Word: whaled
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...were a 12-year-old boy on a solo Save the Whale campaign, well, you'd slap your favorite marine mammal into a truck for a drive to the Pacific Ocean. And to keep him refreshed, you'd probably run him through an automatic car wash. And then, like an animal tamer who uses love instead of a whip, you'd get your adorable orca to leap over a high jetty so he could be reunited with his pod. You'd go that far for a friend. Where there's a whale, there...
...story of two 12-year-olds separated from their folks. Jesse (Jason James Richter) is a troubled boy who, while cleaning up the graffiti scrawled on the walls of a seaquarium theme park in the Pacific Northwest, bonds mystically with a 7,000-lb., 22-ft.-long killer whale named Willy. Aided by his foster parents and two sympathetic adults at the park, the sweet boy makes it his mission to free the sweet beast...
There's no denying, though, that Free Willy is a clever movie toy for the kid market. Most of the time Willy is played by Keiko, a killer whale (actually a type of dolphin) that the company found in a seaquarium in Mexico City. But frequently Keiko is spelled by a stunt double: a high-tech robot coated with 3,000 lbs. of eurythane rubber. (There is also a Turbo Willy - -- essentially the top of the whale, with mammoth hydraulic propellers on the bottom.) How real were the fake Willys? Persuasive enough so that the real Willy got the hots...
...questions. And like any ingratiating adolescent, Willy knows how to make bad manners look cute. The children who giggled in Jurassic Park at the sight of a paleobotanist elbow- deep in triceratops doody will love the moment when Willy uses his blowhole to whisk away a huge wad of whale snot. Most important, he has a sweet disposition -- lets the boy stroke his tongue -- and is fiercely loyal to his human sibling. By film's end, a million tots in the audience will be tearfully whispering Jessie's climactic words: "I love you, Willy...
...Perhaps the people at Sea World, the chain of popular marine parks in San Diego; Orlando, Florida; San Antonio, Texas; and Aurora, Ohio. Its curators are steamed at the film's depiction of an animal theme park as an inhumane cesspool. "The movie is not a fair portrayal of whales in captivity," argues Jim Antrim, general curator at Sea World in San Diego. "The trainer seems to be feeding the animal an inferior type of fish and often walks by the animal in an uninterested manner." Sea World execs charge that the movie is inaccurate on many levels, from...