The Manipulation of the Color of Blue and Green in the Film The Life of Pi

The Life of Pi is a film focused on a man named Pi who tells a writer his story of survival when he was a young man immigrant from India. During this immigration, his family passed away in a shipwreck and he became lost at sea. The story He narrates is an unbelievable journey in which he tames and lives with a Bengal tiger, lands on a carnivorous island full of lemurs, and eventually finds safety on Mexican soil. Pi told this story to insurance agents but, they did not believe him.

They needed the “truthful” story; Pi described this version of his story and it was rife with death, cannibalism, murder, and Pi’s seemingly endless loneliness. The main story he tells is incredible, but many parts of it seem to be full of lies. One tool used to play with truth and fiction in the movie is color. During the film, the greens in nature and the blues of the ocean and the sky are especially notable.

They are highlighted beautifully and are shown in many different hues depending on the scene displayed. Colors are often altered to look special or more vibrant during more surreal scenes. The use of vibrant, lively colors within The Life of Pi shows the blend between fact and fiction in the story, conveying the theme that sometimes it is better to tell an unrealistic story with good intentions than re-live the pain of reality.

Within the film, blue and green are manipulated and edited to show how Pi escapes the horrible reality of being lost in the ocean.

Get quality help now

Writer Lyla

Verified

Proficient in: Manipulation

5 (876)

“ Have been using her for a while and please believe when I tell you, she never fail. Thanks Writer Lyla you are indeed awesome ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

Within his original story, Pi had been living alone for days off the boat, terrified of the tiger Richard Parker, who he narrowly escaped from being eaten. Pi catches his first fish and feeds it to Richard Parker, then the movie launches the audience into a dreamlike sense of reality. The Life of Pi keeps its audience guessing which scenes are real and which are not. The exaggeration of color in scenes like the whale scene communicates to the viewer that something surreal is occurring. These types of scenes always occur at night, when Pi has been asleep, furthering the dream-like aspects. The nighttime image on the screen turns to a scene lit by a fluorescent blue tinted light, including all the fish and exterior of the boat, seemingly coming from the ocean itself. Even Pi swirling his arm in the water yield the water to turn this color. Then, a giant whale flies out of the water surrounded in a bright green and blue light which knocks Pi back into the water, fish rush by him and he realizes that all the supplies he took off the boat were now lost. The camera pans to a sky view of the whale swimming away, the ocean glimmering with lights as if it was a galaxy full of stars with blue star dust spread across it.

This scene is a mental escape, to a better place in which Pi can find meaning in the world. Pi spends a lot of time at sea alone, traumatized by the death of his family and he is living alone with a hostile creature. The reality presented to him is rough to say the least. In a dreamlike fashion, he describes this whale scene in a majestic flurry of vibrant color and life moving around him showing vast beauty of nature. The greens and blues are presented to show the colors of life and nature, green plants and a blue ocean full of life. In this scene however, the usually normal, lifelike shades of green and blue adopt an unrealistic, neon glowing hue. Objectively, what happened to Pi was bad. Pi is thrown into the water by a wave from the whale and much of his food is tossed out along with him after an already tiring day. Although it is technically a negative experience, this scene is presented in a beautiful, almost magic light. The ocean is glimmering and the special shades of these colors amaze him and make him happy. He looks at the magic and wonder in the world to escape the harsh reality that he was alone at sea and he might not ever see civilization again. He uses the ocean and his mind to escape to a better place. He may have really seen a whale, that whale may have even knocked him into the ocean and taken out his supplies.

However, through these beautiful, intense hues of color Pi chose to tell his story through a rose colored lens. Another way the color in this scene affects Pi’s view of his situation is in the last shot of the scene. The last shot shows the vast ocean and the bright blue color in the water is used to make the ocean look like space, representing the greater universe full of stars and unknown life. It dwarfs Pi as if he understands how small he is in the grand scheme. It makes his problems seem small when he considers all the other things going on around him. Pi is in an awful situation, and the color in the film show what Pi thought of to get him through the awful situation he was in. It was a necessary coping mechanism to see the world in a good light, to not remember the awful things that happened. It was more important to tell a story which communicated important, true values than to remember his true lonely anguish.

Another scene that exemplifies how The Life of Pi utilizes color to blur the lines between fantasy and reality to show Pi mentally escaping the terrible event he was in, is when Pi lands on a floating island populated by lemurs. Pi and Richard Parker have been on the boat for weeks with only each other for company and the loneliness and disappear has slowly sunk in. Finally, they land on a beautiful green island in the middle of the ocean with thousands and thousands of lemurs populating it. Fresh water pools are scattered across the island and Pi feels as if he is saved for a brief time. Then, night comes and Pi wakes to a glowing neon blue and green pond filled by dead, glowing fish. The entire scene is filled by the blue light coming from the water pool. Pi then picks up a plant and as he peels back the layers, the inner leaves of the plant glow an increasingly intense shade of neon blue until he finds a dark green human tooth in the middle. Pi explains to the writer that he realized the island was carnivorous, and used its pools of acid to eat the fish that came in the day.

Like the whale scene, this begins at night after Pi has fallen asleep which implies that this is occurring in a dreamlike pretense. The entire scene and everything in it, including the ocean around the island, is lit by this special blue light source. As Pi gazes upon the pond of blue, glowing dead fish realizes that what the island gives during the day, it all takes back at night.

This explains why in the plant there is a human tooth. A man just like him was once there and must have gone crazy alone on this island with only lemurs for company and he eventually died there, eaten by the island. The special tones of blue and green in the film depict how Pi looks onto the world in a deeper way to escape the brutal complexities of reality. In reality, there is a possibility that Pi really did find an island on the ocean. He could have even found a dead body on it that prompted him to leave. However, this special blue-ish green light tells us that this scene is not completely accurate. The light shows Pi’s understanding of bigger life lessons, more important than the truth. Pi realizes that nature is an immense force and that all who live must die. Nature will always take away life in the end, and when he sees that tooth he knows he can not to give up, he has to keep trying to find civilization. He knows he was given one life and his mission is to make the most of it. This scene exemplifies the theme that sometimes the important part of memory and storytelling is not necessarily telling the exact truth. Sometimes, it is more important to draw upon the experience positively and make it into a good story. Life can be horrible and it is often horrible to remember things they way they really occurred. A boy alone on an island, going crazy from a lack of company is not as compelling as a story of surreal adventure, a story with important values learned in those horrible situations.

The Life of Pi uses different tones and hues of blue and green to exemplify a shift in reality. These colors allow Pi to cross the gateway into a dreamlike reality which helps him understand the more important things in life. They act as an escape from the horrible things that were really surrounding him. For many months he was alone on a raft, struggling to survive with the knowledge that his entire family was gone. Seeing nature in this beautiful light and realizing that he was only a small piece in the universe helped him get though his problems. He saw that he had the gift of life when he saw that tooth and decided not to squander it. Nature gives life and takes it away, and Pi persisted in his survival until he made it back to the Mexican beach. Color not only serves as a representation of the colors of nature and life themselves, but also as transcendence into important life values. Learning these life values incidentally brought Pi life by giving him an escape and pushing him to keep fighting for survival. The colors of this movie show life both theoretically and literally, and show the audience how life is complex, but in the end worth living as it is one of our most precious gifts.