Thar she blows! Cinema's most spectacular whale hunts

From John Huston's blood-drenched Moby Dick to Richard Harris's orca epiphany, cinema has always loved a whale hunt. Will In the Heart of the Sea land the big one?

From Pinocchio to Free Willy, from Whale Rider to Blackfish, cinema has frequently dallied with what the whale might, or might not, mean. In 1943, Walt Disney even turned Nazi Germany into a fearsome animated whale about to swallow plucky Britain. But above them all looms one legendary beast: the great white whale, Moby-Dick, freighted with portentous doom.

Ron Howard's imminent action movie, In the Heart of the Sea, based on the bestselling book by Nathaniel Philbrick, follows the fate of the Essex, a Nantucket whaleship sunk by a sperm whale in the Pacific in 1820, and the terrible consequences that ensued. It was this same story that Herman Melville used for his 1851 epic novel, thereby turning reality into literary legend.