FA+
Shop
Cartoon of the Week -- Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (Russian version)
11 years ago
General
I'm guessing we've pretty much all seen the Chuck Jones version of Kipling's famous short story. But the Soyuzmultfilm studio in Russia did their own version 10 years before Jones.
While this version of Rikk-Tikki may look suspiciously more like a Siberian sable than a mongoose, I still find his design vastly more appealing than that other one. I'll never forget the time Chuck Jones came to CalArts in 1986 to give a lecture to the Character Animation class. He started talking about his version of the story, and how he went to great pains to "come up with a design for Rikki that didn't look like a weasel." (Because everyone knows that weasels can never be heroic or sympathetic.) That's why Chuck's "mongoose" has rodent teeth and hairless paws like a rat. Way to go, Chucko.
While this version of Rikk-Tikki may look suspiciously more like a Siberian sable than a mongoose, I still find his design vastly more appealing than that other one. I'll never forget the time Chuck Jones came to CalArts in 1986 to give a lecture to the Character Animation class. He started talking about his version of the story, and how he went to great pains to "come up with a design for Rikki that didn't look like a weasel." (Because everyone knows that weasels can never be heroic or sympathetic.) That's why Chuck's "mongoose" has rodent teeth and hairless paws like a rat. Way to go, Chucko.
But yeah, the "weasels can't be heroic" typecast really needs to get broken. The closest example I can think of in modern animation is Timon (and meerkats in general). They're mongooses, and Timon LOOKS like a mongoose!
A lot more then Chuck Jones' Rikki, anyway.
(And the Soyuzmultfilm version was, for the most part, really good. The animation was very quirky and stylized, but you're right: Rikki's design is much more recognizably mustelid, and the mongoose mannerisms were a treat to watch. They left the scene with Karait out, but it really wasn't necessary to the plot; more interestingly they put the scene of Nag eating Darzee's hatchling IN. Try finding THAT sort of bluntness in even modern American animation. More interestingly still, the human family wasn't British colonists as in the original, but native Sikhs. Soyuzmultfilm is a hugely mixed bag, but they have something to be proud of here).
And thus we come full circle, from cliched trope to heroic trope-breaker back to the original trope. ^.^
But you can easily argue that Rikki was a special mongoose - and being pretty well fed, didn't feel the need to cut swaths of destruction wherever he went. Sometimes, it's just fun to let fiction be fiction, and Soyuzmultfilm struck the right balance while staying true to the story.