Inside the Tiger Factory

8/3/15 2:08 PMInside the Tiger Factory | VQR Online

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Inside the Tiger FactoryBehold the Marvel of the Animal's Fabrication

By Peter Trachtenberg (/people/peter-trachtenberg), Illustrations by Danica Novgorodoff (/people/danica-novgorodoff)

50-MINUTE READ ISSUE: Summer 2015 (/issues/91/3/summer-2015)

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I have a publicity still for the movie Tales of Terror, a 1962 horror anthology directedby Roger Corman. It depicts the casting call for the trilogy’s second segment, “TheBlack Cat.” This was a loose adaptation of the Edgar Allen Poe story of the samename. (Just how loose becomes clear when you watch the picture, half of whose plotturns out to have been decanted from “The Cask of Amontillado.”) In diminishingperspective, a queue of women stands expectantly beside a long bungalow. They’rewearing three-quarter-length skirts or housecoats and light cardigans and sunglasses.They look like people who want to be mistaken for movie stars. Each holds, at the endof a leash, a black cat, which lounges at its owner’s feet with an insouciance that willbe surprising to anybody who has ever tried to put a cat on a leash. My own attemptsat this always ended in mutual irritation and exhaustion, but maybe these cats hadbeen trained.

No similar casting call preceded the shooting of Life of Pi, the vast, color-drenched 3-D spectacle about a boy from India marooned at sea in a small lifeboat with a tigernamed Richard Parker, for which Ang Lee won the Academy Award for Best Directionin 2013. Three of the four royal Bengal tigers used in the production were supplied bythe veteran animal trainer Thierry Le Portier, who kept them, along with dozens ofother animals, at his farm in western France. (The fourth tiger, a male named Jonas,came from a small zoo in Bowmanville, Ontario, and was so mild-mannered that thezoo owner used to bring him home on weekends.) When Le Portier sent Leeheadshots of his charges, the director was drawn to one whose forehead had markingsthat looked like the Chinese character for “king.” This turned out to be the tiger’sname. Accounts of the production tend to dwell on such coincidences. Pi is the kind offilm whose insiders describe it as a journey.

Actually, King and his stand-ins only appear in some twenty-three shots in whichRichard Parker is alone on-screen, doing the standard things one expects tigers to do:snarling, blinking, yawning, gazing at the camera with the golden-eyed calm of a beingwho knows he’s at the top of the food chain. (The one departure is a sequence inwhich the 500-pound creature leaps into the ocean and, in contradiction to everythingone knew about cats—though not about tigers, which enjoy it—swims; for a few



thrilling seconds, it’s shot from below. With his upheld head and churning legs, helooks both purposeful and exuberant.) Nobody wanted to risk a repeat of thecatastrophic moment in 2003 when one of Siegfried and Roy’s big cats broke trainingand mauled Roy nearly to death. The only time Suraj Sharma, the teenager whoplayed the young Piscine Molitor (Pi) Patel, saw his costars, who had been flown outto the set built at an abandoned airport in Taiwan, was when he watched them ona monitor.

Tigers are the largest of the felidae, with males of some subspecies measuring elevenfeet from nose to tail-tip and weighing in at 600 pounds. Females are smaller, with anaverage weight of 300 pounds, though they have better odds of survival. Tigers rangein size from massive Amurs to petite Sumatrans. The most common tiger is the iconicBengal, who can be found not only in India but Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. Ofcourse, when it comes to tigers, “common” is a relative term. One sometimes hearsSiberians spoken of as white tigers, but this is a misassumption; they’re just palerthan their tropical cousins. White tigers occur rarely in nature, and the severalhundred in zoos today are mutations bred by human beings. A white tiger is a kind ofspecial effect.

In the remaining Richard Parker footage, what audiences see is a digital simulacrum,constructed, with meticulous care and at staggering expense, with computer graphics(CG) technology. The digital tiger’s creators were Bill Westenhofer, the movie’s visual-effects supervisor, and the VFX company Rhythm & Hues, which won an Oscar for itswork. This Richard Parker is the one Pi finds crouching beneath the tarp that coversthe bow of the lifeboat; the one that snarls, lunges, and swipes at him with a paw thesize of a pie plate. The CG Parker is the one that nearly swallows the boat hook Pi usesto fend him off. It required the labor of 600 animators and took more than a year tomake, and it proved so costly that by the time Rhythm & Hues won its Oscar for visualeffects, the firm had gone into bankruptcy. When Westenhofer mentioned its plight inhis acceptance speech, he was cut short by the theme music from Jaws.



Much of Pi’s considerable publicity centered on its special effects—perhaps logically,considering that the film had no stars, apart from Gérard Depardieu, who makes acameo as a ship’s cook. What it sold was illusion: Of the film’s 960 shots, 690—oneand a half of its two hours—employ visual effects. And which of its illusions was morepotent than Richard Parker, a triumph of digital engineering that also chewed thescenery? Because Life of Pi is based on what is essentially a philosophical novel, thebig cat was, in the words of one commentator, “a visual representation of aphilosophical abstraction.” But it was a representation that throbbed with life. Youcould hear it breathing. You could smell its catty stench. I couldn’t guess whatpercentage of the picture’s audience came expressly to see the tiger, as opposed to thecataclysmic storm, the sinking freighter, the phosphorescent breaching whale, theisland of meerkats. The tiger was an essential part of the movie’s spectacle, maybe thesynechdoche for that spectacle, and it was spectacle that people came to see.

Every tiger has distinct markings, not just on its fur but on the skin beneath. Itsstripes function both as camouflage and calling card, allowing it to slink invisiblythrough forests and grasslands while identifying it to others of its kind.

On the back of its ears are circular white spots that zoologists think may serve as falseeyes, like the ones on the wings of moths and butterflies, warding off other predatorsthat might approach it from behind. When confronted with a threat in front of it, atiger will rotate its ears so that the spots face forward.

It has fewer teeth than most other carnivores, only thirty compared to a dog’s forty-two. It consumes its prey in indelicate chunks—as much as eighty-eight pounds ofmeat at a sitting.

One of the striking features of Life of Pi’s publicity is that it treated the tiger as aphysical, rather than a virtual, artifact, and advertised its construction as a materialprocess, as if those 600 animators had been working with metal and plasticine insteadof strings of ones and zeros. Reading those magazine features, watching those



promotional clips, is like following the building of a skyscraper, back whenskyscrapers were not yet common features of the cityscape and passersby would stopin their tracks to stare at them.

Before shooting began, Lee and his crew spent a year making a previsualization, orprevis: a seventy-five-minute animated film that mapped out each of the ocean scenesfrom the time Pi’s family leaves India on board an ill-fated freighter to the climacticmoment, more than 227 days later, when its sole surviving member is cast onto abeach in Mexico. Not coincidentally, these were the scenes that would use effects.“Shooting 3D is kind of hard, shooting on water is really hard, and so you can’t just goin and get a whole bunch of coverage and figure it out later because we’d still beshooting it,” Tim Squyres, the picture’s editor, told PC Magazine. In contrast to theseamless illusion of the final product, the previs used animation as rough-hewn asSoviet children’s cartoons of the 1960s. Its tiger (which might be the Tiger ofInternational Capitalism) has tiny squinting eyes and a jaw like a hand puppet’s; whenit opens its mouth to roar, you wouldn’t be surprised to see that the inside was madeof plush. Lee is an intuitive filmmaker, who sums up his method as “We’ll see whathappens on set.” But in Life of Pi, he was working with technology so expensive thatscenes had to be planned to the last camera angle. Some segments of the previs wereeven rendered in 3D to convey a better idea of the final product.

During production, most of the Richard Parker scenes were shot with stand-ins. Inthe absence of a tiger, Sharma and the director circled each other around the lifeboaton all fours while the camera stayed trained on the actor’s taut face. In the scene inwhich Pi fights off the creature with a boat hook, animation director Eric De Boer tookthe non-speaking part, grabbing one end of the gaff so the star would have somethingto struggle against. Sometimes props were used. Late in the picture, when Pi and hisshipmate are in danger of starving to death, the boy cradles the cadaverous tiger’shead in his lap. Behind-the-scenes footage shows that what Sharma was holding was asoft, Smurf-blue cloth animal called a “stuffie.” It was stripped out in post-production.Before opening Pi in India, which has strict laws against the exploitation of itsnational animal, Lee had to show this clip to officials to reassure them that no realtiger had been mistreated in the making of his film.



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Tigers in the wild are mostly solitary. They do, however, communicate with oneanother through calls, scent, and claw markings, a kind of remote sociality that allowsindividuals to know and make themselves known to others they may never meet. Theywrap themselves around trees and score bark six feet above the ground; they gougesmall trenches in the earth. They announce their presence in the forest with a low,throaty boom. The poet Ruth Padel, who traveled through the last remaining habitatsof wild tigers in Asia, describes it as what a drum would sound like “if a drum couldmoan.” Phonetically, you might spell the sound aaaOOM, which so closelyapproximates the Indian sacred syllable that one might plausibly claim the chantoriginated in an attempt at imitation. Tigers also roar, growl, hiss, and cough. A soundof friendly greeting is the “chuff,” a closed-mouth snort that also goes by the Germanprusten. You sometimes hear tigers in zoos chuffing to their keepers.

Females live in stable home territories with their cubs, which they raise devotedlyuntil the offspring reach maturity. While the cubs are young, their mother rarely letsthem out of her sight except to hunt, hiding them carefully in the brush and movingthem often to protect them from predators. (When a female Sumatran at theSmithsonian’s National Zoological Park in Washington, DC, gave birth to two cubs inAugust 2013, zoo personnel were pleased to see she didn’t move them; it meant shefelt secure.) At between nineteen and twenty-eight months, juveniles disperse to seekout territories of their own, traveling as far as sixty miles. Young females often stakeout ranges adjacent to their mother’s. Males have to travel farther; it’s one of thereasons for their higher mortality. Typically, a male’s range overlaps those of three orfour females, with which he breeds until he is driven off by another male. His averagetenure is a mere thirty-two months, though one tiger on the Chitwan reserve held histerritory for six years and sired fifty-one cubs during that time. On occupying a newterritory, a male will often kill the resident female’s cubs before he mates with her.And although in popular lore a tigress fights for her young to the death, the truth isthat if the newcomer succeeds in killing them, she goes into heat for him.



It was only in postproduction that the CG tiger came into being, arriving like somereclusive, high-priced star who doesn’t show up to do his scenes until the end of theshoot. It was assembled in layers, from the core outward. Much of the work was doneon a streamlined wire frame, similar to the ones used in the design of cars andaircraft. “You have a version of the model that you can push and pull in the computeraround the shape until it looks right,” Westenhofer explained to the Los AngelesTimes’ Cristy Lytal. “And then there’s an artist who lays in all the muscles and figuresout when the arms move around, how they fire and how the skin folds and moves.And then someone else lays in the hair, and there are 10 million hairs put on the tiger,and she’s got to paint in the colors and the way it wrinkles and folds. So you work on aversion, you compare it to the real thing, and you go month after month until itlooks right.”

There were two teams of animators. One was assigned to build a rough model of atiger, working by hand, the way animators did until the mid-1990s. They started witha functional skeleton that allowed them to visualize the animal’s joints and pivotpoints so they could anticipate how it would move. To this they added a layer oftextured skin, producing a prototype that had stripes but no fur or muscle, andlooked, in Westenhofer’s words, “like a tiger that’s been shaved.” It didn’t have to beconvincing, just plausible enough to serve as a guide for blocking. The animators’contributions to the latter were sometimes inspired. Presented with a shot in whichRichard Parker is given water in a bucket, they had him hesitate a beat, then tap itcautiously with a forepaw before he drinks, a piece of business so quintessentiallyfeline that the viewer laughs with recognition.

It was the job of the second group, the technical animators, to make the plausibleconclusive. On top of the skeleton, they laminated muscle, skin, and fur. (Or, as onehas to keep reminding oneself, simulations of them. Even insiders are subject to thiserror. An animator for PDI/Dreamworks, showing a visitor different versions of thecharacter Shrek, says something about its skull, then corrects herself: “Actually, it’sjust numbers.”) They peeled off the stripes like decals and replaced them with a gridto help fine-tune how the skin would stretch or contract during movement. The teamspent hundreds of hours replicating the way the leg muscles would bunch before thebig cat leaped, the ripple that would pass up its limbs when it touched down, the sway



of the tent of loose skin beneath its stomach as it walked away. They set out torecreate the “subsurface scatter” of light passing through the outer layer of its fur andrefracting off the one beneath, so that when Richard Parker crouched on the lifeboat’sorange benches, his coat would pick up some of their color.

The most demanding scenes were the ones in which the predator was shown movingin water. To sustain the dream of the movie, each illusion had to affect the other, as ifeach really possessed weight and mass. The tiger had to part the water as he wadedthrough it; the water had to break and swirl around his moving body, affect the furdifferently depending on whether it lay above or below the water’s surface. Tiger andwater had been created in different software packages, and Rhythm & Hues had tofind a way to get those packages “to talk to each other and to interact,” Westenhofersays. The animators would pass Richard Parker to the simulators, who would makethe water respond to the illusions of mass and motion, then pass him back to theanimators so they could tinker with his fur, plastering it down where it lay above thesurface, making it swish like strands of seaweed where it was submerged.

When you compare the footage of a real tiger (I think it’s King) swimming in realwater, and his CG counterpart struggling to stay upright as a simulated torrent dasheshim against the stern of the flooded lifeboat, it’s almost impossible to see thedifference. And, really, that “almost” is just the writer hedging his bet.

A tiger in the wild eats fifty large ungulates (or, as Ruth Padel puts it, fifty “large deer-shaped animals”) a year, some 3,000 pounds of meat on the hoof. A female with cubsto feed needs to kill seventy. In India, the prey animals include sambar, muntjac,chital, and the large wild cattle called gaur. In any year, tigers are thought to remove10 percent of the game in their territory. They typically hunt alone, early in themorning or at dusk and into the night. While they can move quickly for shortdistances, they’re too heavy for a long chase. They depend on surprise: They creeptoward their prey from upwind or lie in wait for it in the high grass beside a wateringhole. They are masters of ambush, crouching in stillness for long minutes without a



whisker twitching, their heads held low, their ears raised. When the moment arrives,they erupt from cover. The charge is propelled by the hind legs, which overtake theones in front. The torso stretches impossibly.

Field biologists describe tigers’ killing style as “plastic,” varying according to the typeof prey and its evasive maneuvers. They may seize their victims with their teeth orclaws, or with both at once, by the throat or the nape of the neck. Sometimes theyattack their prey head on and grip its throat until it asphyxiates; this may take up tosix minutes, though some seasoned adults have been seen dispatching a victim in aslittle as one. Sometimes they bring an animal down by the hindquarters, then bite itsthroat as it falls, twisting its head to the side so as to keep clear of its horns or antlers.The long fangs—at three inches, the longest of any felid’s—are ideally spaced to pryapart a small deer’s cervical vertebrae and snip its spinal cord the way a tailor mightbite off a bit of excess thread. A video shows a young female beginning to eat a boarthat she took from ambush in a shallow pond. She lies on top of it, grasping it with herclaws, and takes tugging bites from the base of its neck. The skin is thick, andsometimes the tiger worries it with such force that she lifts the boar’s head from theground. The animal, which up until then one had thought dead, opens its wrinkledmouth and screams.

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When I first saw the previews of Life of Pi, which were almost impossible not to see inthe months before the movie’s release in November 2012, I naïvely thought I waswatching a real tiger. It’s embarrassing to admit. I understood that the boy playing Piwas an actor. My naïveté lay in assuming that the tiger was one, too, an animal thathad been trained to follow cues and, in this case, not kill and eat his costar. I figuredthat the boy’s and tiger’s footage had been shot separately, maybe on stages somedistance apart, and that it was only skillful cutting that made it appear that the tiger

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was lunging at the boy or the boy was jabbing a boat hook at the tiger. Another kind ofnaïveté is to view human acting as pretense and fakery. But I think even the mostunsophisticated viewers understand that animals don’t pretend—not, at any rate, theway humans do. This is what gives their performances their charm, and alsotheir authority.

Maybe that’s why those previews always brought me to a state of wonder, the kindthat’s always called “childlike.” Specifically, it was the tiger that did that to me, themute, gold-and-black, white-ruffed mask of his face burning out of the dimness of thetarp-covered lifeboat, then rising toward the viewer as if from beneath the sea, theeyes widening, the lips peeling back in a snarl whose subsonics, broadcast by thespeakers of a first-run urban multiplex, made my breastbone vibrate. The fury withwhich he scrambled across the deck and halfway over the bow. The unfathomablemenace of his gaze. Otherwise, Life of Pi looked like something I could live without,too much gorgeousness, too artfully composed, delivered in the interest of uplift.

I don’t remember when I learned it was mostly digital. What I do remember is mydisappointment, and the outrage I felt the next time I watched the trailer (probablythe last time I watched one). Once more Richard Parker burst from underneath thetarp. Once more he opened his mouth and roared his demiurgical roar. Once more hesnapped at the thrusting boat hook. Once more, he strode into the underbrush,without pausing to look back at the broken figure gazing at him from the sand. Iwatched coldly. The images were spectacularly lifelike, and they were fraudulent. Icertainly wasn’t going to see the fucking picture, not even in 3D.

I think of myself as a reasonably savvy grownup, seasoned by decades of moviegoing.So I am puzzled why I gasped at the sight of a tiger in a movie trailer. I’m even morepuzzled why, on learning that 86 percent of that tiger—or of the shots of which he wasconstituted—was brought into being on computer monitors, I felt so angry. Was myoutrage about tigers or about digital animation, which in Life of Pi attains suchheights of realism that it seems to create a separate reality, not virtual so much asparallel, or other? A reality that supplants the one we knew?



In Hindu iconography, the god Shiva is depicted seated on the skin of a tiger. Somerishis, jealous of their wives’ passion for him, hid a tiger in the forest where Shiva wasstrolling, in the expectation that the tiger would kill him. But it was the god whotriumphed. The tiger is associated with lust, so the image is shorthand for theconquest of desire. This is rather odd, considering that Shiva is so often associatedwith desire. He’s sometimes known as the Lord of Animals.

One of the jatakas, the stories of the Buddha’s earlier incarnations, tells how, whiletraveling with a disciple, the bodhisattva came upon a tigress that was so deranged byhunger that she was about to eat her cubs. Moved by pity, he sent the disciple off tofetch food, but then sacrificed himself to the creature, which tore him to shreds.

Tiger bones have been used in traditional Chinese medicine as a cure for muscle painand epilepsy; tiger penis is prescribed as an aphrodisiac.

Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth-century “Tiger of Mysore,” decorated his palace withmurals of British soldiers being killed by tigers. Among the items taken from hiscollection when the city fell in 1799 was a mechanical organ shaped like a tigerstanding on top of a redcoat, his teeth in the soldier’s throat. When one winds thehandle, the soldier lifts an arm and calls for help, and the tiger roars.

One of the signs of a new incarnation of a Dalai Lama is striped marks on the legs—“asof a tiger.”

Even in the Middle Ages, tigresses were known for their devotion to their young.Bartholomaeus Anglicus wrote that a hunter could steal cubs with the aid of sphericalmirrors, which he threw in front of the pursuing mother: “And the mother followethand findeth the mirrors in the way, and looketh on them and seeth her own shadowand image therein, and weeneth that she seeth her children therein, and is longoccupied therefore to deliver her children out of the glass, and so the hunter hath timeand space for to scape.”



In parts of Sumatra, the tiger is called inya or nenek, a word that also means“grandmother.” “Ssh, grandmother’s here” is both a warning and a phrase of respect.Villages are thought to have their “own” tiger, which protects the community, upholdsthe law of the forest, and preys only on transgressors—adulterers, for instance—orpeople who have a bad aura or tainted blood. Residents describe their village tiger assopan, “polite.” But they live in fear of the ones they call harimau luar, the tigerfrom outside.

It was also in Sumatra that early ethnographers heard reports of were-tigers. Therewas supposed to be an entire village of them in the Mt. Dempo region. You couldrecognize them because they had no groove in their upper lip. Not long ago, RuthPadel heard of one who was married to a schoolteacher. Her informant told her: “Heturns into a tiger when stressed. He eats like an animal. They are afraid of him. Hiseyes stare like a tiger.”

The kings of Java enjoyed watching rampogs, tiger-stickings, in which captiveanimals were driven onto an open field to be set upon by men with spears. Before thespectacle began, the animals were kept in wooden cages, which were set on fire toforce them into the open. According to some sources, the entertainments claimed thelives of as many as 200 tigers a day.

The Javan tiger became extinct in the 1970s.

Why did I feel cheated when Richard Parker was revealed to be artificial? Any moviecharacter is artificial—so is any character in a book—and it makes no more sense tobelieve in a tiger named Richard Parker than it does to believe in a human beingnamed Rick Blaine or Annie Hall. And outside the 127-minute dream of the film, noone had pretended that Richard Parker was real. On the contrary: All the publicityheralded the marvel of his fabrication.

Some of my indignation stemmed from the awe I’d felt watching those trailers; thetwo feelings were almost identical in intensity, and this suggests that they were thesame feeling turned inside out. Maybe feelings, like matter and energy, are subject to



a law of conservation. They don’t disappear, but morph into other feelings, whichwane in intensity only as the organism wanes in strength. I’ve described my awe aschildlike; my indignation was childlike, too. But what did I have to get indignantabout, except at having been charmed back into a child’s credulity—a tiger and a boy!On a boat!—only to be told that the thing I believed in wasn’t real? Recall the injusticeof childhood, when grownups make you tremble with dread for lying to them only tolie to you and chuckle when you catch them at it. Yet at the same time my outrage wasalso an adult’s outrage on behalf of a child, even if that child was the grownup himself,or some dormant part of him that had been reawakened by the roar of a thirty-foottiger, enhanced by Dolby 7.1 Surround Sound. Improbably, paradoxically, the sameroar had lulled the grownup to sleep. When he started awake, he saw the child gapingat digital tricks, his eyes shining with wonder. In another minute Ang Lee would comealong and steal his pocket money.

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On a June visit to the National Zoo in Washington, I was taken to see a maleSumatran tiger named Kavi. Like most Sumatrans, he was on the small side, probablyunder 300 pounds. His coat was a color between cumin and turmeric, with not muchwhite in it apart from the facial ruff. On this afternoon, he was inside his cage ratherthan in the big-cat habitat outside, where I would later see a female named Damai,who in former times, before zoos began taking pains not to anthropomorphize theiranimals, would’ve been called Kavi’s mate. Mates or not, the two tigers were keptseparate most of the time, in keeping with their normal behavior in the wild.

The enclosure was some ten feet by eight feet. A remotely operated sliding doorconnected it to the narrow hallway through which Kavi would pass on his wayoutdoors. A smaller mesh “howdy gate” led to Damai’s enclosure. Considering thepossible consequences of introducing two large carnivores in an enclosed space, suchgates have become a standard way of acclimating new tigers to each other for breedingpurposes. At his first sight of the female, Kavi had been so excited that he bouncedback and forth in front of the gate. The more reserved Damai watched him, chuffingand rubbing her head against the grate. When they were finally brought together, heat first ignored her, then suddenly seemed to realize why they’d been thrown together



and tried mounting her, so alarming Damai that she clawed him. Subsequentencounters had been more successful, and she was now pregnant. A few months aftermy visit, she’d give birth to two healthy cubs.

Kavi reclined on a shelf bolted to a wall about three feet above the enclosure’s cementfloor. On a nearby tray were the leftovers of the eight pounds of ground meat he is fedeach day. (In the wild, he might eat four times as much, but only once a week, afterrepeated unsuccessful hunts.) There was a lot of meat left, and Kavi’s keeper, a tall,regal woman named Dell Guglielmo, thought he didn’t like the mix. To keep track ofeach animal’s consumption, she and her coworkers sprinkle the feed with differentcolors of edible glitter, which shows up in the scat. The big cats are also fed frozenrabbits and a mixture of whole mice, mouse blood, and chicken broth frozen in amold. “We call them mouse-sicles,” Guglielmo said.

John Seidensticker, a big-cat specialist and research scientist with the SmithsonianConservation Biology Institute, once told me that captive tigers have brains that areup to 10 percent smaller than those of their counterparts in the wild, and much lessmuscle mass. Some of this is probably a result of zoo-bred animals’ lack ofopportunities for purposeful activity, namely hunting and killing. The keepers try togive them toys, but finding a toy sturdy enough for a tiger takes work. A brewery inVirginia had sent over some kegs. And in the narrow corridor, I passed a few largeballs, three or four feet in diameter, made of hard plastic. They were notched withclaw marks, and a few had had huge chunks bitten out of them. Some cats demolishthem in minutes.

The cat house was clean but smelled strongly of urine. A tiger’s has the familiaracridity of all cat piss, just amplified. And it has a puzzling under-note of fish—puzzling because the tigers at the National Zoo aren’t fed fish. The male cats spray,and from inside their enclosures they can easily hit a wall ten feet away. Two cagesdown, a lion named Luke roared; the building seemed to shake. Kavi lookedunperturbed. But when I stepped out from behind Guglielmo, whom I’d followeddown the hallway, he stiffened and his ears rose. She warned me that Kavi didn’t likemen. In another moment he might snarl. The prospect excited me, but I was also alittle scared. I made an attempt at chuffing and was surprised and pleased to hear the



tiger chuff back. His ears lowered. For the next several minutes I stood in the hall,silently watching him while he silently watched me. I blinked at him, though I wasconscious of what a stupid presumption I was making, greeting a tiger the way Iwould an unfamiliar housecat. The tiger blinked at me. I could have spent theafternoon that way. In the pictures I took of Kavi, his forepaws are crossed. Thegesture, together with his slitted eyes, conveys the confidence and relaxation of acelebrity who’s being interviewed by a starstruck reporter. He knows the piece will bea big wet kiss.

The outdoor compound where the tigers spend most of the day (sharing the spacewith the zoo’s lions) was 31,000 square feet, just a fraction of the size of a singleanimal’s territory in the wild. But it was planted with scarlet and red oak, Himalayanpine, and bamboo thickets where the animals could lie up during the day, and hadterraces that gave them opportunities to jump and climb. It was certainly morespacious than their indoor quarters. The big cats used to spend the night outside. Itmust have been satisfying for them, especially on those nights a stray bird or rodentfound its way into the enclosure. (The zoo’s staff still talks about a tigress namedSoyono that killed some ducks that had made the mistake of landing in her territory;she ate only the breast meat.) However, in 1995, Margaret Davis King, a homeless,mentally ill woman from Arkansas, climbed over a three-and-a-half-foot barrier,crossed a four-foot-wide dirt buffer, dropped down a nine-foot wall, and then swam atwenty-six-foot moat and entered an enclosure shared by a pair of lions. A keeperfound her mutilated remains the next morning. The medical examiner told reporters,“This was certainly a death that occurred over several minutes.” King believed she wasrelated to Jesus and received messages from God. Investigators thought she mighthave been emulating the early Christian martyrs, or maybe the prophet Daniel, whowas cast into a lions’ den and emerged unharmed. Since that time, the National Zoo’slions and tigers have been brought inside at nightfall.

Seidensticker believes that every zoo embodies one of four models of animalmanagement, or some combination of them. The models in turn reflect underlyingideas of what a zoo is for—whether it’s meant for human visitors or for the animalsthat live in it and whether those animals are supposed to be micromanaged andpampered or allowed to live as much as possible as they would in their native habitat.



Always, some allowances have to be made for the sensibilities of the clientele. In thewild, the turnover of males in a pride of lions is pretty gruesome; if replicated in a zoo,the zoo would have to hire a trauma counselor for child visitors, and maybe for a fewgrownup ones, too.

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5

Following the second commandment (or, for Catholics and Lutherans, the first), allthe Abrahamic religions prohibit idolatry. This is one of those familiar terms—like“sin”—whose meaning we think we know but that on inspection turns out to be more

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nebulous. In certain times and places and according to certain interpreters, idolatryhas meant not only worshipping graven images but creating such images in the firstplace, on grounds that creation is solely the prerogative of God (in the Quran, one ofthe epithets for God is musawwir—maker of forms) and any work of art usurps it. Inthe most extreme cases, all representations have been forbidden. More often therestrictions are narrower and full of loopholes. Because Allah was said to be thecreator of everything that could speak or breathe, some Middle Eastern paintersfudged the issue by giving their human figures a flower in place of a head. Jewishreligious texts of the Middle Ages gave them birds’ heads, all those beaky Jews,wearing the pointed Jews’ hats mandated by German margraves, toiling, praying,feasting, dispensing alms, piecing together lives as fragile as swallows’ nests, as if theyreally were human.

What distinguishes the idolatrous image from the innocuous one? Judging from theexamples above, it has to do with how closely the image approximates reality (“anylikeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that isin the water under the earth.”). In reality, human beings have human heads withmouths that speak and breathe, but representing them in this manner may be anaffront to God. Was there an outcry within the Catholic Church when Giotto andLeonardo da Vinci began representing the human form realistically, giving itperspective, anatomically correct musculature, and a face as mobile and seamed asthe faces one saw in the marketplace, haggling over the price of fish? Did some popeof the nineteenth century issue an encyclical against photography? Did imamspronounce a fatwa against the cinema? Seeing a locomotive thundering at themthrough a haze of steam, early movie audiences yelled and dove for cover. But in timeall of these illusions were recognized as illusions, realistic but not reality itself. Realityremained elsewhere. Maybe it still belonged to god, if you believed in one. Maybe thedividing line between the idolatrous image and its permissible counterpart is that theone is a counterfeit of the real and the other only a gesture toward it. God may be theuncontested author of the real, but that leaves us the imaginary, where a human beingmay have a body, limbs, and a rose for a head.



Early special effects clearly belong to the realm of the imaginary. Astronomers travelto the moon in a papier-mâché shell fired from a giant cannon. A model gorilla madefrom aluminum, foam, and latex and covered in rabbit fur squats on top of a modelEmpire State Building with a model airplane clutched in its fist. A squad of sword-wielding skeletons pops out of the ground with the spikiness of stop-motionphotography; you can almost hear their joints clacking. This is how skeletons ought tomove—it’s how they move in dreams—but even at nine or ten, I didn’t think theskeletons in Jason and the Argonauts were real: I thought they were cool. So didmillions of other children in the early sixties, and grownups, too. We understood RayHarryhausen’s special effects the same way moviegoers in 1902 probably understoodthose of Georges Méliès: not as illusions but as spectacles, thrilling even in theircrudeness. Was our pleasure a mark of ingenuousness or sophistication? We mayhave tacitly understood that we were seeing representations of things that did notexist—or of things that no one had seen and lived to tell about.

In the West, the fine arts moved toward the real and then turned away, muttering thatthe real had been done. Every so often someone renegotiated reality with the aid of anairbrush or a large-format camera, or put a real shark in a tank filled withformaldehyde. But anybody could see that the shark was dead. Special effects keptadvancing single-mindedly, driven by advances in technology and the appetites,stated and inferred, of the movie audience. It became possible to show men beinghewn down by the thousands on a single morning of World War II, too many to countand at the same time individual in their agony, down to the GI groping dully in thesand for his severed arm. The spacecraft were no longer papier mâché, or no longerlooked like it. One could see the bloom of condensation on their bulkheads. Instead ofSelenites in leotards, there was an alien whose massive, wormlike head, fashionedfrom snake vertebrae and tubes scavenged from an old Rolls-Royce, had 900articulated parts. You could see what it, or its larval precursor, looked like eruptingout of a human chest. You could see ghosts and angels and the world being destroyed.Computer graphics further narrowed the gap between representation and reality andbetween the real and the imaginary. In the fight scenes in The Matrix (I forget whichone), you can’t tell the real Agent Smith from his digitally generated clones. Anybodycan intuitively grasp the technology of the old effects; it’s basically chemistry andmechanics. But who can intuitively understand the processes that transubstantiate



ones and zeroes into a tiger? “The animator will grab a control,” Westenhofer says ofhis creation, which had as many discrete controllers for its paws as earlier animatedcreatures had for their entire facial rigs. “But ultimately we’re just looking at thetiger’s surface.” Or, in the words of that animator at Dreamworks: “Actually, it’sjust numbers.”

The Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the term “the Uncanny Valley” todescribe what happens when replications of the human form, and especially thehuman face, attain a certain degree of realism. Robots that are 20 percent humanlikemake human viewers feel warm and fuzzy, and they feel warmer and fuzzier as robotsbecome more lifelike, up to, say, 90 percent. But somewhere beyond 95 percent theopposite happens. As Lawrence Weschler puts it in his brilliant Uncanny Valley,“When a replicant’s almost completely human, the slightest variance, the 1 percentthat’s not quite right, suddenly looms up enormously, rendering the entire effectsomehow creepy and monstrously alien (no longer, that is, an incredibly lifelikemachine but rather a human being with something inexplicably wrong.).”

The same thing occurs in animation. Viewers who saw the 2004 movie of thechildren’s classic The Polar Express, the first animated film to use motion-capturetechnology,complained that its human figures were at once too convincing and notconvincing enough. One reviewer called it a “zombie train.”

When I asked if he could tell the difference between the real and digital tigers in Lifeof Pi, Seidensticker replied, “There was some very good stuff that I could not tell.Especially the fast moving material.” But at other times, he noted a discrepancy.“There is nothing as smooth as a moving tiger.”

One of the reasons Westenhofer’s tiger is so convincing is that it’s a likeness of aspecific animal: King. He and the other real tigers—his sister Minh, another femalenamed Themis, and Jonas, the male from Canada—weren’t just stand-ins but modelsthat the animation team would refer to as they composed Richard Parker.Westenhofer told me, “I had a conversation with Ang early on to see if we’d bring anytigers on the shoot, and we both agreed it was important. It was a way of holding my



own feet to the fire. Of setting the bar high.” It was with that in mind that the big catswere flown from France to the set in Taiwan and kept there for the duration offilming, in specially designed cages near the 1.7-million-gallon water tank where theocean scenes were shot. One imagines agitated tigers caged in the hold of a cargoplane, trying to make sense of sensations that have no preexisting niche in the tigersensorium. But Thierry Le Portier says they were calm. When I asked him if they’dbeen tranquilized for the thirteen-hour flight, his hauteur was unmistakable even inan e-mail: “I do not need to drug my animals to travel.”

The plane landed. The hot smell gave way to other smells that were more or lessfamiliar, smells of water and growing things and creatures with blood moving throughthem. The tigers were released from their containers and placed in larger ones wherethey could pace and roll on their backs and even take small leaps. To get them used tothe camera, they were wrangled onto lifeboats—not the wooden ones where Sharmadid his scenes, but boats made of steel—and put through their paces in front of mock-ups; fake cameras were mounted on cranes and had pieces of cellophane where thelenses would be so the big cats could see their reflections. The only human whoaccompanied them was Le Portier. When Pi trains Richard Parker with chunks ofmeat and taps of a stick, it’s an offscreen Le Portier who’s wielding the stick. Thetigers’ boats, like the actor’s, were mounted on gimbals to simulate the rocking of acraft in the middle of the ocean. There are no reports of the animals getting sick.

At a certain point, the dummy cameras were replaced by real ones, and Eric de Boerbegan filming: “I shot lots of close-ups of the nose for breathing patterns,” he told thewriter Jean-Christophe Castelli. “Yawning and snarling and hissing and eating,drinking, grooming, marking. Sleeping, pissing. How does a paw change shape whenit takes the weight? And how does it change shape when the weight rolls over it for astep? How do the nails protract and retract?” Artists from da Vinci to Rembrandt haveviewed the human hand as a signifier of the whole being. De Boer seems to have feltthis way about tigers’ paws: “The way the nails protracted and darker fur would comeout with those nails—the pink of the nail. Now when we collide with the ground wecan see the shape change, the anger and aggression.” He and the other filmmakerswere assembling a visual encyclopedia of tiger behavior, though it was moreaccurately an encyclopedia of the behavior of captive tigers. There were no shots of



tigers mating or fighting over territory, no shots of them stalking and killing theirprey, no shots of them feeding on dead things whose blood was still steaming.Typically, tigers begin with the hindquarters.

It became a point of pride for Westenhofer to make sure that every shot of RichardParker was based on a reference clip of one of the animals on set or documentaryfootage. Lee agreed. To understand how a tiger might behave in different situations,the animators consulted Le Portier. “Thierry has been with tigers so long that heunderstands their personalities,” Westenhofer says. “So what would a tiger do if hecame out onto a raft? One of the things I thought was most interesting is that when atiger’s scared, he tries to act as nonchalant as possible. He won’t look at you, he’ll lookat his paws. To someone who knows, he’s showing he’s nervous by acting like he’snot nervous.”

Throughout, they had to guard against the temptation to make the tiger look—and act—more human. Of course, from the time of the first cartoons, animals have beenportrayed as if they were. In his earliest incarnation, Mickey Mouse looked likesomething you’d swat with a broom, but over time his head and eyes got bigger androunder, his muzzle shortened, until he was basically a hairy kid with a squeaky voiceand a tail. Even CG animals were subject to this convention. When Westenhofercreated a digital Aslan for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and theWardrobe, the majestic authenticity of his animation was undercut by the necessity ofgiving the lion a mouth that was capable of speaking—in Liam Neeson’s voice, no less.For Pi, however, he made it a rule not to anthropomorphize. “Here was a tiger thatwas going to be a tiger,” he told me. In an early version of the scene in which thecharacters come ashore on a deserted beach, Richard Parker was shown pausing as heslinked off into the trees, and turning to look back at Pi. Everybody agreed the lookwould drive home the meaning of the shot. But Westenhofer knew a real tigerwouldn’t do that. In the final take, the creature walks on without stopping.

The one exception to the rule came on a suggestion from the trainer. When Pi andRichard Parker are nearly dead from starvation and the despairing boy holds the bigcat’s head, the animal looks at him briefly, in a way that may not be grateful but seems



at the very least speculative, as if he were trying to understand the new terms of theirrelationship. Maybe for the first time Richard Parker grasps that they have arelationship. This would be a radical understanding for an animal that in its naturalstate spends most of its life alone. But as Westenhofer explains, the moment wasgrounded in Le Portier’s own experience. As a trainer with more than thirty years ofexperience, working with animals whose life span is only sixteen years, Le Portier hasseen a number of his companions pass away. “His tigers are really aggressive, they’renot bottle-fed guys,” Westenhofer told one interviewer. “This tiger was dying ofcancer, and it was right near her passing away, and it was the first time she nuzzledhim and created contact, looking up and regarding him. That’s what we tried toportray in that shot.”

6

Wild tigers,” writes John Seidensticker, “are being annihilated.” There may be as fewas 3,200 adults left in the wild—half as many as in 2000. Of these, roughly 2,000 arethought to be Bengals, living in India and adjoining nations; 400 Sumatrans remainin Indonesia. There may be 500 tigers in Malaysia; another 300 in Vietnam, Laos,Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia combined. Only 400 Amur tigers still remain in thevastness of the Russian Far East and northeast China. This diminished populationinhabits only 7 percent of its former geographical range.

Tigers were first declared endangered in 1969. Between that time and the present,their numbers have dwindled further and the human population living within theirrange has increased by 40 percent, to more than 3.4 billion. It’s hard to resist theconclusion that the principal threat to wild tigers is human beings. There may beother animals that prey on them (though not many), but certainly no other species hasbeen known to organize the ceremonial baiting and execution of captive tigers, or tomake a practice of killing them wholesale for sport.

The destruction of tigers isn’t always, or even primarily, deliberate. As populationsgrow, villagers in India or Indonesia or Nepal clear more land for farming; theyventure deeper into the surrounding forests for wood for cooking and building, andthey cut more of it. Maybe commercial logging operations start taking wood as well.



Maybe the villages grow into towns. As the forest melts away, the animals that livedthere die out or disperse, the tigers that fed on them turn to prey of convenience—goats and cattle and dogs and occasionally people (man-eating is rare and usuallyattributed to animals that are too weak or debilitated to take other game)—and thepeople kill them, as people kill any common menace. Development accelerates theprocess. Three videos, taken days apart by a camera trap in the Bukit Betabuhprotected forest in Sumatra, show a tiger coming so close to the lens that its whiskersand facial ruff blur; then a bulldozer plowing a dirt road through the underbrush; andfinally, a tiger, maybe the same one, passing by but quickly stepping out of range,having found nothing worth staying for.

What makes the animal’s status especially dire is the fact that its remainingpopulations are scattered, in what biologists call Tiger Conservation Landscapes(TCL)—areas that have sufficient habitat, resources, and prey to sustain five or moreanimals and where tigers have been known to occur in the past ten years. There areseventy-six such zones across Asia; some can support as many as 500 tigers. But mostof the known TCLs are smaller, often too small to be ecologically viable, and theirisolation makes it difficult for tigers to migrate from one to another, which isnecessary to prevent inbreeding and relieve the pressure of too many malescompeting for game and females, the circumstance in which they’re most likely to killcubs. When young males disperse from these safe islands, they have to pass throughcountry where they risk being shot or poisoned by poachers or struck by motorvehicles as they cross a road.

These days, Seidensticker devotes most of his efforts to creating and preserving safehavens for tigers in the wild, notably in the Terai region of Nepal. He’s part of aninternational campaign to double the number of wild tigers by 2020. Still, hisperspective is often bleak: “We have witnessed the unfolding catastrophe of amagnificent predator’s steady slide to extinction.” Beyond poaching and the unceasinghuman claim on their habitats, the problem, he writes, is that “there is insufficientdemand for the survival of wild tigers living in natural landscapes.”



I once asked Seidensticker, “If you were going to design a perfect environment for atiger that would still enable visitors to see it, money no object, what would itlook like?”

He wrote back: “I don’t think you can build a ‘perfect’ captive environment.”

In the twenty-first century, extinction means something different than it once did.There are now more tigers in captivity than in the wild, more than 5,000 in the USalone. Of these, only an estimated 500 are in zoos or certified preserves. The othersare penned in yards or confined in coops only a little bigger than dog houses,sometimes inside people’s homes. They are often malnourished and abused or, as inAsia, sold for their pelts and organs.

In 2012, Terry Thompson, a collector of exotic animals in Zanesville, Ohio, opened thecages of his private menagerie before shooting himself through the roof of the mouth.To the horror of many observers, police killed fifty wild animals, including eighteenBengal tigers.

In Brazil, there’s a family that lives with seven tigers, most of them apparently full-grown. Photos show the family feeding one by hand at the dining table; the smilingpatriarch pushing back another’s lips to display his canines; a bikinied daughter lyingon top of a tiger swimming in the pool and toweling him dry afterward.

One of my students once showed me a picture she’d taken of a friend at an animalpark in Thailand during a scholastic year abroad, a pretty, twenty-something youngwoman lying with her head resting on the flank of a prone tiger, as unconcerned as ifhe were a plush toy with a pink felt scrap for a tongue. What could be worse than for awild creature to have its nature suppressed in such a manner? Still, it’s hard for me toadmit that in a portion of my heart I was envious. What could be more wonderful thanto lie down with a tiger in complete safety, unless maybe to have one as a pet?

Years ago, at a county fair, I posed for a photograph holding a liger cub, the offspringof a tiger and a lion that had probably been mated by a private collector. My wife and Ihad to drape a padded blanket over our laps, I guess to keep the little creature from



clawing or peeing on us, though it was perfectly docile. It had probably been drugged.

Still, I think of that photo, taken inside a carnival tent on a clammy afternoon inAugust when both of us were grumpy and depressed, and costing us ten dollars, as akeepsake of one of the happiest moments of my life.

Thierry Le Portier says that the only wild animals he fears are the ones that wereraised as exotic pets. To him, they always look dead behind the eyes, and theiraggressive instincts, he believes, will always resurface.

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Bill Westenhofer told Cristy Lytal that the best thing about “making a digital tiger isthat you get to spend eight weeks with real tigers. It’s the most arresting animal you’veever seen. Everything about the way they look, their eyes, the concentric rings. Whenthey look at you, it freezes you in your tracks.”

There’s a syntactical doubleness here: A tiger’s look freezes you, the way it mightfreeze prey, but looking at a tiger has the same effect; it’s the most arresting animalyou’ve ever seen. A tiger is a spectacle, something that, by virtue of its beauty andferocity, demands to be looked at, even as it resists being known. This is why they’vebeen shown in zoos and circuses for hundreds of years. It’s probably why they’ve beenkilled in such numbers, so that hunters can pose for photos beside their carcasses anddrape their skins on the living-room floor. At the same time, I think their value asspectacles is a large part of what keeps tigers alive. This is why conservationorganizations like the World Wildlife Fund so often use pictures of them in theirfundraising. In a world saturated with images, something can be a spectacle even ifyou never get to see it. You need only know it’s out there—not in a cage, but in theforest, crouching in the high grass, slinking in the shadows beneath the sal trees.

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But what if that spectacle can be reproduced with a realism that captures the 10million individual hairs of a tiger’s pelt, the pores in a tiger’s nose, with some lines ofcode and clicks of a mouse, and does it so perfectly that you can’t tell the difference?What if our children’s children grow up believing that virtual tigers are the only tigersthere are and in the rare event they ever see a real one are disappointed because itseyes are too bright, its gait too silken?

When I finally went to see Life of Pi, what struck me was not just the digital tiger’sidolatrous authenticity, but its poetry. This was particularly evident when it firstglowers up at Pi from the bottom of the lifeboat and again when it plunges into theocean and triumphantly swims; there was another kind of poetry in its bottom-heavyclumsiness as Pi helps it back into the craft. Without that help, the predator mightremain in the water, paddling with weakening strokes until it drowned. More than anyother moment in the film, this one conveys the idea of symbiosis, the interdependenceof two life forms that are ordinarily inimical. Of course, what Lee shows us surgingthrough the swells is a real tiger. And the digital Richard Parker’s first appearance onthe boat essentially duplicates footage of the real thing: When King was filmedspringing from beneath the tarp on the boat, Westenhofer recalls, he never justsprang. In take after take, he ripped the tarp to shreds.

People have been debating for decades whether animation is a craft or an art. In theperson of Richard Parker—I use “person” consciously—Westenhofer and his crewachieved art. This isn’t just because of their creature’s fidelity to actual tigers; it’sbecause of the hundreds of hours they devoted to observing tigers in the first place,watching them yawning and snarling and hissing and eating, drinking, grooming,marking, sleeping, pissing. Asking how a paw changes shape when it takes the weightof their stride. Close observation is something we ascribe to scientists, especiallynaturalists, but it’s also required of artists, even artists whose work distorts the real orscorches it with the heat of their feeling. Rilke said of Rodin, his friend and instructor:“Since he had been granted the gift of seeing things in everything, he had alsoacquired the ability to construct things and therein lies the greatness of his art.”



Peter Trachtenberg (/people/peter-trachtenberg)

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of Another Insane Devotion (DaCapo, 2012), The Book of Calamities (Little, Brown, 2008), which wonthe Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, and 7Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh (Crown, 1997). The recipient of aWhiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he teaches in the writingprogram at the University of Pittsburgh and in the core faculty of theBennington Writing Seminars.

Danica Novgorodoff (/people/danica-novgorodoff)

Danica Novgorodoff’s graphic novels include The Undertaking ofLily Chen (First Second, 2014); Slow Storm (First Second, 2008); andRefresh, Refresh (First Second, 2009), an adaptation of BenjaminPercy’s short story of the same name that was included in BestAmerican Comics 2011.

It was Rodin who told the young poet to go to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris andstudy one of its animals, acquainting himself with its movements and moods until heknew everything about it that could be known. This was how he wrote “The Panther.”The poem begins:

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,has grown so weary that it cannot holdanything else. It seems to him there area thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

ISSUE: Summer 2015 Volume 91 # 3 (/issues/91/3/summer-2015)

PUBLISHED: July 1, 2015

http://www.vqronline.org/people/peter-trachtenberg

http://www.vqronline.org/people/danica-novgorodoff

http://www.vqronline.org/issues/91/3/summer-2015



UPDATED: June 24, 2015

TOPICS: Special Effects (/tags/special-effects), Life of Pi (/tags/life-pi), Tigers (/tags/tigers),Conservation (/tags/conservation)

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http://www.vqronline.org/tags/conservation

Documents

Inside the Tiger Factory