Life of Pi

Life of Pi. With reference to recent developments in adaptation studies – and, in particular, to critical movements away from treating ‘source material’ for adaptations as ‘original’ and adaptations themselves as derivative and inferior, and towards understanding the relationship between adapted texts and adaptations as intertextual – it argues that Lee’s film playfully subverts notions of ‘originality’ by casting the novel on which it is based as the adaptation rather than as the adapted text. Moreover, it argues that Lee’s film is one of a number of recent, prominent screen adaptations of ‘well-loved novels’ to take such an approach, and that such works encourage us to consider the relationship between adapted texts and adaptations as intertextual.

Part of a larger, forthcoming project on screen adaptations of novels that have won or been short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction, this paper focuses in particular on director Ang Lee’s 2012 adaptation of Yann Martel’s 2002 Booker-winner Life of Pi. With reference to recent developments in adaptation studies – and, in particular, to critical movements away from treating 'source material' for adaptations as ‘original’ and adaptations themselves as derivative and inferior, and towards understanding the relationship between adapted texts and adaptations as intertextual – it argues that Lee’s film playfully subverts notions of “originality” by casting the novel on which it is based as the adaptation rather than as the adapted text. Moreover, it argues that Lee’s film is one of a number of recent, prominent screen adaptations of 'well-loved novels' to take such an approach, and that such works encourage us to consider the relationship between adapted texts and adaptations as intertextual.

Life of Pi (USA/Taiwan/UK – 2012), directed by Ang Lee, is one of the most remarkable recent movies in 3D, according to the movie critics. From the opening credits, passing by the transitions between shots, to the ending credits, there is an exquisite use of image layers and juxtapositions. This paper intends to reflect on the experimental use of the 3D technology by Ang Lee in this film, establishing parallels with some iconic uses of visual and special effects throughout cinema history. Thus, the complex composition of shots in Pi that refers to one of the most praised pioneers of cinema, George Méliès. We can also consider the resemblance of the dissolve effect between some shots and between scenes of Life of Pi and the way Orson Welles dissolves using light and editing at the same time in some scenes of Citizen Kane. That happens when some element in the shot keeps focused longer than the rest of the image. There is also the expressive use of color and of composition angles of the shots that are narratively justified.

Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi, the winner of numerous prestigious awards, was described as "very bold and extreme with a wonderful central idea" (Irish Examiner 2002). The "central idea" of the novel has been described differently by readers and literary critics around the world. For many, it is Pi's relationship with the tiger, Richard Parker; for some, it is the decentering of humans in favour of animals; and yet for others, the central idea of Life of Pi lies in Martel's unusual treatment of religions and their role in human life. In this paper we argue that that the main idea of the novel is Martel's ecocriticism of humanity in general, and especially the tendency of humans to put themselves at the center of any story, whether about animals or gods. Martel creates a tangled web of many different stories which define Pi's life in order to prioritize the role of fiction in the development of human personality and dissect the relations betwe...

The aim of this essay is to show that Yann Martel’s Life of Pi can be read as illustrating what philosophers usually name as pragmatic arguments for religious belief. Ultimately, this seems to be the reason why, in the short prologue that accompanies the novel, Martel claims Life of Pi to be “a story to make you believe in God”. To put it briefly, these arguments claim that even conceding that the question of whether to believe that God exists or that He does not exist cannot be decided upon the evidence we have, we are still justified to decide to believe in God because of the practical beneficial consequences this belief will bring to us. In Martel’s Life of Pi it is this kind of pragmatic reasoning that originates and what makes the “story with animals” preferable over the “story without animals.” I also point out that these arguments appear more convincing if they are not understood as referring to belief in the ordinary and common usage of the term, as the acceptance as being true the factual claim that the world is such that God does actually exist, but as referring to a subjective, non-truth-dependent way of understanding the world and of relating to it. I show that this is precisely the kind of conception of religious faith that is illustrated by the character of Pi through the novel.

I enjoy watching movies, as well as critiquing them. The movie I chose for this review is a multi-awarded adventure-drama film: The Life of Pi. Based on the novel written by Yann Martel, the movie follows “Pi” Patel, an Indian teenager, who is the lone survivor of a shipwreck trying to survive adrift in the Pacific Ocean (but he is accompanied by a Bengal Tiger). In the novel, Martel discusses themes of religion and spirituality through Pi’s exposure to Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism at an early age. He said in the interview that the book can be summarized in three statements “Life is a story"; "You can choose your story"; "A story with God is the better story" (Renton, 2013). These themes are reflected in the movie, as I will argue that: Unlike in other mainstream movies, The Life of Pi is a strong film that shows its audience how one’s faith in the divine is significant towards perseverance.

Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi, the winner of numerous prestigious awards, was described as "very bold and extreme with a wonderful central idea" (Irish Examiner 2002). The "central idea" of the novel has been described differently by readers and literary critics around the world. For many, it is Pi's relationship with the tiger, Richard Parker; for some, it is the decentering of humans in favour of animals; and yet for others, the central idea of Life of Pi lies in Martel's unusual treatment of religions and their role in human life. In this paper we argue that that the main idea of the novel is Martel's ecocriticism of humanity in general, and especially the tendency of humans to put themselves at the center of any story, whether about animals or gods. Martel creates a tangled web of many different stories which define Pi's life in order to prioritize the role of fiction in the development of human personality and dissect the relations between the human, the natural world, and the text. Although he favors the animal story, the final chapter reveals that the only story humans find "real" is the one in which animals are seen as anthropomorphic.

This paper provides a literary analysis of Yann Martel's novel, "The Life of Pi."  Specifically, it considers why it makes the claim that it is a story that will make you believe in God.  What does this claim say about the nature of contemporary religious belief?  To address this question, the paper draws on religious theorists Steve Bruce and Marcel Gauchet.

This paper deals with the literary term ‘magic realism', also known as ‘magical realism’, elaboratingonhowitappliesasapostcolonialdeviceinYannMartel’sLifeof Pi and its importance to the novel’s narrative. The novel can also be classified as a 21st-century Robinsonade — “a fictitious narrative of often fantastic adventures in real or imaginary distant places” (“Robinsonade”), that is “appropriated, translated, re-historicized, read and written anew” (Bhabha, Third Space 207), in which the protagonist Pi finds himself stranded in an ocean after a shipwreck with survivors on his lifeboat.

This brief interdisciplinary paper explores the psychological function of religion demonstrated in Yann Martel's Life of Pi.  Drawing on research into Terror Management Theory, this essay describes how Pi's unique religious orientation helps him to survive his ordeal at sea.

Yann Martel's Life of Pi which bagged Booker Prize (2002) is a novel od sea voyage. The voyage reflects the human struggle for survival. The present paper critically examines how he embeds thrill, suspense, and magic in the narrative of Pi Patel's lonely voyage with ferocious animals in a boat. In this long trail, Pi explores several popular myths about animal behaviour and displays rare human verve for survival.

Post liberalization the surge in the Indian economy saw a concomitant surge in the presence of India in the world. Since the last decades of the twentieth century Indian writing in English and ‘India’ in English writing has received more attention than ever. Graham Huggan’s considerations of ‘the material conditions of production and consumption’ of ‘postcolonial exotic’ as a factor responsible for the turn of literature into ‘saleable exotic objects’ notwithstanding, in today’s transcultural and transnational world where India is accessible and visible to all, what constitutes the ‘Indian’ exotic in literature? Yann Martel’s, Man Booker Prize-winning novel,  Life of Pi underscores the changing nature of the exotic. Life of Pi is a story of an Indian boy’s fantastic experience migrating to Canada. A shipwreck for 227 days, at sea with a tiger in a lifeboat, Pi faced existential challenges that made him redefine himself.  While Pi’s transformation is seen as psychological and/or spiritual, it is also cultural-a change in values and beliefs- that is to say it is an alteration in Pi’s ‘Indian-ness’. Migration plays a major role in the shaping of identities today. An ethno cultural portrait of Canada, 2010, lists 1,355,653 Indians in Canada at 3.86% of the Canadian population. This brings us to problem of locating the source of the exotic in Life of Pi. How has a Canadian author interpreted the character of his Indian protagonist? Is the protagonist, Pi, based on a Canadian Indian immigrant or is he an ‘Indian’ Indian, or both, and as such is there a difference? What perception does it create about India and the Indian? Pi’s transformation,  the alterations in his Indian-ness, calls for more serious consideration for at the heart of it lies the question of engagement with ‘exotic otherness’, with ‘oppositionality’ and the associated binaries of similarity and difference, acceptance and rejection. This paper attempts a reading of the debate between the need for ethnic ‘exotic’ affiliation and the need for transformation into the ‘familiar’ which unfolds in the ever-shifting landscape of migration. This paper suggests that the debate can be seen to reflect the more substantial problems connected with immigrant societies – of ethnocultural identity, the consciousness of nationhood and multiculturalism – all conundrums of twenty-first century migration.

Humanity or humanism is a set of beliefs that lauds man's greatness and centers on the significance of human beings. The ideology comes with the notion of self-centeredness, individualism, and even anthropocentrism, excluding other beings from the individual sphere while creating the line of human and non-human. Environment, animals, and the outside world is viewed as resources that man can avail of as much as they desire. Life of Pi (2012), a film by Ang Lee, and James Cameron's Avatar (2009) featuring the conflicts between man and the others, Pi vs Richard Parker, or the Sky's people vs the Na'vi, epitomizes the wall of alienation that man builds, assigning each side of the wall with opposing views such as savage-civilized, culture-nature, science-religion, etc. However, both movies also suggest that such wall of aliens can be broken down by studying the nature of the wall, examining its bleary boundary, and redefining the definition of self.

Ang Lee'nin yönetmenliğini yaptığı, Yann Martel'in aynı adlı romanından uyarlanan film, 3D teknolojisinin kullanımı sayesinde romanın kendisinden daha fazla ses getirdi. Ang Lee, özellikle Hindistan'a özgü rengârenk doğa manzaralarının ve hayvanların bulunduğu sahnelerle hikâyeyi ustaca, göze hitap eden bir zenginlikte sundu. Film, 11 dalda akademi ödüllerine aday gösterildi ve dört ayrı dalda başarı gösterdi.

This is a film review of Life of Pi (2012) directed by Ang Lee. The “moral wound,” rendered symbolically in the form of the tiger in Life of Pi, is a complex trauma in which the victim, in order to survive in life-threatening circumstances, commits an ethical transgression against his or her deeply held values. Pi encounters such an injury and manages it by separating it like the tiger and after that needs to at the same time both save the tiger and wish it to vanish. Jonathan Shay's work relating the encounters of returning Vietnam veterans to Homer's Odyssey is used to assist a comprehension of both Life of Pi and American officers coming back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reasons are considered for the possible delayed effect of trauma as a factor in the increased suicide rate of older veterans. Finally, the concept of the "mortal wound" is discussed, with an eye to its treatment.

In the Spring 2014, thirty students at Carthage College watched "The Life of Pi" in an introductory level religion course.  They tweeted their thoughts during the film and then the tweets were organized thematically, so that students could gain insight from their peers.

Part of a larger, forthcoming project on screen adaptations of novels that have won or been short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction, this paper focuses in particular on director Ang Lee’s 2012 adaptation of Yann Martel’s 2002 Booker-winner Life of Pi. With reference to recent developments in adaptation studies – and, in particular, to critical movements away from treating ‘source material’ for adaptations as ‘original’ and adaptations themselves as derivative and inferior, and towards understanding the relationship between adapted texts and adaptations as intertextual – it argues that Lee’s film playfully subverts notions of ‘originality’ by casting the novel on which it is based as the adaptation rather than as the adapted text. Moreover, it argues that Lee’s film is one of a number of recent, prominent screen adaptations of ‘well-loved novels’ to take such an approach, and that such works encourage us to consider the relationship between adapted texts and adaptations as intertextual.