A Comparitive Analysis on the Film Adaptation of Life of Pi

Pi is alone with Richard Parker on the lifeboat and they both starve and suffer with dehydration. Pi starts catching fishes for both of them. He always gives the biggest share to Richard Parker as he is the strongest. One day, he decides to eat the largest part. He wants to calm his desire for hunger. He does not want to share anything with Richard Parker. Pi starts eating like an animal. Pi tells, “It came as an unmistakable indication to me of how I had sunk the day I noticed, with a pinching of the heart, that I ate like an animal” (Martel 183). The innocent boy is now as dangerous as an animal that can do anything for the food. His yearning for food makes him selfish. It is in pi’s hand not to sacrifices his integrity, but he chooses to sacrifice because he knows that at this critical situation it is right to do. Even though Pi loses his integrity, he gains the power of being the strongest one on the

This setting is the cause of Pi’s development of primitive instincts because it is associated with chaos and a battle with the environment. The lifeboat is floating in a barren body of water that has a lonely atmosphere, which helps portray Pi’s need to be independent. To tame the survival instincts inside of him, Pi needs to rely on his own decisions and logic. Because Richard Parker’s territory is within the lifeboat, the lifeboat represents the origin of Pi’s savagery; therefore, it’s atmosphere is tense and overpowering. The action of the passage occurs in the lifeboat because Pi needs to tame his inner tiger in the same setting where it was born. Pi discusses that he spends more time in the lifeboat after his confrontation with his brute behaviour. The raft allowed Pi to hide from his developing instincts, but now that he has tamed his savagery, he can live along side it in the

As Pi reaches the second level of the hierarchy of needs, he finds himself on the level of safety he needs to figure out how to stay safe while on the life boat. While Pi was on the boat he was so scared of Richard Parker that he had jumped off the boat to go in the water, but then realizes that there are predators just as scary as Richard parker or maybe even worse that he has to avoid to staying safe. “I noticed the presence of sharks around the life boat…The sharks were makos-swift, point-snouted predators with long murderous teeth that protruded noticeable from their mouths” (Martel 179). Once Pi tries to overcome his fears and tames Richard like a zookeeper would do and once he does, he ends up having a companion that helps Pi get through the struggle to survive. Pi finds an island where he is safe and is able to regain his strength but as he finds a tooth in the algae, Pi

Pi is an eager, outgoing, and excitable child, dependent on his family for comfort and support. In school, his few main concerns were to prevent his schoolmates from mispronouncing his name and learning as much and as fast as he can about religion and zoology. But when the ship went down Pi is torn from his family and left alone on a lifeboat with wild animals which would make anyone believe that they weren’t going to even make it through the night. The disaster gives him a reality check which makes him realize that he has to become self-sufficient. He mourns the loss of his family and fears for his life, which any normal sane person would do but he realizes that he has to take this challenge and make the best of what he can. He finds a survival guide and emergency provisions. He had to force himself to question his on values and decides that his vegetarianism is a luxury, and he wouldn’t make it a week without teaching himself how to fish. He manages to protect himself from Richard Parker the bangle tiger that has managed to get stuck on this boat with him and take on a parental relationship with the tiger, providing him with food and keeping him in line, to protect himself as well as keeping Richard Parker alive. The devastating shipwreck turns Pi into an adult, able to fend for himself out in the world alone. Which gives him good morals, and

Desperation forced him to try and move towards the safety box that was near Richard Parker who has the ability to easily attack him. Once Pi is near the safety box he illustrates the feeling of satisfaction by saying, “oh, the delight of the manufactured good, the man-made device, the created thing! That moment of material revelation brought an intensity of pleasure -- a heady mix of hope, surprise, disbelief, thrill gratitude, all crushed into one … I was positively giddy with happiness." (Martel 141). He finds water in the box as he hoped for and this has brought him a confidence boost. Even though Pi completed the first of many stages in the hierarchy, he is still stranded in the ocean. He acknowledges the fact that animals or very territorial and in turn marks his own territory within the boat. Pi insists that, “I had to fix in his mind that the top of the tarpaulin and the bow of the boat, bordered by the neutral territory of the middle bench, was my territory and utterly forbidden to him” (Martel 168). He urinated on the parts of the boat that he claims as his part of the boat and does it in a way that Richard Parker who is an animal would understand.

While most of us love watching films, those of us who have read the book in which a film was developed from, will most likely feel uneasy when the film does not match exactly what we read. In most cases, we feel disappointed to not see our own interpretation of the book on the screen. A film made from a book or inspired by a book is called adaptation. Many people who have read Cornell Woolrich's short story "It Had to Be Murder" and then watched Alfred Hitchcock’s film, “Rear Window,” were disappointed that the adaptation did not reflect exactly the

Left without any companionship and the consequences of his deed, Pi spent the rest of his time creating the better story. He weaved a web between the story of Richard Parker and the events on the ship, to disassociate from the events of the other survivors. The death of personified animals stings much less than witnessing the death of Pi’s mother and the sailor. It also made it easier to live life connecting Richard Parker to the hyena’s death. This also explains the disappearance of Richard Parker after climbing into the boat, and his reappearance to kill the hyena in the second story.

Finally, when the lifeboat reached the island of Mexico, the “savage Pi” is gone forever with Richard. Richard Parker’s savagery influenced Pi for his guilty acts, however, he was the motive and spirit that encouraged Pi to stay alive before being rescued.

The story would have changed had the sole surviving animal had been the zebra, orangutan, or a hyena because Pi would not have survived. Having Richard Parker as his boat mate forced Pi to stay alert at all times. If Pi had been too distracted, Richard Parker could have pounced and attacked during times of inattentiveness. Piscine also had to be a caregiver for Richard Parker inadvertently keeping him focused on something other than loneliness. Also, if an animal like the zebra or orangutan, that is relatively harmless, would have been the sole survivor, Pi would have been tempted to kill and eat them as his provided food supply dwindled away, taking away his source of entertainment.

Where he soon finds himself alone with a zebra, an orangutan, and a hyena, all seemingly in shock. His family is gone. The hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan, and then Richard Parker shows himself. Soon the tiger kills the hyena, and Pi and Richard Parker are alone together at sea. Pi lives on canned water and filtered seawater, emergency rations, and freshly caught fish. He also provides for the tiger, whom he masters and trains. When the blind man attacks Pi, intending to eat him, Richard Parker kills him. Not long after, the boat pulls up to a strange island of trees that grow directly out of vegetation, without any soil. Pi and Richard Parker stay here for a time, sleeping in their boat and exploring the island during the day. Pi discovers a huge colony of meerkats who sleep in the trees and freshwater ponds. One day, Pi finds human teeth in a tree’s fruit and comes to the conclusion that the island eats people. He and Richard Parker head back out to sea, finally washing ashore on a Mexican beach. Richard Parker runs off, and villagers take Pi to a hospital.

In Life of Pi, Yann Martel weaving a wondrous tale of God, a shipwreck, and the nature of storytelling, but the film version, marvelously made by Ang Lee, contains several significant inconsistencies with the book. Although the general structure of the story is the same in both versions, the limitations of film-making and the realities of what makes a film entertaining create the few changes between the two versions.

Furthermore, his vast knowledge of animals, having grown up at a zoo, helps him to tame Richard Parker. Pi knows tigers’ psychological thinking and exploits this by classically conditioning Richard Parker. Likewise, Pi’s experience of watching a tiger kill a goat in his early childhood taught him the fundamental lesson that ‘an animal is an animal’, enabling him to strategically and mentally survive his long and testing time at sea. In addition to that, during the early parts of Part 2, Pi comes across a survival manual, a crucial object for his continued existence. The book gives him critical information on the do’s and don’ts of survival at sea and it is hard to imagine that Pi could have survived without this book which also gave him the opportunity to write down his words which were “all he has left’’.

On its surface, Martel’s Life of Pi proceeds as a far-fetched yet not completely unbelievable tale about a young Indian boy named Pi who survives after two hundred twenty-seven days on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. It is an uplifting and entertaining story, with a few themes about companionship and survival sprinkled throughout. The ending, however, reveals a second story – a more realistic and dark account replacing the animals from the beginning with crude human counterparts. Suddenly, Life of Pi becomes more than an inspiring tale and transforms into a point to be made about rationality, faith, and how storytelling correlates the two. The point of the book is not for the reader to decide which

The Tragedy of Macbeth written by William Shakespeare, is known for its' tragic ending and twisting plot. The play brings a magnificent amount of drama through the actions of the characters, bringing emotionalism with a sense of wickedness that still captures the audience. Shakespeare provides his audience with a tale of power and death. Macbeth has a theme that explores the decisions made Today can affect a person's future. Readers should understand that Shakespeare is known for his plays having relatable characters and a dramatic plot intertwined with human traits such as the necessity of love, the greed for power, the evil lurking in the darkness within the heart. By knowing that readers have a better understanding of the play itself.

Literary adaptation to film is a long established tradition in cinema starting with early cinema adaptations of The Bible. Adaptations have been a common phenomenon in the world of cinema from the early years of its origin. Literature provides a wide range of possibilities for the film. Adaptation has been defined as the act of producing a work of art by adapting elements from another work of art. Film adaptation is the transfer of a written work to a feature film.