The Joys of Literature Through Animation
In his first autobiography, Chuck Amuck, Chuck Jones talks about his early research for his adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's The White Seal. First, he says, he went to the zoo to look at the sea lions, which are the animals Kipling was apparently really talking about. (Says
Jones, and certainly I cannot tell you any different.) He described them as looking like big, fat movie executives sunning themselves on a beach, that if you squinted, you could just about see the cigars and tacky shorts. Then, in order to figure out how they swam--because they were doing no swimming at the zoo--he tied his grandsons' legs together and tied their arms to their torsos to the window, put swim fins on their feet, and tossed them into his pool. One rather wonders if he told the boys' parents that he was going to do that. One hopes that he was also prepared to rescue the boys should they prove unable to give him his motion study. Most of all, one hopes it was the shallow end! At any rate, there's a difference between his deliberate nature here and motion capture animation as done now--and the motion capture is the lesser.
The collection at hand originally aired as TV specials back in the '70s, back around the time I was born. Three of them are taken from stories by Kipling, specifically "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," "The White Seal," and "Mowgli's Brothers." Probably the best known of those is "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," the story of the struggle of the titular mongoose (Shepard Menken) against two cobras, Nag (Orson Welles) and Nagaina (June Foray, of course), inside the garden of a colonial couple. This is the one schools like to haul out and show kids for whatever reason. In addition, there are a series of shorts made from A Cricket in Times Square, originally by George Selden.
Animation fans who somehow didn't know these were Chuck Jones before watching definitely would afterward. There is a very distinct Jones style. Even in characters also drawn by other people--Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny--show distinct touches when drawn by Jones. (Dr. Seuss pointed out that Jones's Grinch looked more like himself than Seuss's illustrations.) I don't like Tom & Jerry cartoons, but I will still pause for a second and linger over the art. His autobiographies are filled with his illustrations--and those of others. He loved art, his own and others', and that may well be part of what inspired these. It's also true that Jones read a lot, starting from when he was a kid, so probably the Kipling was part of growing up for him, and he never stopped reading, so the fact that Cricket came out in 1960 is irrelevant. Besides, grandkids.
Maybe the reason "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" gets shown in the schools so often is that it's the best of the lot. "Yankee Doodle Cricket," for example, is more of the tedious Bicentennial celebration programming, for all it came out in '75 and not '76. During that year, there was such a focus on making everyone feel as though they were part of a greater history--well, they were; they are. Everyone is. But the thing is even more cutesy than "Ben & Me," that beloved old Disney standard. There's also the heavy-handed criticism of American culture in "A Very Merry Cricket," insisting that everyone in the hurly-burly of the modern world is basically a bad person, if you really stop to look at it. There's a mother who hits her child early in the short, and it's kind of appalling. But hey, if everyone slows down a minute for a cricket, that'll make it all right, won't it? A cricket which can be heard all over the place, too.
The thing is, probably the only exposure most kids have to Kipling these days comes from "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," the Disney version of The Jungle Book, and learning about "the White Man's Burden" in history class. Possibly not even that last. This is in part because Kipling has, in a lot of ways, become horribly, horribly dated. Notably that "White Man's Burden" thing, which becomes very interesting when you realize there is no one in "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" who is not an animal or English. Mowgli (Roddy McDowall) is the only human in "Mowgli's Brothers," but he must establish dominance over Shere Khan and the others. He has fire; the boy's father (Les Tremayne) has a fire-stick. This is not necessarily saying that Kipling thought the Indians were animals, but it seems rather certain that he thought they were less than the British. While humans are the villains in "The White Seal," you don't have to be a Freudian to be suspicious of the fact that it is, after all, the white seal who saves all the brown ones. Again, this probably isn't on purpose. It may not even mean anything. Still.
November 2, 2009
