Unnecessarily sad

You're watching it right now too? So is my grandma. I was watching it for a bit but I left the room when the man went to London. Next thing I hear from the room is "Mitch is dead!" and I am like "Whoa what the crap just happened in 5 minutes?!"

I actually popped onto here trying to find out what happened to the Otter since I missed the scene. Even though I haven't seen the scene just the thought that the poor little guy had to die makes me annoyed.

I was thinking the same thing, "Why didn't she use the leash?"
Earlier in the film I thought Mij was dead when he was found on the shore caught
in the fishing net.
The ending is indeed, very sad. But I was happy to see Mij's children come ashore and swim in the pool.
It is a hard fact of live that we humans outlive our pet birds, dogs, cats......... and otters.

Agree with everyone here but my experience is closest to that of imfedup13. My mom was watching the movie, which I found charming, lovely, and heartwarming. I told her I remembered the book being a bestseller and was thinking I should read it. I left the room for a second, Mom yelled, and said this guy had hit Mij, she didn't know how badly. One of the posts above said with an ax, Mom said with a shovel. I didn't see the actual scene but was upset and terribly sad for the rest of the day. Needless to say, I was glad I didn't invest the time or emotional energy to read the book or see the whole movie and think I will skip both in future. I told Mom of a children's librarian who said many kids refused to read any animal stories because "something terrible always happens to them." Now, strange to say, I have read Where the Red Fern Grows and Old Yeller and seen the movies of both multiple times--and those were domestic animals! But, you know, the dogs died in sort of combat situations, defending their young owners. A somewhat sadder example with a wild pet of which I read the book once and saw the movie multiple times is The Yearling--and even that was explained as defending the owners' livelihood. Poor little Mij just died senselessly, and what made it worse was that his owner was so reluctant to leave him and then had to come back to that. (This scene I did see--heartbreaking!) I didn't even realize there was a leash which could have been used, which makes it that much worse. The owner's friend must have felt awful as well she should--it would be much worse for such a thing happen to a friend's pet entrusted to you than to your own pet...bad as that would be. I really came on here to see if there was any explanation for the "I thought it was just an otter" remark--does the guy whack every otter he sees?

Because books are often different than movies, I was hoping against hope that maybe the ending was just to make the movie more dramatic. Regarding the thread "Walt Wouldn't Have Allowed It" (the OP deleted the first message, but as of this writing the thread is still there,) that's a strange and unpredictable thing. I can name several movies, particularly Disney, in which a person or animal died in the book who did not in the movie. In others, an accident or something may take place differently in the film but has pretty much the same outcome. (For instance, in Pollyanna, where in the book her accident is random and in the movie is a result of disobedience.) I won't try to name a large number of examples to avoid creating spoilers for too many books and movies, but I will say that when my niece played one of the younger daughters in a stage version of Fiddler on the Roof, the girl playing the eldest daughter read the book and warned my niece never to read it!

Oddly, in a number of movies, mostly not Disney, a person or animal is seriously injured or killed who was not in the book or in real life! For instance,





(SPOILERS for My Side of the Mountain and several versions of Anna and the King.)





in the movie of My Side of the Mountain the falcon is shot--this never happens in the book! In fact, a book sequel is devoted to the same falcon. In the Rex Harrison version of Anna and the King, Anna's son Louis is killed as a child in a horseback riding accident. For decades I believed this true and thought the real story was just brightened up for the musical. It was not! Louis lived to adult age. (For decades I also believed the story that the king had those poor people tortured and killed, also downplayed in the musical, very much played up in the Jodie Foster version, and the reason I never read the book. This is a total lie--made up to sell books--and by Anna herself, not by the novel's author! It never happened and is the main reason every version of the story is still banned in Thailand.) So I was hoping against hope, for poor little Mij, very sorry to hear that the book was identical.