Column SFF Bestiary The Other Half of the Story: Keiko, the Star of Free Willy Keiko’s story may be more harrowing than his movie counterpart, but it still offers hope… By Judith Tarr | Published on June 23, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share When Free Willy was filmed, it presented a serious moral dilemma. Its star, an orca named Keiko, was a captive himself. Whereas the fictional Willy got to go free, Keiko remained in captivity. Viewers recognized this. Schoolchildren wrote letters. Their objections were loud enough and prolonged enough that the studio actually paid attention. There were practical considerations in any case. Keiko’s story—documented in Keiko: The Untold Story of the Star of Free Willy—is if anything more harrowing than his movie counterpart. He was captured in Iceland around 1978, when he was about two years old. Normally orca hunters aim for the four-year-olds, young and small but weaned from their mothers. Keiko at half that age would still have been a nursing infant. Mostly likely he was swept up in the net and kept, and shipped off to a marine park in Japan. The park already had a pod of orcas, and Keiko as a stranger did not do well. He was bumped around for a while until he ended up as a solo orca in a park in Mexico City. His tank was small but so initially was he; the climate was much too warm, which caused problems as he grew, including a case of papillomavirus—that’s the weird crusty growth we can see in the film. Warner Brothers had been looking unsuccessfully for an orca to star in its story of a whale who was rescued from a park and freed into the wild. Most parks were not in favor of such a message; their orca shows were major sources of income. But the park in Mexico was willing, probably because they could see that Keiko was not doing well. By the time he became a movie star, Keiko was fast outgrowing his tank. He had occasional dolphin company, but nothing consistent. His health was deteriorating and so was his energy and his attitude. When filming ended, the studio knew it had to do something, even without the public outcry. To its credit, it developed a plan, and the Keiko Project was born. The first priority was to get Keiko out of the park and into a purpose-built facility in Oregon. This took a while. The tank that was built was deep and large and filled with fresh, cold sea water. For the first time since he was captured, Keiko would be able to dive deep and swim relatively freely, while being fed high-quality herring—his natural diet back in Iceland. Within six weeks of being shipped from Mexico to Oregon, Keiko was a changed whale. His color had deepened, his skin had cleared up, and he was building muscle and stamina. His whole attitude had changed. He was bright, curious, and engaged with the humans who cared for him. By the time the documentary gets to this point, we’ve learned a lot about orcas in the wild. Orcas are the largest of the dolphins, and they live quite a long time. Females can live ninety years or more, males fifty to sixty years. They live in large families, or pods, led by a senior female. Her offspring will stay with her all their lives; she nurses her calves for two years. Orcas are very, very intelligent. They have language and culture, and different pods have their own dialects and ways of doing things. Young orcas learn social skills from their families. The males, the fathers and uncles, teach them to hunt. Their eyesight is very good, but not much use down in the depths where they do much of their swimming and hunting. They have a highly developed sense of hearing, and the ability to use sonar to build pictures of, for example, schools of herring herded into a ball to be picked off by hunting orcas. When a male reaches the age of twelve or so, he has a growth spurt. That’s when he develops the distinctive long, upright fin. A male in captivity, confined to a small tank without the opportunity to build strength and stamina, doesn’t do this. That’s why captive males’ dorsal fins flop over. (Which answers the question Jess asks in Free Willy.) All of this makes clear just how tragic the life of a captive orca is. Males in captivity seldom make it past age twenty. (Females live a lot longer, as witness the Free Corky campaign, which has been trying for decades now to free a female orca captured in 1969 and still alive at Sea World.) By the time Keiko reached Oregon, he was around sixteen years old, and his clock was ticking. The Keiko Project’s goal was to rehabilitate him in Oregon, then when he was ready, ship him back to his home waters in Iceland. A team of orca experts, veterinarians, and trainers got together to get him healthy and fit—and they succeeded. They learned a great deal in the process, and demonstrated just how smart an orca is. Not just in how he responded to his trainers and to the people who came to see the world-famous whale, but in how he learned—watching television at night, including his own movie, and viewing documentaries about orcas. During the day he trained his trainers, especially a young woman who could not get him to perform as such, but if she did crazy silly things, he rewarded her with his own goofy tricks. When the vets cleared him for travel, he flew by Air Force troop transport to Himaey in the Westman Islands of southern Island, near where he was captured. The whole world followed his journey, and the people of Iceland were enthralled. The upshot of that was his greatest legacy: the end of the captive orca industry in Iceland. Gradually the Keiko Project team acclimated Keiko to the ocean, first in the bay and then out in the open sea. There at last he met wild orcas, swam with them, foraged with them, lived among them. It seemed the project had succeeded. Keiko had returned to the wild. But he hadn’t found his mother or his birth pod. That part of the dream didn’t happen. The team tracked him from Iceland down to Norway, extrapolating from his route that he was hunting and foraging for himself. Then one day he turned up beside a fishing boat outside of Skelvik Fjord, and followed it in. Keiko had tried life in the wild, and he opted to return to humans. They were, in the end, his pod—or as close as anything could come. The Keiko Project moved him to a relatively isolated fjord near Taknes. He lived the rest of his life there, with occasional brief forays back out to sea. He was free to come and go, and for the most part he chose to stay. He lived in between worlds, unable to rejoin his family but seemingly content with his human friends and caretakers. In December of 2003, ten years after the release of Free Willy and some twenty-five years after he was trapped in a net off the coast of Iceland, Keiko declined rapidly and died of renal failure. He had made it past the age of twenty-five, which was exceptional for a male orca in captivity. As Naomi Rose of Humane Society International said, he might have lived that long in the tank in Oregon, but no one in the project regrets their decision to offer him the open ocean. “We gave him five years of home.” The project still hopes to set other captive orcas free, but so far none of the parks has been willing to cooperate. Even now, with what we know of orcas and the horrors of captive life, orca shows are big business. Free Willy’s sleazy park owner and his adamant refusal to let the whale go, no matter how much he suffers, is pretty much how it is. There’s no practical way to ship the orcas out of the parks, rehabilitate them, and send them home. All anyone can really do is try to stop the industry at the source, put an end once and for all to the capture of wild orcas. That at least seems to be happening, though the larger parks have produced their own micro-pods, breeding orcas in captivity—with distinctly mixed results. Ultimately, there needs to be a ban on orca shows, period. As long as that’s not happening, the same stories will be told over and over, and the same tragedies occur and recur. Keiko’s story offers hope, if anyone will take it.[end-mark] The post The Other Half of the Story: Keiko, the Star of <i>Free Willy</i> appeared first on Reactor.