"The Whale Rider"

"If I had known it was gonna be an artsy film, I would [have] ... seen something else."
This is a quote from my roommate Marisa Hernandez, after returning home from a movie date. This statement kept me from seeing Whale Rider when it first came to theaters. She claimed to have fallen asleep in the middle of the show. Her simplified syntagma, "...it's about a girl who rides a whale...", didn't spark my interest. I had never heard of Whale Rider. I had not seen any previews.
So, was my roommate's synopsis correct? Sure. But I found Whale Rider to be made of so much more. …