With Free Willy in mind, we spoke to Cowperthwaite about her movie, what the childhood classic gets right, and her film’s relationship to Sea World.įree Willy resulted in a campaign to restore Keiko back to health and train him for eventual release into the wild. to help rescue Keiko, the real-life Willy, from captivity. Back in 1993, the movie caused a swell of support for whales, pushing Warner Bros. ![]() As the rebellious Jesse comes to learn through interacting with the whale, Willy deserves to be free. Willy, like Tilikum, is an aggressive whale imprisoned in a sea park. That ecofriendly, Michael Jackson–endorsed movie is regarded as a children’s staple, but it features a heavy activist undercurrent. With blunt force, Blackfish asks, “Why?”Ĭoincidentally, Cowperthwaite’s film, which hit theaters last weekend, arrived on the tail of Free Willy’s twentieth anniversary. Yet the whale continues to perform today. She began to wonder, why would a highly intelligent animal like Tilikum ever bite the hand that fed it? Through research and interviews with former orca trainers, Cowperthwaite unveiled a history of mistreatment toward captive whales and unfortunate encounters with humans – captured in 1983, Tilikum had killed two other trainers before Brancheau. ![]() The event shocked many, including documentary filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite, who routinely brought her kids to enjoy shows at Sea World’s San Diego outpost. In February 2010, Orlando Sea World trainer Dawn Brancheau was pulled into the water by her animal co-star - a killer whale named Tilikum - and killed.
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