical piece: “As the score goes on, it keeps the emotional struggle…the feeling is not one of pure relaxation, but of the unknown.” In the dark and cold underbelly of the Pacific Ocean, Pi encounters the same awe and terror he felt as a young boy. As a child, Pi reads about the heroic acts of the Hindu gods and the compassion and mercy of Jesus Christ. Ultimately, Pi’s willingness to try everything not only prepares him for 227 days lost at sea (Magee), but gives him the courage to find strength in trauma, in tragedy.
Similarly to any adaptive screenplay, its movie adaptation originates within the pages of the original novel. For a novel like Life of Pi, Yann Martel imbues what could be a simple story about a young castaway lost at sea into two parallel narratives. On the surface, it may appear that we are following Pi and a Bengal tiger on a lifeboat, but is there more to what we see on screen. In film, the passage of time for the perceiver is referred to as “screen duration,” while passage of time for the characters is referred to as the “temporal duration” of the film (Raj, Identifying 5). However, the screen duration of the film is an unreliable source for validity, because what we see on screen is distorted by Pi psychological trauma. Conversely, the temporal duration contains two stories, one which is allegorical and the other literal to what actually happened.
In the beginning of the script, the dialogue for adult Pi reinforces the importance of Pi’s name. As a voice over the scenes representing Pi’s uncle swimming in France, Pi says,
“Before I was born, he [Mamaji] said to my father, ‘if you want your son to have a clean soul, you must take him one day to swim in the Piscine Molitor.’ I never understood why my father took this so much to heart…Imagine me trying to explain that name to my schoolmates. I barely made it to the age of eleven before…” (Magee)
The understated nature of Irrfan Khan’s voice over as an adult Pi helps to perpetuate the audience’s suspension of disbelief.
Throughout David Magee’s script, Magee alludes to the dichotomy of Pi’s experience. At the end of the script, the adult Pi conveys ethical and moral ambiguity of the film:
I’ve told you two stories about what happened out on the ocean. Neither explains what caused the sinking of the ship, and no one can prove which story is true and which is not. In both stories, the ship sinks, my family dies, and I suffer (Magee).
Whether the tiger, zebra, a hyena, orangutan are simple personification of Pi, the Buddhist sailor, the cook, Gita Patel does not matter. What does matter? Well, the story is what matters (Castelli). According to Yann Martel,
The story of Pi and Richard Parker is one of existential choice…Are you directed by the flat edicts of rationality, or open to more marvelous possibilities? Do you need to know for certain, are you limited by that necessity, or are you willing to make leaps of faith (Castelli).
I have purposely omitted certain details, in order to preserve not only the ending of the film, but the overall wonder that the major plot beats illicit to the viewer.
One of the most memorable aspects of Life of Pi is the stunning images that result from its cinematography, which occurs after the film’s apex. Even after the screen fades to black, images of Pi and Richard Parker on the lifeboat. One of the most prevalent and emotion shoots in Claudio Miranda’s (director of photography) toolbox is profile angle, which represents the subject from the side (ICEM). For cinematographers, the profile shoot is ideal because it clearly represents the character’s relationship in the environment (ICEM). In Life of Pi, Pi’s relationship to the deep Pacific Ocean is mediated by a white lifeboat, which has a capacity for thirty people.
In addition to the profile angle, the filmmakers in Life of Pi also employ another angle shot that contributes to the Pi’s state of mind. According to St. Thomas University’s Institute for Communication, Entertainment & Media (ICEM), a low angle shot or “up shot” is a shot that occurs when the camera is situated below the character’s horizon (ICEM). Because the “up shot” shifts the rules of perspective from one-point and two-point perspective to three point perspective, the character appears larger than usual (ICEM). In order to evoke emotions, filmmakers use close-ups, medium shots, and long shots to intensify or minimize a particular emotion. In Life of Pi, Miranda and Lee use these cinematic tools to great effect, in order to convey Pi journey from powerlessness to courage.
In the pre-production of Life of Pi, Lee and Miranda wanted to use a camera that would capture the properties of light, water, and darkness (ARRI). As a result, Miranda chooses the ALEXA 3D camera because of its sensitivity to light (ARRI). According to Samantha Murphy Kelly, a writer of Mashable.com, Ang Lee most important goal was to realistically portray water on screen.
I knew that to make it work with 3D, water had to become a character itself. I’ve never seen realistic water scenes in movies because water hits one side of a tank wall and bounces back like it would in a bathtub, but we needed to make it work (Kelly).
In order to film in a controlled environment, Lee’s production crew built a two hundred and twenty-five thousand cubic feel wave tank in an abandoned runway in a Taiwanese airport (Kelly). According to Kelly, after four months of construction, the wave tank was able to hold one point seven million gallons of waters. In addition, the production team also designed the wave tank to have a movable wall, which allows for the penetration of natural light (Kelly). For every person during the production and post-production stage of the making of Life of Pi, the wave tank allows for a certain level of control. Because of the construction of the wave tank, special effects artists are able blend their computer generated images with physical elements (water) and props.
As a review and case study of this marvelous film, this paper only scratches the surface of the complexity of Life of Pi. I strongly recommend this film not only for its latent religion and philosophical themes, but for its beautiful visuals and sensory experience. As a film that attempts to express the ineffable quality of Yann Martel's novel, Ang Lee's supervision and direction of this film ensures the clear translation between a textual and visual representation. Life of Pi evokes the visceral realism of adversity in the backdrop of extreme scarcity and excessive splendor. This dichotomy between excess and deficiency immerses the you - the viewer - in a state of utter bewilderment and fascination. As a film that relies completely on a 3D stereoscopic, the film's technical prowess and resourcefulness accentuates the spectator's scopophilia.
Works Cited
Castelli, Jean-Christophe. The Making of Life of Pi: A Film, a Journey. New York: Harper Collins, 2012. Print.
Clarke, R. "The Sea Inside in Bringing to the Screen the Magic Realism of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Ang Lee Has Set Himself His Most Complex Technical Challenge yet." Sight and Sound. 23.1 (2013): 26-31. Print.
Habib, M.A.R. Modern Literary Criticism and Theory: A History. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 2008. Print.
ICEM, Institute for Communication, Entertainment & Media. “Camera Angle-Reading.” St. Thomas University, Institute for Communication, Entertainment & Media. 2013. Web. 16 January 2014.
Life of Pi. Dir. Ang Lee. Perf. Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Rafe Spall, Gérard Depardieu. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2013. DVD.
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. “Pi’s Epic Journey: Creating the Unforgettable.” Life of Pi Movie. Journey.lifeofpimoive.com. 2014. Web. 23 April 2014.
http://journey.lifeofpimovie.com/#!/
Raj, Sony. “Cinematography.” St. Thomas University. Miami Gardens, Flordia. 20 January 2014. Lecture.
Raj, Sony. “Film Editing.” St. Thomas University. Miami Gardens, Flordia. 13 March 2014. Lecture.
Raj, Sony. “Identifying the Elements of a Story: A Plot Diagram.” St. Thomas University. Miami Gardens, Flordia. 27 March 2014. Lecture pgs 1-25.
Raj, Sony. “How to Analyze a Film.” St. Thomas University. Miami Gardens, Flordia. 16 January 2014. Lecture.
Raj, Sony. “Music & Sound in Film.” St. Thomas University. Miami Gardens, Flordia. 30 January 2014. Lecture.
Raj, Sony. “Telling Stories for the Screen-Scriptwriting.” St. Thomas University. Miami Gardens, Flordia. 06 March 2014. Lecture.
Raj, Sony. “Screen Production Process: An Overview.” St. Thomas University. Miami Gardens, Flordia. 18 February 2014. Lecture.
