In the movie "Life of Pi", did Ang Lee use "cinematic license" to delete the "inessential" animals from the lifeboat?

Looks like those animals aren’t as intelligent as the tiger, so they don’t exist.

@MimishuLee1995

That’s gotta be the reason why! ;D

I never saw the movie but I had read the book and thought there were other animals in the lifeboat. I just looked up a summary of the book and here’s what it says about the other animals. Again don’t know what they did in the film:

“At the beginning of Part Two, the ship is beginning to sink. Pi clings to a lifeboat and encourages a tiger, Richard Parker, to join him. Then, realizing his mistake in bringing a wild animal aboard, Pi leaps into the ocean. The narrative jumps back in time as Pi describes the explosive noise and chaos of the sinking: crewmembers throw him into a lifeboat, where he soon finds himself alone with a zebra, an orangutan, and a hyena, all seemingly in shock. His family is gone. The storm subsides and Pi contemplates his difficult situation. The hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan, and then—to Pi’s intense surprise—Richard Parker reveals himself: the tiger has been in the bottom of the lifeboat all along. Soon the tiger kills the hyena, and Pi and Richard Parker are alone together at sea. Pi subsists on canned water and filtered seawater, emergency rations, and freshly caught sea life. He also provides for the tiger, whom he masters and trains.”

All of the animals depicted were anologies that represented the people involved.
It was explained in the end.
The situation that he physically survived but not mentally he had to invent a story to comprehend what had happened as it was easier for him as a child to understand.
I think it was stated that in the end HE was the tiger who survived.

@Inspired_2write Yeah – the ending kind of took away the magical realism of the story, at least for me.

@Brian1946 Didn’t you have the correct title “Life of Pi” initially. Did someone ask you to edit it to “Life of Pie”? If so, I could riff on cherry or blueberry!

I initially used and have kept the riff-worthy spelling in the OP title, so nobody asked me to change it to “Pie”.

I used the half-baked goods spelling as an implicit invitation to riffery, so riff away, Penguin of NJ!

Or I could just riff infinitely on the correct spelling, “pi.”

If the diameter of a cherry pie is 12”, how does one calculate the circumference?

If we use the radius, do we get to use twice as much “pie” for that calculation?