Whale Rider Fantasy

I was saddened to see that in a routine house-cleaning IMDb deleted many pages of thoughtful posts and dialogs. In an effort to encourage a renewed interest in the message board for this fine movie, I resurrected an old post of mine, which was a response to a question posed in the OP for that thread. Sad to say, I didn't have the OP saved, so I can't give it the credit it deserves. I encourage others not only to participate in this thread, but to start OP's of their own.

"... fantasy glowed throughout this movie. However, what made it especially neat was the fantasy never took over the story; it all played out in the gritty world of today, where it seems a fact of life that there is no magic any more. Pai may have been creating a legend, but she wore a gaudy green nylon jacket and walked along the road practicing her taiaha . . . with a cue stick. Nothing that happened in the movie could be absolutely attributed to the intervention of magic. Coincidence and the natural course of things were never impossible. What I loved was the way the mystical legend was tied to the gritty world of today in a scene over a worn-down outboard motor and a frayed starter rope. No enchanted forests. No all-powerful fairy godmother. No talking animals. No "Once upon a time." The only scene that was an overt fantasy was at the end with the launching of the waka, which I feel actually was a fantasy being played out in Pai's mind. One of the moments that really moved me was as she was riding the whale in what looked to be a the end of her, the present-day boys were sending up an ages-old chant for her. While the movie didn't depend on magic, it left us with the feeling that perhaps magic wasn't completely gone from our world."

Gordon


I'm Nobody! Who are you?