Movie Time: The Whale Rider

Date: 27^th January 2014

Day: Monday

Time: 3:00-4:00pm

Class: Pomegranate

Theme: Underwater World

Teacher: Teacher Yeong

Movie Time: The Whale Rider

I have the VCD of “Whale Rider”. Therefore I played the first disc for the children to watch.

The summary of the story is as followed:

In a small New Zealand coastal village, Maori claim descent from Paikea, the Whale Rider. In every generation for more than 1000 years, a male heir born to the Chief succeeds to the title. The Chief’s eldest son is Porourangi. His wife gave birth to a twin, a boy and a girl. Unfortunately, she and the baby boy die during child birth. Only the baby girl survived and they named her Pai. Koro, the grandfather to Pai, refused to acknowledge Pai as the tribe inheritors when Pai’s father has no intention to became the next Chief as he decided to move far away from his people physically and emotionally. This makes Koro called for all the 12 years old boy in the tribe to be trained as the next Chief. Meanwhile, deep within the ocean, a massive herd of whale is responding, drawn towards Pai and their twin destinies. When the whale became stranded on the beach, Koro is sure this signals an apocalyptic end to his tribe. Until one person prepares to make the ultimate sacrifice to save the people.

The story took place in quite a slow pace and there’s a lot of scene where the children doesn’t understand. Half way through the children started to wind and wanted to leave.

I guess, the children were not ready for such kind of movie. Therefore, I shall just pick the last ending part about 10 minutes to see how Pai rescued the whale. The children were curious to find out what happened to Pai too.