Somehow I’ve managed to have Free Willy on my radar since it first aired, but I’d never actually seen it. I had it figured fairly accurately as “misfit kid bonds with captive animal, adventures (and liberation) ensue.” The animal in this case is an adolescent orca, and the kid teeters on the edge between the safety of a foster family and a life of crime.
It’s long for a kid-focused film at nearly two hours, and much of it is kid-drama with the protagonist, Jesse, his years-long conviction that the mother who abandoned him will come back, and the trouble he gets into because of it. But it’s framed and tightly woven with the orca’s story.
The opening sequence is long, dreamlike, and surprisingly compelling. A family of orcas swims and plays and lives its life off a rocky coast—until human hunters emerge from a hidden cove and a set a net to capture one of them. The whale they catch is distinguished by a small set of black dots on its otherwise pristine white chest.
This is Willy (played by an orca named Keiko and an assortment of mechanical stand-ins). He is, we’ll learn later, twelve years old, twenty-two feet long, and weighing over three and a half tons. We’re also told that he was too big and too old to be captured in the first place—with the implication that if you’re going to hunt orcas for the water-park trade, you’re better off ripping babies away from their mothers.
Orcas are a highly social species. They travel in family groups called pods, sometimes as many as fifty or more, and they may stay with their mothers their whole lives. It’s no surprise that Willy is not working out as a marine-park attraction: a lone orca in a tank designed for dolphins, in the seedy Northwest Adventure Park. There is nothing good about his situation.
Willy is proving to be untrainable, at least by the young woman trainer who works for the park. This is a problem for the park’s skeevy owner, Dial, and his equally skeevy henchman, Wade. The park needs to make money, and the whale is supposed to be the main attraction. If he doesn’t work out as a performing animal, he’ll be worth more dead than alive.
Jesse and his gang of runaways stumble into the park one night while escaping police pursuit. They end up down in the observation deck, find cans of spray paint and vandalize the place. Ringleader Perry escapes, but Jesse is caught—and not just by the cops. He comes face to face with Willy through the glass.
This adventure changes his life. His punishment for vandalism is to clean up the mess, and his jailers, as he sees it, are a young couple named Glen and Annie. Glen owns a garage. Annie is a writer. They’re his new foster parents, whether he likes it or not.
I expected Annie to use her skills to publicize the Willy situation, but her career is a throwaway. Glen gets to be a hero later, and so does she, but not because she can write.
It’s not about them, anyway. Jesse does his community service and bonds with Willy. They seal the deal one night when Jesse falls into the tank and nearly drowns. Willy retrieves him and deposits him on the rim, and saves his life. That, by the rules of Hollywood, binds them together forever.
Jesse also makes friends with Randolph, who plays the role of Wise Native American. Randolph teaches Jesse about his people, the Haida, and tells him a story about a hero and an orca. He teaches Jesse a prayer in the Haida language. “You have something special, kid,” says Randolph.
Rae, the trainer, is a good person who cares deeply about her charge, but Willy despises her because she’s had to subject him to uncomfortable medical procedures. He won’t work for her at all. Every time she goes near the tank, he drenches her with a massive tail-slap.
But he will play with Jesse. Jesse wins him over with harmonica music, then starts bringing him treats from the fish market. Willy is fed a diet of carefully selected fish, but his favorite is salmon. “That’s his chocolate,” says Rae.
She knows other things that will please him, too. Orcas are very tactile. They like to be touched and stroked and petted. They especially like to have their tongues rubbed—which takes guts, reaching into that huge mouth with its rim of daggerlike teeth.
Rae shows Jesse how to train a whole series of tricks. Willy is happy to cooperate: orcas love to play with people they like.
There’s a bit of urgency there. Willy has to make money for the park or else, it’s strongly implied, he’ll be killed for the insurance. Jesse, Rae, and Randolph come up with a plan to turn Willy into a star.
Unfortunately they fail to allow for human stupidity. On the day of the big debut performance, the crowd in the bleachers around the tank is fairly normal but still way too much for Willy’s senses. But a major failure in judgment seals the deal. Nobody thinks to close off the observation deck below.
It’s jammed with people, and they start hammering on the glass. The more they pound, the more agitated Willy gets.
Willy does his best. At first he just refuses to perform. He dives to escape the crowd on the surface, but that puts him face to face with the mob below. And the pounding will. Not. Stop.
Finally he does the only thing he can reasonably do. He charges the observation windows.
That sends the mob shrieking for the stairs, just as the bolts start to go on the bulkhead. The tank is close to being breached.
It’s an unmitigated disaster. Jesse pitches a massive sulk and decides to run away to California, where Perry has gone to get rich—presumably by dealing drugs. But first he makes sure Willy knows how mad he is.
Willy tries to apologize by inviting him to play with a favorite toy. Jesse isn’t having it. Then he hears what Willy has been hearing: whales out in the bay, calling. It’s Willy’s family, Jesse is sure.
That pulls Jesse out of his sulk—just in time to catch Wade and a crew of welders down in the observation area, attacking the bolts that were already weakened by Willy’s attack. Jesse overhears their conversation, and realizes what they’re doing. They’re sabotaging the tank. They want to kill Willy.
Jesse has completely forgotten both his tantrum and his trip to California. Finally, at long last, the film is getting to the point. It dawns on Jesse that he has to free Willy. It hasn’t occurred to him at any point previously, in spite of everything he’s learned about orcas and captivity, but better late than never.
He can’t do it alone. He calls on Randolph, who is more than willing, and Rae comes to help as well. They have to coax Willy into the sling that he hates, that’s used for vet checks. Then they have to lift him out of the rapidly draining tank and load him on a trailer, and get him to the nearest ocean access, with the bad guys and the police in hot pursuit.
Willy can survive out of water for a while, if he’s kept wet, but there’s not a moment to waste. It’s a race against time, bad guys, wonky equipment, and bad roads. And, at the end, Dial blocking the way to the marina, and the whale hunters in the water, spreading a net across the entrance to the harbor.
In the end, a combination of crazy courage, orca strength, and Haida magic wins the day. Jesse, in the time-honored tradition of wild-animal-loving kids, has to say goodbye to his friend. With the help of his own friends and chosen family, he sets Willy free.
The lesson here, true to the genre, is that wild animals need to stay wild. Orcas are not meant to be stolen from their families and kept in captivity. Trained-whale shows are a form of abuse; they’re torture for the whales.
One thing we learn, among many, is that stress damages their bodies. Jesse notes a clear sign that I had wondered about as well. He sees a chart on the office wall that shows an orca, but it’s not Willy. The orca on the chart has a long, upright dorsal fin. Willy’s has flopped over.
That happens to captive orcas, Rae says. Nobody knows why. Maybe, Jesse suggests, it’s because they need room to swim. A tank just isn’t enough.
Willy at least, and at last, gets to return to the wild. I’ll have more to say about that next time. Free Willy premiered in 1993, but it’s just as topical now as it was then. More, maybe, with what’s happened with orcas since.
The movie freed Keiko, too, though I understand that there is a lot of controversy over releasing captive animals, particularly social animals like orcas, back into the wild.
And I am also bemused by the return of the title “killer” whale for orcas. I guess the videos of them playing “toss the porpoise” did not charm their fans much.
I first saw this movie as a kid, and it left a strong impression. It turned the orcas who I thought to be true killer monsters (the only thing where I had encountered them until then was the animation about Lolo the little penguin, and they ate penguins there!) into big, gentle, caring and intelligent creatures I saw in a completely different light. I should somewhere still have the whale I made of clay a few years later and painted to resemble an orca, in honor of Willy. I remember reading about the movement to free Keiko after it, and I do remember the controversy rumours (and sadly, reading the news one year that Keiko had died). I have rewatched the movie once or twice since (unlike the sequel, which I think I have seen only once) and it held up just nicely, but reading this article makes me realize it has been too long since the last time. Until I can watch it again, though, I think I will go and listen to Michael Jackson asking whether we will be there …