...i read the book ages before watching the film and thought the book was better. It was just some little things that peeved me like, the pie is called 'pie' becuase he was PIEbald, get it? so i didn't really see the point of the chestnut horse, lovely though he was.
anyone else feel this
the books are always better then the movies and as for the color of the horse, sometimes it could be hard to find a horse that fits the decription in the book. But hey that's my opinion.
shareI admit I didn't have the audio up very loud, but I thought the farmer who originally owned him said he was "a pirate" (which we understood to just mean a sort of wild horse), and that's why they called him "the Pi." (Well, that is how I was mentally spelling it, until I saw his saddle blanket.) But all the DVD scene titles spell it "The Pi" also. So I was a bit confused when I saw that saddle blanket.
"Good night, Vienna, city of a million something-or-others..."
The movie is very much a Hollywoodized version of the book, but you're right, the fact that the Pie was piebald was a significant plot point in the book. I agree with the other poster here, that it is difficult to find the right actor for the part, whether human or another type of animal, so sometimes being exactly faithful to the original version doesn't work out. Elizabeth Taylor doesn't look a thing like Velvet as she was described in the book, but she was breathtakingly beautiful and loved animals so she was a cinch for the part. Same for the horse, King Charles; he looks like a racehorse (I think he was a show jumper in California before the movie), and could jump well. It looks like him or a similar chestnut horse doubling for him in the race, and it would have probably just been impossible to find a pinto or piebald horse capable of keeping up with Thoroughbred steeplechasers.
Part of the significance of the color/breed of the Pie in the book was just how unusual it was to find a grade, multicolored horse that could compete with all the Thoroughbred steeplechasers. Even today, National Hunt horses don't have to be purebred Thoroughbreds, but I can't remember seeing a piebald one; they are mostly Thoroughbreds.