Life of Pi is a novel written by Yann Martel and the film adaption was directed by Ang Lee has been the sensational movie/novel franchise of 2013, breaking records in the box office and selling millions of copies worldwide as well as winning many awards in the Oscars for best cinematography, best visual effects, best direction and best original score. It has no doubt been successful in both forms as a novel and the film adaption. The film and the novel both use a vast array of effective techniques to engage their audience. I would like to investigate on some of the relationships between the novel and film and how they have a profound effect on the story delivered to the audience in the novel and film respectively. It follows 2 main themes of religion and survival throughout both the book and the noveloutline themes, acknowledge differences between the mediums and their portrayal of themes as well.
The Life of Pi is about a boy named Piscine Molitor who lives in a town called Pondicherry in India, from a very young age he is very interested in religion and his father owns a zoo so he becomes adept with animal life. He is quite an intelligent boy who has a tendency to be very curious and he finds himself tied to 3 different religions: Hinduism, Islam and Christianity he learns about each of them and is very interested from a young age developing a strong foundation with God.
In any novel and film adaption it is evident that they wouldn’t be exactly the same as the film must be able to condense all the information in the book into a timeframe and skips over finer details. The novel on the other hand has a great deal of detail to each of the characters for example with Piscine Molitor (protaganist) has a great deal of backstory and description in the novel so we have a much greater understanding and are able to better connect with him. We must remember that film adaptions will not always portray the characters and events in