In the first story, Junior Pie is stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger, an orangutan, a zebra and a hyena. The zebra breaks his leg and is eaten by the ferocious hyena. When the hyena intends to turn on Junior Pie, the orangutan steps in to teach the hyena a lesson, and the disgruntled hyena waits for an opportunity to finish off the orangutan. However, when the hyenas are getting carried away, they unknowingly annoy the tiger, who is lounging in a lifeboat, and are unceremoniously bitten to death by the tiger. After that, Junior Pie and the tiger go through the process of confrontation - peaceful ****ing together - and dependence on each other. However, the gods of fate have no mercy on Pie, who is so devout that he has practiced three religions, and douse all his hopes with a storm, only to send him to a floating island with plenty of food, meerkats, and a beautiful freshwater lake. On this island, one man and one tiger feast on seaweed and meerkats, respectively. At night, Junior picks a lotus flower from a tree and unravels the layers of petals to find a human tooth inside. Realizing that the island is a cannibalistic island and that if he stays on it for long, he will be eaten by it, Pai takes the tiger away from the floating island and drifts to the Gulf of Mexico. After landing, the tiger left Pai without looking back and went into the jungle, never to be seen again.
The second story is the "truth" told by the investigator sent by the teenage party to the Japanese shipping company. The investigators didn't believe the first story of a fantasy island full of animals and paradise, and would have been laughed out of the room if they had brought it back. They insist that Pai tell another story in order to return. Pai then tells another, much grimmer tale. In this one, he was on the tiny lifeboat with the cruel French cook, the kindly Chinese sailor, and his mother. The sailor falls and breaks his leg, and the cook contrives to kill the defenseless sailor and feed on his body. Unable to tolerate this, the teenager Pai clashes with the cook, and the mother slaps the cook in defense of her son and tells Pai to get on the small pontoon attached to the boat immediately. When Pai boards the raft, he turns around and sees that his mother has been killed by the cook in an attempt to protect him, and her body thrown into the sea. The angry boy Pai boards the boat again with the vengeance of his mother's murder, and the cook, realizing that he has made a big mistake, prepares a knife to kill him. Afterwards, the teenager feeds on the cook's body and drifts alone to the Gulf of Mexico.
The audience can easily correspond the first story to the second. The zebra represents the sailor, the orangutan represents the mother, the hyena represents the cook, and the tiger represents Junior Pie. Unable to face the harsh reality of what happened on the lifeboat, Junior Pie chooses to fictionalize a relatively bird-like story for himself to escape reality. However, if one thinks about it, one can see that the second story is equally untrue.
Quote, on that banana raft. In the first story, Junior Pie recounts the orangutan floating toward the lifeboat on a raft made of bananas. An investigator pointed out that that couldn't be possible because bananas don't float on water. So Junior Pie tells a second story without abandoning that banana raft, saying that the mother floated in on a banana raft. That, naturally, is also impossible.
The director begins the story with a rather tiresome account of Junior Pie's upbringing and his religious beliefs. Teenage Pie is a full three religions - Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. As Pie's father says, "If you believe in everything, it means you believe in nothing." Teenage Pie was not a devout believer at all; religion was just a haven for him, a tool to soothe his soul. As a vegetarian, non-killable devotee, when Junior Pai kills a dorado in the first story, he falls to his knees and cries out, "Thank you, Vishnu, for taking the form of a fish to save me." Why doesn't he thank God, or Allahu Akbar, but Vishnu? Because there was no corresponding teaching to be found in either Christianity or Islam for him to kill, and only Hinduism could bring him spiritual solace. He was not really thanking God, but was making excuses for his killing. In the storm that destroys his faith, he angrily curses the heavens, leaving his faith behind, and shivering in the lifeboat with one man and one tiger. After the storm, the lifeboat docked on the miraculous floating island.
The reason why this floating island is said to be like a miracle is because its illusion is too obvious. Tens of thousands of meerkats, a desert animal, live on this floating island in the sea, and in the middle of the rainforest on the floating island is a bay of extremely clear lake, which is sweet fresh water during the day, and secretes skin-crushing acid at night. If we are not watching a fantasy movie, then this floating island is necessarily a metaphor. The symbolism of the floating island is not explicitly stated in the movie, perhaps because it would be too cold to do so. But Ang Lee, lest the audience fail to see the metaphor, gives a full close-up of the floating island in a distant view - its silhouette resembles that of a woman's body. Thus, the symbolism of the floating island becomes clear - the mother's body.
In the second story, the cook throws his mother's body into the sea, which is a waste. Since he had already eaten the bodies of sailors, he had no psychological barriers to eating his mother's body, and throwing it into the sea made no sense. In fact, the cook did not die peacefully, and the Bengal tiger represents the animalistic nature of Junior Pie's heart. Just as in the first story, when the hyena kills the orangutan, the tiger suddenly emerges from the boat and bites the hyena to death, so Junior Pie, inspired by his mother's death, brutally kills the cook.
Junior Pie, alone and adrift at sea, has no choice but to reach for the corpses of the sailor and the cook when the provisions are eaten, or when, as in the first story, they are knocked away by that humpback whale. And when the corpses of those two were also eaten up, Junior Pie went through hunger and inner torment, and finally his faith was destroyed by that storm, and he had to feed on his mother's corpse. That paradisiacal floating island is the symbol of his mother. She protected her son with her life and continued to feed him with her body after her death.
At the beginning of the movie, Ang Lee also tells the story of Ananti, the boy's lover. At their first meeting, Ananti dances a dance that means the truth hidden in the forest is a lotus flower. If this teenage love affair was taken out of the movie in its entirety, it wouldn't be a hindrance to the story. That's why I think Ang Lee made this story to fulfill the metaphor of the floating island. The forest on the floating island hides the cold truth - that the lotus flower opens and inside are the mother's teeth.
After seeing his mother's teeth, Junior Pai came to his senses, realizing that if he continued on, he would be consumed by the evil in his heart and become inhuman. So he leaves the floating island - pushing his mother's body into the sea, even though he will be buried there.
When Junior Pie parted from Ananti, she wrapped a bracelet around Junior Pie's wrist, meaning to say goodbye to the one he loved. When Junior Pie leaves the floating island, he wraps that bracelet around a tree root to say goodbye to his mother.
The experience was too frightening for the boy to face, so he made up the story of Animal Crossing. The tiger is the cruel beast in his heart, "when you look into the tiger's eyes, you see only your own reflection". When you look into the tiger's eyes, you see only your own reflection". The process of the teenagers' confrontation with the tiger and the process of peaceful **** is in fact the process of human nature having to compromise with the animal nature in the cruel natural environment.
But the rags-to-riches story is not convincing. Facing the investigator's questioning, Junior Pie was at his wits' end, but he couldn't face up to the fact that he was feeding on his mother's corpse in any case, and after tying the bracelet around her wrist, he completely forgot about the unpleasant experience, in accordance with his usual spirit of escaping from reality. He concocts another story that is relatively less grim. And even with the second story, the investigators couldn't believe it, and they went with the first story on their investigative report, "He stayed with this animal to the end."
"Boyhood's Adventure" can also be seen as a beautiful landscape film. The beginning of the vibrant zoo, India that is full of exotic colors and customs are just appetizers, the main course is a refreshing sea scenery: deep blue velvet night, reflected in the sky of the stars of the gorgeous sea, was half-hidden by the clouds of the silvery moon, the sea of spectacular schools of flying fish, the jellyfish group of the deep sea, fluorescent leaped out of the sea humpback whale! ...... Ang Lee played the 3D effect to the extreme, the beautiful scenery makes the audience look mesmerized. But the more beautiful it is, the more creepy and chilling the hidden truth is.