Life of Pi (2012)

            Some people said that the best-selling novel by Yann Martel was unfilmable, but director Ang Lee has proved them wrong. You could watch this film for the pure enjoyment of its super-sophisticated animation, which some have compared to that in Avatar. The adventure story is also a winner. A young boy named Pi Patel becomes a lone castaway after the tanker his family was sailing went down in a storm. For 227 days he's stuck in a life boat with a manic hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a ferocious Bengal tiger named Robert Parker. In the end, of course, he's saved, but how and why? The Japanese insurance adjusters don't believe his fantastical explanation, so he gives them a much more banal version. This is a movie with an overt moral about the stories we tell to understand reality. Contrary to his father's wishes, from his earliest years as a little boy Pi was always deeply religious, and so he's clear in his own mind about the One who watched over him while he was adrift in the ocean.