Surname 1
Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Course
Date
“Life of Pi” comparison movie to the book
Introduction and Background
The author, Yan Martel, had his first birthday in 1963 in Salamanca, Spain, to parents
from Canada. Yan studied philosophy at Trent University in Ontario. It is during his studies that
he realized his writing talent. He produced a number of amazing fiction stories with “The Life of
Pi” being one of the stories that earned his a good reputation world. The tale is given against the
Indian period known as the Emergency, which involved the case of the prime minister's election
being found to be fake and thus forced to resign resulting in a series of strikes and upheavals in
the nation (Anukriti, 2015). It is the tough political and economic conditions of the nation that
forced the people to flee the nation and seek asylum in another nation, Canada (Paul, 201).
Novel Summary
The novel brings about complicated philosophical as well as religious questions, which
makes it easy to summarize such that it features person getting stuck on a lifeboat at the center of
Pacific Ocean with a deadly animal-the tiger. Pi’s childhood desire to learn more about animals,
religious as seen in the way he becomes a Christian and later an Islam. The martial laws set in
India makes it very difficult for them to survive and thus they sell most of the properties and
leave to Canada on a Japanese ship. Pi is the only person who survives when the ship sinks
alongside a zebra, a hyena, and a tiger. The hyena attacks the zebra and is later on killed by the
tiger who is then left with Pi. He survives death by teaching the tiger on how to use the lifeboat
and by feeding it with fish. This has also been presented in the same manner in the movie with
the only difference being the romantic association between the actor and the lady who makes
him have more reasons to flee the nation. The animals also are large in number in the story as
compared to the film, which makes it fail to bring out all that the Pi wants to let the people
understand by writing the book.
Analysis of the Novel versus the Film
In the novel, Martel heavily depends on words to bring out the colors as well as visual
pictures in the brain of the readers. This can be seen in the way the author describes how Pi kills
the Dorato by saying “Blue, green, red, gold and violet flickered and shimmered neon-like on its
surface as it struggled. I felt I was beating a rainbow to death” (Yann, 2.61.31). In the film, there
is the use of computer graphic imagery to surmount a large number of obstacles. The animals are
animated which give strong emotional traits making it more interesting to the readers (Dorma
́
n et
