Celebrating Kiwi-ness

Countless international critics have praised the universal themes explored in Niki Caro’s Whale Rider; what a reviewer for the Age finds most impressive is its quintessential Kiwi-ness. “Whale Rider sounds like it could be Disney Down Under, The Lion King set to the thump of the haka. In fact it is not a bit like that. Telling the bare bones of the story … leaves out the absolutely crucial New Zealandness of Whale Rider‘s world. Realism enfolds the mythic story so completely that neither the search for a chief nor the myth of the first whale rider seems at all arcane. They are just Kiwi things, like a Steiny after a game of cricket.”