Dolphin Tale or prosthetic fluke

Annie Makoff

They promised it was the movie to change lives. They promised it was so inspiring that you’d leave the cinema a totally different person, and if you were disabled – even better, you’d suddenly accept your disability because hey, if a dolphin can do it, so can you.

It should have been an inspiring, sweet film. It’s a true story, but sadly, the filmmakers decided to inject the Hollywood factor into it, because, as David Yates, Director of Clearwater Marine Aquarium and Executive Producer of Dolphin Tale pointed out: “We didn’t want it to be a documentary.” Maybe that’s where they went wrong.

In reality, Winter, the bottlenose dolphin and star of the show, was found by a conscientious fisherman in the winter of 2005 with her tail mangled in a crab trap. She was taken to Clearwater Marine Aquarium where they were forced to amputate her tail and remove two vertebrae as a result of her injuries.

Given practically no chance of survival, Winter adapted by swimming side to side, instead of the normal up and down movements which dolphins perform. Realising that this awkward swimming pattern would result in severe spinal problems later on, the team at the Aquarium did the impossible: they commissioned a human prosthetics company to make an artificial tail for Winter so she could learn to swim like a normal dolphin again.

Not only did Winter adapt miraculously well to her artificial tail which she wears for one hour at a time, several times a day, (she’s had between 40-50 tails made for her since 2005 at the vast expense of the prosthetics company), but her so-called “out-going personality” has been an inspiration to millions of people throughout the world.

Because she wasn’t cowering in a corner, ashamed of her tail (we all know how self-conscious animals are about difference, right?), David Yates believes that her happy-happy dolphin attitude has inspired people the world over.

“There is no question that Winter has helped thousands of disabled people, we see it happen every single day,” he insisted. “One deaf kid started wearing her hearing aid after meeting Winter, despite refusing to wear it for years, and injured soldiers who have met her have had a totally different outlook afterwards. Winter changes lives.”

So for all this life-changing talk, it was rather a letdown that Dolphin Tale didn’t really follow real-life events.

The film focuses on a miserable little blighter, Sawyer Nelson, (apparently a metaphor for every lonely kid out there) played by Nathan Gamble, who first discovers Winter caught in a crab trap. Following her rescue, he visits her at the aquarium everyday and the two very quickly strike up a sickening bond. His mother, who has all but given up hope for her socially isolated son is surprised.

His teachers are surprised. Staff at the centre are surprised. Everyone, it seems, is surprised in fact, apart from me.

And to add insult to crab-trap injury, the big star appears in relatively few scenes. The focus, rather than being on Winter, is on Sawyer. This inevitably makes for a mind-numbingly slow pace, which some reviewers have described as “meaningless filler”, which I am inclined to agree with.

Nothing much happens for at least an hour into the film when the prosthetist who is to make Winter’s first tail (played by Morgan Freeman) finally appears, and even then, the film never really achieves a crescendo.

A family movie featuring children and animals was always going to be cheesy, but this took cheese to entirely new levels. This was grated, melted and grated again. Every scene had emotive music to alert the viewer to what mood they should be experiencing and there was a repetitive “joke” played out throughout the film involving an intimidating pelican, which probably sounds funnier than it was.

Yet David and his chums remain convinced that their film is going to do more for people than months of therapy ever could.

“I know exactly what the movie can do for people,” he said. “I don’t even have to guess. I’ve already seen it happen – it changes lives.”

• Dolphin Tale; Warner Bros; running time 113 mins; DVD and Blu-ray available.