This is a fun adventure about the healing bonds of family, both human and animal. This is a heartwarming story centered on the friendship between a boy and a dolphin. A lonely and friendless boy finds and untangles a hurt dolphin whose tail was caught in a crab trap. He becomes very attached to the dolphin when the tail must be taken off to save the dolphin's life. The boy believes the dolphin would be able to swim normally if it was given a prosthetic tail.
“Dolphin Tale” introduces the screen's cutest, most adorable mammal star yet – the dolphin Winter.
Nathan Gamble stars as Sawyer, an eleven year-old boy who helps a dolphin he and a fisherman find stranded on a beach, her tail wrapped up in the ropes attached to a crab pot. Sawyer, a social outcast who is struggling in school, finds new purpose in saving this animal. Cozi Zuehlsdorff is Hazel, the girl who comes with her marine veterinarian dad (Harry Connick Jr.) and a crew from the nearby marine hospital to pick up Winter, as they call her, and try to save her.
Sawyer fibs to his mom (Ashley Judd) and plays hooky from school to stay with Winter, who bonds with the boy who cut ropes from her tail, a tail she eventually loses due to injuries. But as Sawyer’s wounded soldier-cousin returns home from combat to a Veteran’s Administration hospital full of men who are being fitted with artificial limbs, the kid gets the idea to have a prosthetic specialist (Morgan Freeman) see what he can work out for the poor dolphin missing her tail.
Freeman does his adorable curmudgeon thing. Kris Kristoffersen is Hazel’s crinkly-eyed grandpa who looks, approvingly, on all the life lessons the little dolphin is teaching his son and granddaughter and her new best friend.
“Dolphin Tale” is movie of cute scenes and cuter ingredients — the cranky pelican who rules the roost at the aquarium, the way Hazel and her dad live on a houseboat that looks like a Disney World castaways attraction, for instance. The melodrama kicks in as the marine hospital and aquarium are struggling to stay afloat, battered by a hurricane, coveted by a hotel developer (Winter Park actor Tom Nowicki in a nice turn).
If you love animals and/or Dolphins..you too will love Dolphin Tale!
This is written by Douglas Young. Directed by Charles Martin Smith .
Cast: Harry Connick Jr. Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd, Frances Sternhagen, Tom Nowkicki.
