I don't know that Kaa was good or bad so much as on his own side. He tended to be on the baddies side for that, but he was a rogue. I recall him trying to capture and eat Mowgli tho so I'd say he was a villain.
In the book, anybody trying to eat Mowgli is definitely automatic "badguy" classification.
I kinda remember him (in the movie) being a threat to Mowgli, when he is absolutely, positively, no such thing in the book. There are no ambiguous neutrals in the book. And Kaa is definitely on Mowgli's side in the book, which is not the vague recollection of the movie (wasn't the song "Trust in Me" about Kaa trying to lull Mowgli to sleep so he could eat him?). Thus, the question.
So, I was trying to detangle my biblical "snake = evil" from my Disneyfied (?) Kipling (wherein there is no such thing as moral ambiguity). I kind of thought that Disney caught a case of the bible and turned Kaa into a figure of unambiguous evil.
That mirrors the book actually (though, in the book it was twisting his body into hypnotic shapes, rather than just his eyes.. Though I doubt the circumstances were identical. In the book, Kaa was doing his hypnosis dance to attract and eat a crapton of mischievous monkeys, and Bagheera and Baloo got hypnotized as a side effect (and it was assumed that Kaa would eat them given the chance) but Mowgli snapped them out of it, because he wasn't at all affected by Kaa's dance.
Kaa was pretty unabashedly on Mowgli's side in the book. He works with Bagheera and Baloo in the case of the monkeys (mentioned above) mostly because he liked eating monkeys. However, nobody really liked Shere Khan in the book. Except the Jackal (whose name I don't remember offhand, and the book is in my desk-drawer at school...) and some of the younger wolves during Mowgli's childhood that didn't want to hunt for themselves (and reduced themselves to the equivalence-in-valor to the Jackal by following Shere Khan for scraps of food, and were thus automatically dishonorable "badguys").
Is it worth reading? I'm not 100% sure either way. I'm pretty sure it's public domain by now, so you can find it on Project Gutenberg, so the price is right if you're willing to read things on your computer screen. In some ways it's interesting to read because it's, in some ways, already part of the subtexty fabric of English Speaking culture, in other ways it really feels... old. Kipling is one of those authors we now think of as sadly racist, despite being famous and such... and it's not even as subtle as Lovecraft's racism. (He very obviously talks shit about Indians, not even bothering to use symbolism or analogy. Additionally, there is a level of moral simplicity that struck me as... old-fashioned and simplistic. "Good" and "evil" can be re-written as "loves and obeys Mowgli" and "everybody else" respectively. His dominance over the rest of the jungle is authorial fiat rather than anything believably prepared or defended within the text
( ... )
Sir Apropos of Nothingthe_jennyOctober 7 2009, 01:29:20 UTC
I never saw the movie but I did read the book (yeah, I say that a lot. So?) but I clearly remember less than you do. What I *do* remember (c'mon, go loopy with me!) is that Shere Khan makes a few appearances in the Fables graphic novel. Which brings us back to comic books, which brings us back to Neil Gaiman, and thence on to The Graveyard Book, said loop being the reason I'm posting this at all, when I still haven't read TGB, don't remember TJB, and never saw the movie. :)
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I kinda remember him (in the movie) being a threat to Mowgli, when he is absolutely, positively, no such thing in the book. There are no ambiguous neutrals in the book. And Kaa is definitely on Mowgli's side in the book, which is not the vague recollection of the movie (wasn't the song "Trust in Me" about Kaa trying to lull Mowgli to sleep so he could eat him?). Thus, the question.
So, I was trying to detangle my biblical "snake = evil" from my Disneyfied (?) Kipling (wherein there is no such thing as moral ambiguity). I kind of thought that Disney caught a case of the bible and turned Kaa into a figure of unambiguous evil.
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However, nobody really liked Shere Khan in the book. Except the Jackal (whose name I don't remember offhand, and the book is in my desk-drawer at school...) and some of the younger wolves during Mowgli's childhood that didn't want to hunt for themselves (and reduced themselves to the equivalence-in-valor to the Jackal by following Shere Khan for scraps of food, and were thus automatically dishonorable "badguys").
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