Nothing is heard from him for years. Ellie and Carl (Edward Asner) grow up, have a courtship, marry, buy a ramshackle house and turn it into their dream home, are happy together, and grow old. This process is silent except for music (Ellie doesn’t even have a voice credit). It’s shown by Docter in a lovely sequence, without dialogue, that deals with the life experience in a way that is almost never found in family animation. The lovebirds save their loose change in a gallon jug intended to finance their trip to the legendary Paradise Falls, but real life gets in the way: flat tires, home repairs, medical bills. Then they make a heartbreaking discovery. This interlude is poetic and touching.
The focus of the film is on Carl’s life after Ellie. He becomes a recluse, holds out against the world, keeps his home as a memorial, talks to the absent Ellie. One day he decides to pack up and fly away—literally. Having worked all his life as a balloon man, he has the equipment on hand to suspend the house from countless helium-filled balloons and fulfill his dream of seeking Paradise Falls. What he wasn’t counting on was an inadvertent stowaway—Russell (Jordan Nagai), a dutiful Wilderness Explorer Scout, who looks Asian-American to me.
What they find at Paradise Falls and what happens there I will not say. But I will describe Charles Muntz’s gigantic airship that is hovering there. It’s a triumph of design and perhaps owes its inspiration, though not its appearance, to Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky. The exterior is nothing speciaclass="underline" a really big zeppelin. But the interior, now, is one of those movie spaces you have the feeling you’ll remember.
With vast inside spaces, the airship is outfitted like a great ocean liner from the golden age, with a stately dining room, long corridors, a display space rivaling the Natural History Museum, and attics spacious enough to harbor fighter planes. Muntz, who must be a centenarian by now, is hale, hearty, and mean, his solitary life shared only by dogs.
The adventures on the jungle plateau are satisfying in a Mummy/Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones sort of way. But they aren’t the whole point of the film. This isn’t a movie like Monsters vs. Aliens that’s mostly just frenetic action. There are stakes here, and personalities involved, and two old men battling for meaning in their lives. And a kid who, for once, isn’t smarter than all the adults. And a loyal dog. And an animal sidekick. And always that house and those balloons.
Whale Rider
PG-13, 105 m., 2003
Keisha Castle-Hughes (Pai), Rawiri Paratene (Koro Flowers), Vicky Haughton (Nanny Flowers), Cliff Curtis (Porourangi), Grant Roa (Rawiri), Mana Taumaunu (Hemi), Rachel House (Shilo),Taungaroa Emile (Dog). Directed by Niki Caro and produced by John Barnett, Frank Hubner, and Tim Sanders. Screenplay by Caro, based on the book by Witi Ihimaera.
Whale Rider arrives in theaters already proven as one of the great audience-grabbers of recent years. It won the audience awards as the most popular film at both the Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals, played to standing ovations, left audiences in tears. I recite these facts right at the top of this review because I fear you might make a hasty judgment that you don’t want to see a movie about a twelve-year-old Maori girl who dreams of becoming the chief of her people. Sounds too ethnic, uplifting, and feminist, right?
The genius of the movie is the way it sidesteps all of the obvious clichés of the underlying story and makes itself fresh, observant, tough, and genuinely moving. There is a vast difference between movies for twelve-year-old girls, and movies about twelve-year-old girls, and Whale Rider proves it.
The movie, which takes place in the present day in New Zealand, begins with the birth of twins. The boy and the mother die. The girl, Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes), survives. Her father, Porourangi (Cliff Curtis), an artist, leaves New Zealand, and the little girl is raised and much loved by her grandparents, Koro and Nanny Flowers.
Koro is the chief of these people. Porourangi would be next in line, but has no interest in returning home. Pai believes that she could serve as the chief, but her grandfather, despite his love, fiercely opposes this idea. He causes Pai much hurt by doubting her, questioning her achievements, insisting in the face of everything she achieves that she is only a girl.
The movie, written and directed by Niki Caro, inspired by a novel by Witi Ihimaera, describes these events within the rhythms of daily life. This is not a simplistic fable, but the story of real people living in modern times. There are moments when Pai is lost in discouragement and despair, and when her father comes for a visit she almost leaves with him. But, no, her people need her—whether or not her grandfather realizes it.
Pai is played by Keisha Castle-Hughes, a newcomer of whom it can only be said: This is a movie star. She glows. She stands up to her grandfather in painful scenes, she finds dignity, and yet the next second she’s running around the village like the kid she is. The other roles are also strongly cast, especially Rawiri Paratene and Vicky Haughton as the grandparents.
One day Koro summons all of the young teenage boys of the village to a series of compulsory lessons on how to be a Maori, and the leader of Maoris. There’s an amusing sequence where they practice looking ferocious to scare their enemies. Pai, of course, is banned from these classes, but eavesdrops, and enlists a wayward uncle to reveal some of the secrets of the males.
And then—well, the movie doesn’t end as we expect. It doesn’t march obediently to standard plot requirements, but develops an unexpected crisis, and an unexpected solution. There is a scene set at a school ceremony, where Pai has composed a work in honor of her people, and asked her grandfather to attend. Despite his anger, he will come, won’t he? The movie seems headed for the ancient cliché of the auditorium door that opens at the last moment to reveal the person whom the child onstage desperately hopes to see—but no, that’s not what happens.
It isn’t that Koro comes or that he doesn’t come, but that something else altogether happens. Something on a larger and more significant scale, that brings together all of the themes of the film into a magnificent final sequence. It’s not just an uplifting ending, but a transcendent one, inspired and inspiring, and we realize how special this movie really is. So many films by and about teenagers are mired in vulgarity and stupidity; this one, like its heroine, dares to dream.