First image from Ang Lee’s Life of Pi surfaces featuring a tiger, a boat, and a boy

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Ang Lee’s adaptation of the novel LIFE OF PI has been underway for quite some time with little to no information about the production seeping out.  Now, we have our first image from the film, featuring two of the main characters; a Tiger (reportedly CGI) and newcomer Suraj Sharma, who plays the titular character, Pi Patel. The film also stars Tobey Maguire, Gerard Depardieu, and Bollywood actress Tabu. 

Sail away:

The story goes like this:

Pi Patel is an unusual boy. The son of a zookeeper, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior, a fervent love of stories, and practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes.

The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them “the truth.” After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional-but is it more true?

I read the book eight years ago and found it to be really great, imaginative, and ripe for a big screen adaptation.  Ang Lee is truly the perfect choice to direct the film, I just hope he delivers on the potential that the material has. 

LIFE OF PI is set to be released on December 21, 2012.