It cost some $200,000 a month to maintain Keiko in his million-dollar pen and to reintroduce him to the waters where he was born. Still, the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation carried on and hired an Air Force cargo plane to take the whale to yet another custom-made location - in Iceland. He didn't even know how to catch a live fish. Phillips and his colleagues knew how unprepared Keiko was for life in the wild. Within a year and a half, he'd gained 2,000 pounds and his skin virus had disappeared. Keiko was moved to a specially built tank in Oregon where he swam in sea water for the first time since infancy.

When Phillips saw Keiko in his pool in Mexico, the orca was underweight and suffering from papilloma virus.

No one had ever undertaken such a project, but Phillips said he knew he had to give it a shot. Because they're so smart, orcas are easily trained, and audiences loved Keiko's droopy dorsal fin.Īs the public began to campaign for Keiko's release, the movie studio hired Dave Phillips, a marine mammal activist, to monitor Keiko's rehabilitation and spearhead the effort to return the whale to the wild. He says the rescue team simply disregarded the laws of nature.īack in 1979, when Keiko was about 2 years old, he was trapped off the coast of Iceland and sold to a marine amusement park in Mexico City for $350,000. 'This animal most probably will not be able to survive on its own if it's not being taken care of by humans,' said Leif Nottestad, an expert on orcas at the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, Norway. When audiences, including millions of children, learned that the animal that played Willy - an orca named Keiko - was confined to a shallow pool in Mexico, they started a campaign to free him.Īnd that, say some experts, was taking Hollywood too far. The emotional tug of the movie sparked an even more intense real-life drama.

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