Hacker Cinema
Free Willy
1993 · Film · 112 min
Part of Free Willy Collection
Directed by Simon Wincer
When maladjusted orphan Jesse vandalizes a theme park, he is placed with foster parents and must work at the park to make amends. There he meets Willy, a young Orca whale who has been separated from his family. Sensing kinship, they form a bond and, with the help of kindly whale trainer Rae Lindley, develop a routine of tricks. However, greedy park owner Dial soon catches wind of the duo and makes plans to profit from them.
2 positive3 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
Man I'm mixed on this. I'm very happy that these creatures aren't being stolen from the ocean anymore for human entertainment.
But for an old lady like this, the odds of her re-adapting to a wild state are basically nil. Imagine being abducted by aliens at a youngish age and later, without ever being able to meaningfully communicate with your captors, and many decades later you're being moved to a distantly remembered place and set free. Hell, a popular sci-fi setting in movies and books involves a person living in similar circumstances and being sent back home decades later.
At least in this scenario the idea is to slowly re-introduce her and get her reacquainted with the area.
Anyway, without knowing more details than the article provides, I kind of am siding with the alternate idea of letting her live out her days with those dolphins she's lived with forever, plus her known human assistants.
Maybe it's not as fulfilling as Free Willy (who died soon after release), but at least she would be in familiar company and have more space to move around in.
Good idea, there already is a children's movie "Free Willy", so the name should be safe. ;)
Among the GitHub suggestions there is "peep":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peep_show
But "peeps" seems to be safe in our great moral beacon, the USSA!
I don’t know about Dory and Nemo, given the incredible range and quantity of distractors in this day and age (which of the dozen movies that came out this week will you take direction from today?), but I know in the past the Lassie problem was both real and long-lived (from anecdotal discussions with animal welfare experts).
But that doesn’t take away from the point of this research and I don’t disagree with it. Movies like Free Willy, Rio, Balto, Fly Away Home, and so many others have definitely worked miracles for turning apathetic (or rather, directionless) children into compassionate adults that care about the plight of the animals we share this world with.
For those of us who grew up in the 90's, it's the entire premise of the movie "Free Willy".
That's actually not a bad (albeit sad) point, but they constantly refer to 'also known as killer whale' in the article afterwards.
I mean, baiting to click the article ('killer whale') and showing the creature ('Hey, I know that one. Free Willy was a great movie!') should be enough, even if we accept your premise.
I'm mostly repeating what my better half wants me to say right now, but .. why would we call something a 'killer' (often hard to get right for people - killing in the animal kingdom isn't what we associate with a killer)? And why would we repeatedly do so in a plea to stop treating them badly?