Life of Pi Book VS Movie: Intimacy
Life of Pi definitely had a lot of hype surrounding it when it was released at movie theatres. Initially, I was not even aware that it was an adaptation of a book! Once I got my hands on a copy of the novel from the local library however, I devoured all one hundred chapters before watching the movie. Although Ang Lee’s film is incredibly breathtaking when it comes to visuals and pretty close in plot to the book, there are certainly differences among the two. One of the most notable differences between the book Life of Pi and its film adaptation is the lack of connection the viewer develops with the narrator as compared to that of the careful reader and Pi. As it often goes with book-to-movie adaptations, the book Life of Pi by Yann Martel allowed for an amplified understanding of the main character, a teenage boy named Pi who gets stranded at sea on a tiny lifeboat for over seven months with a handful of wild animals as companions.
The book Life of Pi features a longer introduction to Pi’s life before the shipwreck that the movie fails to elaborate on, thus giving us a deeper look into Pi’s way of thinking and his family and school life. The film features the same explanation of the derivation of Pi’s name, the struggles he faces with religion, and his life at the zoo, but completely erases the book’s tales of Pi’s mentors and teachers guiding him in his adolescence. One set of characters I was particularly eager to see in the movie were the two different men named Mr. Satish Kumar, one a devout Muslim and the other a committed atheist. These characters helped me, as a reader, to better understand Pi’s interests in zoology and religion, and where they intersect. Mr. Satish Kumar, the atheistic biology teacher, is devoted to scientific inquiry and and inspires Pi to study zoology later, while Mr. Satish Kumar, the Muslim baker, introduces Pi to Islam and encourages him to study religion in college. These characters were completely cut out from the movie, and viewers missed out on an important part of Pi’s character development.
Another differing aspect between the book and the movie is the depiction of Pi as an unreliable narrator. Towards the end of the novel, Pi enters a temporary blindness and begins hearing a voice speaking to him. Originally, he believes it to be his tiger companion, Richard Parker, who has gained the ability to speak, but later he concludes it is another blind sailor stranded at sea, who attempts to climb aboard Pi’s lifeboat but is killed by Richard Parker. In the film adaptation, however, Pi never goes blind. Instead, he tries to talk to the tiger and then reminisces on the sinking of the ship he was originally on and undertakes a philosophical journey by pondering the relationship between man and nature. This scene is beautiful to Pi’s character evolution in the movie, but it is vastly different from the intimacy the reader experiences with Pi as the reader watches him go from a normal teenage boy to a confused, possibly unreliable narrator.
Both Ang Lee’s film adaptation and Yann Martel’s book took recipients on a breathtakingly tragic journey along with Pi and Richard Parker, but it is clear that the intimacy the reader builds with Pi is something the viewer of the film is missing out on.
