'Life of Pi' Trailer: Hey, Check Out All Ang Lee's CGI Animals!

Still being tossed as an awards contender despite a glaring lack of showtunes and/or impersonations, Ang Lee's Life of Pi is hoping to make up for its shortcomings with blindingly garish 3D and an animated menagerie to rival The Lion King opening. Here's the film's latest trailer. It does a little better job spelling out the film's plot, and the overall moral, which I think is, "If you're moving an entire Indian zoo by boat across dangerous waters, stop that. That is a crazy thing to be doing."

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'Life of Pi' Trailer: Tigers on Boats Have Never Been More Three-Dimensional

Well, here's the first trailer for Life of Pi, Ang Lee's adaptation of the book about a kid adrift on a boat, with a tiger. Beyond the boat and tiger stuff, the original Yann Martel novel gets into some heavy issues of spirituality and personal identity, but you won't get a lot of that in this two-minute teaser. What you get instead a lot of saturated colors and 3D stuff flying out at you. 3D rain! 3D tiger! 3D tin can! 3D fish! Some sort of glowing ghost whale or something (3D)! You will be 3D'd so hard by these things.

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First Footage from Ang Lee's 3D 'Life of Pi' Reveals Tiger Claws Will Come Right Out of the Screen, Guys

Well, here's the first footage from Life of Pi, Ang Lee's adaptation of Yann Martel's award-winning novel about a boy stranded on a boat with a menagerie that includes a huge Bengal tiger. It's the first 3D film for Lee--who back in April called himself a novice in the medium, saying "it's hard to shoot in 3D"--and in this extremely brief clip, he doesn't waste any time in exploiting the format and having the feline swipe its paws directly at the viewer. I can't decide if he's being disappointingly gimmicky or just really faithful to recreating the experience of having an aisle seat at Cats.

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This Kid Is Pi (in Ang Lee's 'Life of Pi')

Slumdog Millionaire might finally have some competition for those plum roles Kal Penn is too old for: Ang Lee has hired unknown newcomer Suraj Sharma for the lead in his adaptation of Yann Martel's Life of Pi. Sharma will be playing the title character, who Amazon's review describes as "the precocious son of a zookeeper [who] finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker." The lack of wacky celebrity voice casting would seem to indicate Lee plans to keep with the tone of the book, which is a shame, because any movie with a tiger wise-cracking in the voice of Kevin James would sure make a shitload of money.