Trailer
Plot summary
Scotland, 1942. Angus MacMorrow lives with his mother Anne and his sister Kirstie at a manor on Loch Ness, where Royal Artillery troops under Captain Thomas Hamilton set up a battery against German U-boats. Angus's father Charles, once the family's handyman and now a Royal Navy sailor, has been missing since his ship sank a year earlier, and Angus will not accept that he is gone. While gathering shells, Angus finds a large egg in a tide pool and raises the plesiosaur-like creature that hatches, naming it Crusoe. He confides in Kirstie and in Lewis Mowbray, the handyman newly arrived at the house, who tells him the animal is a genderless Water Horse that lays a single egg and dies before it hatches.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Water Horse (2007)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Jay Russell had read Dick King-Smith's children's novel years earlier but could not film it: the computer graphics needed did not exist cheaply enough. He waited until the technology caught up rather than spend what he reckoned would be $300 million.
- The MacMorrow family home was the 100-year-old Ardkinglas Estate on Loch Fyne, and the owners carried on living in the house while the crew filmed around them.
- Weta Digital built the creature Crusoe out of animal parts rather than human expression: Jay Russell said his face combines a horse, a dog, an eagle and a giraffe, with some expressions taken from a dog.
