Life of Pi

Directed by Ang Lee, the movie Life of Pi is about a boy named Pi who, after a shipwreck, loses his family and gets stranded on a lifeboat with a Royal Bengal tiger.

But what people tend to miss, even after the movie blatantly states itself, is that the whole story is a metaphor for survival cannibalism. Pi, after a shipwreck, is stranded in a rescue boat with a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger. The hyena kills both the zebra and the orangutan, and in the end the tiger kills the hyena.

All these animals are symbolic of different people: the zebra is a fellow passenger from the ship, the hyena is the ship’s cook, the orangutan is Pi’s mother, and the tiger is Pi himself. The Cook (described by Pi as a very resourceful man) killed the passenger (the zebra) first as his leg got infected, then he ate him; after that, he proceeded to kill Pi’s mother (the orangutan) and filled with rage, Pi (the tiger) kills the Cook.

One of my favourite quotes from the film is “Hunger can change everything you thought you knew about yourself.” It represents how a dire situation brings out the beast (the tiger) in Pi, that lead him to resort to cannibalism to survive.

Then there’s the Mysterious floating Island that seemed like a paradise for our protagonist at first, but later on he found out that it would kill him if he stayed too long. My interpretation is that the island is Pi’s mother; heartbroken after her death, Pi couldn’t throw her body in the ocean, so after he had eaten both the cook and the sailor, blinded by hunger, he ate his own mother. We can see in the movie how Richard Parker (the tiger) was eating the meerkats on the floating island; it could represent how Pi must’ve also eaten the maggots on his mother’s flesh, and how later when he found out that the nature of the island was acidic, could represent how rotten flesh of his mother could kill him if he kept eating, hence the floating island: a paradise that would kill him if he stayed long enough.

The last metaphor I could think about in this movie is how the present Pi tells the interviewer that if Richard Parker wasn’t there with him on that boat, he would’ve died, but here’s the thing: Pi never fully accepted Richard Parker as his own; he always believed him to be a separate identity. After reaching the shore of Mexico, the story states how Richard Parker left Pi without a goodbye, representing Pi’s psychology of how he let go of Richard Parker the moment he was safe, how he couldn’t accept himself as the monster; it was Richard Parker.