Fantastic!

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Great family movie, the story is awesome, surprisingly great acting for such a film, and touching to boot.

The film Whale Rider is based in New Zealand. It stars a young girls named Pai who believes she will be the next chief. She technically cannot inherit the leadership because she is female. Her grandfather, Koro, later forms a strong bond with Pai, but he still condemns her and blames her for mishaps within the tribe. Koro eventually teaches a school of boy, hoping to find a new leader. The boy shows signs of a good leader and fighter demonstrating alpha male skills. He teaches them how to use fighting sticks. This tradition is strictly reserved for males. However, Pai's nanny tells her that her second son had won many tournaments in his youth, so Pai secretly learns from him. As she is learning to use the stick she wants to still watch her grandfather teach and one day he finds her getting lessons from one of the boys who is being taught by him and he is furious. Pai was always determined to prove to Koro that she is meant to be the chief. She never let Koro fully get to her. Even though Koro never showed signs of true love and affection to her. Even when Pai finds his whale tooth necklace that none of the other boys in town could do when he gave them the task of finding the tooth he threw into the middle of the deep ocean. Or when Pai writes her school speech for him and he misses the recital. But, eventually Koro opens his eyes and sees that Pai is meant to be chief. He responds immediately to Pai with acceptance and love. The film builds a global perspective by showing the viewer how to love, care, and keep composure while times are not in your favor. I would strongly recommend this film to a teacher or student.

What is intriguing about watching Whale Rider initially is how it pulls off its bait and switch. The opening backstory is narrated by the older Paikea with the sense of a tragic fairy tale; twins, destined to bring balance and renewal and hope to a decaying community, but the male dies along with his mother. The father is rightfully furious with grief, but the elderly patriarch is already prodding him to move on from this and start anew. His thinly veiled intent is correctly guessed: he just wants a grandson. And yet throughout the film it is Porourangi who is absent, leaving his parents to raise Paikea. What can be said about a man who leaves his infant daughter and flees to another country? Think of the vitriol that Koro must hold back when listening to snippets of his new life - his unmasculine career as an artist, his relationship not with a Maori woman, but with a German. What makes Whale Rider great are the subtleties that lie between the severed connections of this family, and that its characters are not merely prickly caricatures. Think of the difficulty on Koro's behalf in not only accepting but eventually loving Paikea as his own, the little girl as the symbolic left-overs of his cowardly failure of a son. The relationship is loving, yet strained when she steps out of the gendered boundaries of the community (even when she achieves she is overstepping). Koro senses the time has come for one of the boys to step up; he's ruled the village for years with a iron fist, patrolling its behaviour with a stern look and the sharp rap of his taiaha. Rawiri Paratene's performance has the full range of emotions that come with the weight of responsibility and duty as their leader. Although he recognises strength, he is also quick to anger when it comes from an improper source - his delivery of a line in a pivotal moment calling for all the firstborn boys of the village has all the menace of the Biblical angel of death descending upon Egypt. Nanny sees all this and pushes back when she can. Her acts of rebellion are smuggled within her feminine duties; when she sweeps up the cup that Koro has smashed in the name of tradition, she spits, "You might be the boss out there, but I'm the boss in this kitchen." The irony isn't lost on her, and the act recalls years and years of tip-toeing the same line that is her husband's steadfast will and adherence to custom. The curious thing about Koro's choices are how they are revealed to be so misplaced beneath the surface. When Hemi's father comes to watch his boy perform, he arrives with steely swagger. He and Koro rub noses in the traditional greeting, yet the gesture forgoes respect and becomes a competition of brimming masculinity. The two are like bulls locking horns, stamping their feet, trying to outdo one another in their display. A few minutes later he is already out the door, promising to visit in the "next couple of days" - maybe. He's not a role model at all, and Hemi looks on with the sad resignation of a boy who has endured these flimsy promises all his life. In her soundtrack Lisa Gerrard has perfectly captured the ethereal whine of the ocean's call, in the way it twists around the modern music of the car radio and slowly overpowers it. The sound bridges she creates are exquisite, linking Paikea's diminutive cry to the elegant whale song underwater, and then back to the figure atop the wooden whale that watches over the village. Her work lifts the ambiguity of the climax, along with the excellent model whales, into a tale of mythic proportions. Observe how careful Niki Caro is to never explicitly show how Paikea is transported from beach to riding underwater - the journey is as symbolic as it is not literal, and those looking for rationality are looking in the wrong places. Elsewhere Paikea has that same quality in her; Nanny scolds Koro on how she is supposed to know to take the bus, having been picked up from school all these years, and then as if magically summoned on cue, she is there in the doorway, and ready to undergo her rites of passage. Keisha Castle-Hughes was beaten by one of the greatest performances of the decade in Charlize Theron's Aileen Wuornos at the Academy, and there is no shame in that. She has the short tousled hair of a boy, but the stick thin arms of a girl, and that is enough to rule her out in the eyes of Koro. Castle-Hughes attacks this logic with wide eyes and childish determination, exposing its short-sightedness. In her every move she is made one with her surroundings, from the way she creeps and runs her fingers along the wall, to her graceful breaststroke as she dives towards her destiny. In her heartbreaking tribute to her grandfather, she has the mechanical delivery of every young child reciting a speech to a public audience, yet brings the pain and confusion of Koro's rejection out into the open. What this scene shows is the tenderness evoked from a character that is still a child, and has had the connection to her grandfather fractured because of tradition. What every other aspect of her performance shows is that she has all the qualities of a great leader: strength, courage, intelligence. When Koro was rattling off these qualifiers to the boys, he never mentioned gender.

I have very mixed emotions about this film. I enjoyed watching it because there were not very many slow scenes. However, it did seem a bit forced in terms of the acting. I did not really particularly like any of the character's roles, because they just seemed to be trying to hard to act in my opinion. If I had to choose a favorite character though, it would be the little girl because she was so under appreciated, it was almost (literally) unbelievable, and unrealistic. Her grandfather was so mean to her, but to me, it was a bit unclear as to why exactly, and why he did not somehow grow to love her. I was also confused about who her father was. In the beginning, I understand that her mother died during childbirth along with her twin brother, and that the man with the long hair at the hospital was her father. However, when the movie fast forwarded after a few minutes about ten years later, I was completely lost as to which man (there were two that looked the same to me) was her father and which was her uncle! As the movie progressed, I grew tired of the grandfather's lousy, mean behavior towards his granddaughter, and his moping. I don't understand how he became so upset when he saw the whale on the beach, yet seemed to have a cold heart of stone when it came to people around him who loved him very much! I really wish that the grandmother would have divorced him during the film, like she kept telling the little girl she would. I think that there should have been more character development for the grandfather's role, because that could have made it more intriguing, and given the audience some insight into his mind. I also wish that the little girl would have had a best friend, or someone she could have stuck with throughout the film, because everyone seemed to be so against her that I wanted to just jump in and hug her! Overall, this film is interesting because of the Maori culture aspect, but I would not recommend it, or watch it again. My favorite thing about this film to be completely honest was their accents.