Gender Stereotypes In Whale Rider

Whale Rider, a film, based on a book by Witi Ihimaera, made over $1 million dollars in the first month. Even though the movie cost $9 million to produce, the movie made over $20 million by the time it finished at the box office.
The director, Niki Caro, helped Whale Rider win the ‘Independent Spirit Award for Best International Film.’ Niki, to this date, has had 11 awards for different movies and short skits.
Whale Rider, is about a girl, called Paikea (Keisha Castle-Hughes), who is trying to fit in with all the other boys. But she has her grandfather, koro (Rawiri Paratene), is trying to stop her. So she is always trying to secretly try to do what all the boys are doing in the warrior school ran by Koro. When Koro loses his whale tooth, after throwing it into the water for the warrior students to collect, Paikea jumps in to return it back to her grandfather. By the end of the movie, Paikea becomes the leader and gets to do call out the commands.
Whale Rider shows a range of themes like tradition, rituals and the rights, gender stereotype, relationships between people, relationship with the environment, loss and death, legend of the warrior and family. This is all important in the film because it can teach us what the Maori culture is like, and also what’s right and wrong.

I personally would only rate this movie a 5.5 out of 10 because I found the whole storyline boring and very hard to follow so I had to watch it twice.

I couldn’t see most of the dark scenes so it made it hard to know what’s happening. But the location and the scenery around was very aesthetic. The location they chose to film at made it very believable to think it’s the Maori culture. The camera crew did a good job with the camera and the editor made it very seamless. When they had the underwater whale scenes, I found them very pointless and the movie would’ve been better without it. At times, the dialog was very poor and I couldn’t hear what they were

saying.
Even though I didn’t read the book, I feel like the book would help me understand more of what the movie was about and what it was trying to tell us. I would recommend this to anyone who lives within the Maori culture, and anyone who likes to follow traditions or story lines.