Dolphin Tale (2011) on Netflix
Sawyer Nelson, a lonely 11-year-old, frees a dolphin tangled in a crab trap. Winter, as she is named, is treated at Clearwater Marine Hospital, where her torn tail must be amputated.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb6.8/1027,085 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes81%
Trailer
Plot summary
Eleven-year-old Sawyer Nelson is lonely and has been falling behind at school since his father left five years ago. His only friend, his cousin Kyle Connellan, a champion swimmer, leaves to join the army to pay for Olympic training, so Sawyer faces summer school alone. Riding his bike, Sawyer finds a fisherman trying to help a dolphin caught in a crab trap. The dolphin is carried to Clearwater Marine Hospital, run by Dr. Clay Haskett, and his daughter Hazel names her Winter. Sawyer slips in to see her and returns every day. Clay and Sawyer's mother, Lorraine, are wary, but the visits seem to do the boy and the dolphin good, and Sawyer stays on to help. Winter's torn tail has to come off, and Sawyer believes a prosthetic one could let her swim properly again.
Cast
- Nicholas Turner Martinas Bully #1
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dolphin Tale (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The real dolphin Winter was actually found stranded in Mosquito Lagoon near New Smyrna Beach, not at Clearwater as the film shows, and a Hubbs-SeaWorld researcher named Teresa Mazza-Jablonski stayed in the water with her for seven hours during the rescue.
- Unlike the film, which shows Winter's tail amputated because of infection, in reality the rope wrapped around it cut off blood supply until most of the tail fell off on its own, leaving only a small remaining piece for doctors to remove.
- The film compresses the creation of Winter's prosthetic tail into a few weeks built by a single doctor on vacation, but in reality it took several months of work by Kevin Carroll, Dan Strzempka and Charles Brown of the Hanger Clinic.
