I had another article in the works, but current events made me want to find something light and hopeful and heartwarming for this week instead. Thanks to commenter Brian for a recommendation that was just what I needed. I have the best commenters.
The Water Horse: Secrets of the Deep was filmed in New Zealand, with local land and waterscapes doing a decent job of cosplaying Scotland. It’s a nice example of the trope of lonely kid who saves life of animal, has to hide it from parental unit or units, animal refuses to not get discovered, hijinks ensue. Extra points if the animal is mythical, magical, and/or extraterrestrial (hello, E.T.!).
In this case there’s another trope, the frame story set in the present day. Young couple visiting Loch Ness happens across the iconic “Surgeon’s Photo” of Nessie. Male partner (who looks a little bit like Ted Danson) declares that it’s a hoax. Crusty Old Local™ lowers his newspaper to declare in his turn that there’s more to the story than anyone knows.
And we’re off, back to World War II. Young Angus lives in a stately home beside Loch Ness with his older sister and his mum, who is the head housekeeper. Angus’ father is away in the war. Now the war is coming to them in the form of an army unit. Its mission: to barricade the loch against a German invasion.
There’s a whole tangle of human drama. Angus badly misses his daddy, and has built a sort of shrine to him in the shop (i.e. the handyman’s domain). The soldiers billeted in the manor have their own stories, character quirks, and love interests. Ditto the new handyman.
But the heart of the film, and the reason we’re all here, is a thing Angus finds while wandering around a tide pool. Angus is both terrified of and drawn to the water. He almost drowned once, and has flashbacks. But a tide pool is safe enough, and he comes across an oddity: a large black egg-shaped object, which he drops into his bucket and carries home to the shop.
The black coloring turns out to be a kind of casing. Underneath it is beautiful and gleaming and blue-green.
It is, of course, an actual egg. It hatches a Weta creation, a shiny, rubbery, pinkish-black shading to beige creature with a reptilian head and Shrek-like horns, a blobby body, seal-like fins, and a tail ending in a whale-like fluke. This baby, whom Angus names Crusoe because he was found all alone on a beach, is sweet and cute and endlessly hungry.
Angus is determined to keep him as a pet, and also determined to hide him, but that doesn’t exactly work out. Angus’ sister quickly finds out about him, as does Lewis the handyman. So does Strunk the army cook’s bulldog, Churchill, who despite his less than athletic build is a determined and ruthless hunter. Churchill (played by canine actor Sid) is one of my favorite characters in the film.
There are, inevitably, hijinks, and chases, and drama. Lewis comes from another Scottish town near another loch, and he knows what Crusoe is, thanks to his knowledge of loch lore. Crusoe is a Water Horse, a kelpie. Lewis convinces Angus, with difficulty, to give up the idea of keeping him and release him into the loch.
Unfortunately for Crusoe, this throws him into direct conflict with the army’s mission. They’ve rigged a vast net up the loch to catch invading submarines, and have installed artillery down at the other end. Once they reach the testing phase, they start shelling the loch. Angus tries desperately to stop them, but fails. No one believes there’s an actual monster in the loch.
Of course there is, and he is sighted by multiple people. One of them is a newspaperman from Aberdeen whose search for fame and fortune leads him to try for a sighting. When he doesn’t get one, he manufactures it—and that’s the photo we were shown at the beginning. Ironically, while he’s producing his hoax, the real monster is cruising along just out of sight.
The real hoax is some years older than the one we’re shown. It does give us a glimpse of how the “monster” was constructed, and it’s nice, and cute, and fits the film.
So what exactly is Crusoe? Lewis tells Angus what he knows. The Water Horse is the rarest of animals, he says. There’s only ever one in the world. It reproduces by laying a single egg, and then it dies. It’s always an orphan, and it never knows its parent. It’s a kind of aquatic version of the legendary Phoenix.
Although Angus identifies Crusoe as a boy because of his heroic appetite, in fact he’s a they. Both male and female, Lewis says. Which means it basically clones itself.
Crusoe grows at an enormous rate. Every time he eats, he gets exponentially bigger. The tiny, kitten-sized hatchling matures into a monster big enough to swamp a torpedo boat. He keeps his horselike head and his Shrek horns, and gains a serrated ridge along his neck. His body continues to be short and roundish, and his fins and tail recall both a seal and a whale. In adult form he has a mouthful of pointed teeth.
He eats anything he can get, particularly fish. He does not eat humans, and will only attack them if they attack him first. The shelling traumatizes him and destroys his trust in humans, which breaks Angus’ heart.
Before he loses that trust but after he reaches adult size, he and Angus share a few hours of wonder. Angus falls onto his back and is carried off, much like the legend Lewis told of a relative who asked the beast to carry him across the loch. Lewis claims not to recall how the story ended: whether the kelpie did as asked, or whether he carried the man away into the deeps.
As it turns out, both things can be true. Crusoe carries Angus down the loch, and then starts diving, swimming through a world of marvels: sunken ships, treasure chests, an underwater Stonehenge. Angus at first is terrified, but soon starts to enjoy it.
There’s nothing said about it, and no explicit magic, but Angus manages to both scream and whoop underwater, spends quite a long time down there, and doesn’t appear to have any trouble with oxygen deprivation. Is it possible that Crusoe has a magic about him that lets his rider not have to breathe underwater? Or else extends the rider’s ability to hold his breath without passing out?
It appears that Crusoe is an amphibian. He doesn’t quite read as a reptile, and he’s not a mammal—no fur, no mother to provide milk in infancy. He breathes air, but is clearly at home underwater. He swims rather like a seal, or like a dolphin, but is much larger than either.
He’s pretty intelligent, too, maybe as bright as a dog. He bonds to Angus and makes friends with Lewis. Shelling of the loch traumatizes him but Angus is able to calm him to an extent, enough to ride him down the loch when the army mistakes him for a German invasion.
I thought he might end up saving the loch from the Germans, but the story doesn’t go in that direction. It’s more about letting a wild animal be wild, and setting the kelpie free to be all he’s meant to be.
As the story comes to its end, we find out the approximate lifespan of the individual Water Horse. Between sixty and seventy years, give or take, before he lays his one egg and dies. Then there’s another black-cased egg with its jewel-gleam of blue and green beneath.
And so the species continues, one egg at a time, one beast at a time, and, it seems, one human rescuer at a time. Maybe that human needs a rescue of his own. He saves the loneliest creature in the world, and helps him live and grow and spread his subtle magic through the loch, and finds friends and family and his own subtle magic in the process.
