Whale Rider (2003)

This is truly a very good movie in every aspects but its most beautiful and important one is the concept of respect. I can't imagine a better way that teaches everyone why and how to respect what they are and what others are. The music is great, cinematography is amazing and the story is very interesting. However it needs a little patient for one to fully enjoy it. Watch it , it will be an excellent experience.

Whale Rider is a film from New Zealand, it portrays a small young girl who is destined to become chief. But there are some roadblocks in her way. Such as her grandfather, as is all older people who are stuck in their own way, Pie's grandfather wants a new chief for the community and it has to be a boy. Koro sets off to find the next chief by creating a school for boys since he does not have a grandson of his own. Koro goes so far as to disown Pie to find the right person, even if that person is right in front of him. I understand where Koro is coming from. He wants to keep the tradition of then a male chief alive, but at the same time I understand that Pie is the true leader and it's time for change. As time goes on through the film Pie's ability to be chief shows, she is able to call the great elder's, whales. As soon a Koro realizes she is the one, he has to accept her and he does. The film shows how to love, care, and accept, and we can use it to guide us today.

What is intriguing about watching Whale Rider initially is how it pulls off its bait and switch. The opening backstory is narrated by the older Paikea with the sense of a tragic fairy tale; twins, destined to bring balance and renewal and hope to a decaying community, but the male dies along with his mother. The father is rightfully furious with grief, but the elderly patriarch is already prodding him to move on from this and start anew. His thinly veiled intent is correctly guessed: he just wants a grandson. And yet throughout the film it is Porourangi who is absent, leaving his parents to raise Paikea. What can be said about a man who leaves his infant daughter and flees to another country? Think of the vitriol that Koro must hold back when listening to snippets of his new life - his unmasculine career as an artist, his relationship not with a Maori woman, but with a German. What makes Whale Rider great are the subtleties that lie between the severed connections of this family, and that its characters are not merely prickly caricatures. Think of the difficulty on Koro's behalf in not only accepting but eventually loving Paikea as his own, the little girl as the symbolic left-overs of his cowardly failure of a son. The relationship is loving, yet strained when she steps out of the gendered boundaries of the community (even when she achieves she is overstepping). Koro senses the time has come for one of the boys to step up; he's ruled the village for years with a iron fist, patrolling its behaviour with a stern look and the sharp rap of his taiaha. Rawiri Paratene's performance has the full range of emotions that come with the weight of responsibility and duty as their leader. Although he recognises strength, he is also quick to anger when it comes from an improper source - his delivery of a line in a pivotal moment calling for all the firstborn boys of the village has all the menace of the Biblical angel of death descending upon Egypt. Nanny sees all this and pushes back when she can. Her acts of rebellion are smuggled within her feminine duties; when she sweeps up the cup that Koro has smashed in the name of tradition, she spits, "You might be the boss out there, but I'm the boss in this kitchen." The irony isn't lost on her, and the act recalls years and years of tip-toeing the same line that is her husband's steadfast will and adherence to custom. The curious thing about Koro's choices are how they are revealed to be so misplaced beneath the surface. When Hemi's father comes to watch his boy perform, he arrives with steely swagger. He and Koro rub noses in the traditional greeting, yet the gesture forgoes respect and becomes a competition of brimming masculinity. The two are like bulls locking horns, stamping their feet, trying to outdo one another in their display. A few minutes later he is already out the door, promising to visit in the "next couple of days" - maybe. He's not a role model at all, and Hemi looks on with the sad resignation of a boy who has endured these flimsy promises all his life. In her soundtrack Lisa Gerrard has perfectly captured the ethereal whine of the ocean's call, in the way it twists around the modern music of the car radio and slowly overpowers it. The sound bridges she creates are exquisite, linking Paikea's diminutive cry to the elegant whale song underwater, and then back to the figure atop the wooden whale that watches over the village. Her work lifts the ambiguity of the climax, along with the excellent model whales, into a tale of mythic proportions. Observe how careful Niki Caro is to never explicitly show how Paikea is transported from beach to riding underwater - the journey is as symbolic as it is not literal, and those looking for rationality are looking in the wrong places. Elsewhere Paikea has that same quality in her; Nanny scolds Koro on how she is supposed to know to take the bus, having been picked up from school all these years, and then as if magically summoned on cue, she is there in the doorway, and ready to undergo her rites of passage. Keisha Castle-Hughes was beaten by one of the greatest performances of the decade in Charlize Theron's Aileen Wuornos at the Academy, and there is no shame in that. She has the short tousled hair of a boy, but the stick thin arms of a girl, and that is enough to rule her out in the eyes of Koro. Castle-Hughes attacks this logic with wide eyes and childish determination, exposing its short-sightedness. In her every move she is made one with her surroundings, from the way she creeps and runs her fingers along the wall, to her graceful breaststroke as she dives towards her destiny. In her heartbreaking tribute to her grandfather, she has the mechanical delivery of every young child reciting a speech to a public audience, yet brings the pain and confusion of Koro's rejection out into the open. What this scene shows is the tenderness evoked from a character that is still a child, and has had the connection to her grandfather fractured because of tradition. What every other aspect of her performance shows is that she has all the qualities of a great leader: strength, courage, intelligence. When Koro was rattling off these qualifiers to the boys, he never mentioned gender.

To start this all off, I would have to give Whale Rider a 8 out of 10 stars. The movie was a little hard to follow in the sense of not knowing much about Pai's family's culture, but that wasn't a very big problem. The story starts off with Pai's father in the hospital with Pai's mother, who is in childbirth. Pai's unborn brother dies with her mother, causing Pai's father to leave and go travel the world taking pictures. To me it was very surprising that a father would just leave his only daughter, especially after what occurred. Yet, I guess that is how he was to cope with the dramatic loss. I won't get too in depth about the rest of the story, but Pia's grandfather is looking for a new leader, and right from the start there are gender rolls that take place. Pia is not allowed to go for the position as the leader of the people, as she is only a girl. There is a constant love-hate relationship between Pia and Grandfather, yet it all ends towards the end. I won't spoil the ending, but it is very easy to get lost when it comes to why everything is happening. Besides that, Whale Rider is a very excellent movie, and I would recommend it to anyone. Before you watch it though, make sure to do some research on the movie and the people who are in it.