Thursday, November 30, 2006 'Mee-Shee: The Water Giant', an extraordinary tale of friendship
IT COMES as no surprise when children are often heard of having imaginary friends. From a talking bear to an invisible playmate, imaginary friends add color and magic to a child's life. But in the new movie "Mee-Shee: The Water Giant", a boy becomes friends with a creature believed to be only a figment of imagination.
After a helicopter crash in a remote lake in North America, Sean Cambell (Bruce Greenwood), an oil company trouble-shooter, is called in with his high-tech mini-submarine to help retrieve a unique drill head.
For his disappointed 10-year-old son Mac (Daniel Magder), the news means postponing yet another Florida vacation with his father. But when they arrive at the guesthouse of Mrs. Coogan (Phyllida Law), Mac soon learns of a legendary creature that supposedly lives in the lake!
Utterly intrigued, Mac teams up with a cute little Native-American girl called Pawnee (Jacinta Wawatai) and they go in search of the monster, urged on by the sight of a woman known as "Crazy Norma" (Rena Owen) throwing whole salmon into the water to feed the creature.
When Mac is trekking through the woods by the lake, he slips and falls into the water and nearly drowns. Amazingly, he is rescued by something huge, which buoys him up to the surface. Convinced that it was the creature, Mac locates his cave and finally comes face to face with the huge, frightened water giant, Mee-Shee! From there, a very special friendship begins.
Within days, a rival oil company arrives in an attempt to steal the drill, and soon the money-hungry villains realize that the drill is not the only prize from the lake they need to take home with them. Mac must find a way to save his newfound friend but first he must convince his father that the creature is real, which is not as easy as he'd hoped.
In a dramatic climax with Mee-Shee, Mac and his father in grave danger, can there be anything else lurking in the lake to come to their rescue?
Produced in the tradition of "E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial" and "Free Willy", the fantasy-adventure has been made even more magical by the extraordinary visual effects and animatronics from Academy Award winning Jim Henson's Creature Shop.
John Stephenson, executive vice president of Jim Henson's Creature Shop comments, "We are delighted to have done the visual effects on this fabulous project. Not only did we have the opportunity of creating the creature star of the film, a forty-foot long sea monster but we also provided all the other visual effects for the movie. The Water Giant has been built as a full-sized animatronic head (about the same size as a VW Beetle) and as a 3D CG animation seen both above and below the surface of the water".
Producers Barry Authors and Rainer Mockert began development of the project with the intention of shooting it in Canada on Lake Okanagan, where a real legend exists amongst the Native Indian people of a mythical creature akin to the Loch Ness monster. However, production was moved to Queenstown, New Zealand where a fictional lake has been portrayed in a North American setting. British director John Henderson directs from an original screenplay by Barry Authors.
Catch the beloved creature in cinemas as the movie started showing last Wednesday. From Viva International Pictures. (Press release)
