Babar

Netflix movies were mailed out Monday and arrived Tuesday. Which is amazing to me considering our mail service isn’t the most reliable in the world.

We watched the ones for H.o.p. first and thankfully no scratches. I had gotten the animation “Babar, King of the Elephants” which, yeah, is kind of young for an 8-year-old some would imagine, but H.o.p. loves the story and was stoked about seeing the movie.

I hated it.

He loved it.

When the movie began, hearing the music, I had immediate worries. Was I going to have to listen to this painful Disney-influenced (to my ears) pablam throughout? I had been naive, expecting Francis Poulenc. We used to have a CD with a beautiful rendition of “The History of Babar” and just as importantly the narration was wonderful, done by none other than Dame Edna Everage. (S)he spoiled me. When I’m snuggled up in bed with my hot milk and S’mores, the only person I want reading to me is Dame Edna Everage. Never mind that I’ve only had a S’more once in my life and never have tasted hot milk.

But above all I was expecting the simple, unadulterated story of Babar, rather than a bastardized Reader’s Digest version of the books mashed up in a blender with bits and pieces of “Redwall”. “Redwall”, yes! The movie kept reminding me of a television cartoon but I couldn’t peg which one, so I looked up the director/writers and found that director/writer Raymond Jafelice had worked on the “Redwall” TV series. He had also done “Care Bears” and “Ewoks”, and another of the writers, Peter Sander, had also done “Care Bears” and “Strawberry Shortcake”.

Many people like “Redwall”, which used to be on PBS, and perhaps still is. H.o.p., acquainted with it through his cousins, only saw a couple of episodes which he said he liked but never enough to seek it out, and I immediately couldn’t stand it. I grew up in the 60s and 70s and at least back then we knew roadkill animation for the lifeless asphalt-pancaked rodent it was. How it became a supposed art form, I don’t know.

“Redwall” and “Babar, King of the Elephants”, came out the same year. No wonder that watching Babar I was haunted by “Redwall”.

Bad animation. Lackluster voice talent. A story that wanders all the lanes of the highway, colliding with “Bambi” and “The Land Before Time” (and “Redwall”, at least in feel), resulting in a vehicle dressed up in everyone else’s fenders and fins and driven by the puppet rodent it killed back at the foot of the driveway.

Really, I only have much use for the first of Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar books and neglected to buy most of the others for H.o.p.

Babar’s beginnings are mired in controversy. His mother slain by a hunter, Babar wanders into a city, meets the kind and wealthly old lady who takes care of him and “civilizes” him, then returning home he is crowned King of The Elephants because of his exposre to the outside world, its endowment of experience and wisdom. The second of the books, “The Travels of Babar”, Babar and Celeste going on an adventure, becoming stranded on an elephant, pursued by black-faced cannibals, escaping, reaching “civilization” again and being sold into a circus, rescued by the old lady and returning home to save the elephants from the rhinos. There’s a book where they build Celesteville, which we didn’t buy and the book where Babar and Celeste have triplets, we didn’t get that one either, or “Babar and Zephir” and “Barbar and Father Christmas”. We only have the first two books and the second one, “The Travels of Babar”, has always been more a back shelf book that’s accompanied by a lot of verbal footnoting on why the black island cannibals that threaten Babar and Celeste are insignificant to the story and instead are a commentary on the times.

There’s more than a heady whiff of colonialism in the first book with Babar coming back from the city all duded up and promptly becoming King, but that is easily ignored for the old fairy tale of the homeless waif who meets his good fairy and lives happily ever after. Yes, it’s confusing that the same civilization that killed his mom is the one in which he finds his home after her death, cared for by the Forces for Good, and returns to his childhood home as the model elephant. The old, unclothed king dies from eating a bad mushroom and Babar, arriving in spats and hat, immediately takes his place as he has learned so much living in the world of men.

What child isn’t going to think how great is this story where a rich old lady loves you with single-minded devotion and gives you everything you could possibly want.

Again, how ironic that Babar loses his mother and finds a new mother in the civilization that shot her bam-bam dead? Do we accept it as a fairy tale or a story told by colonialist peoples who see all this as a story of how the good of colonialism overshadows the tragedy?

In the movie, with the death of his mother, Babar is described as homeless, alone, as he wanders toward civilization.

“He wouldn’t have been homeless,” I found myself blurting, “because elephants have extended family relationships.”

Babar would have been taken care of by his aunts.

I didn’t let that get in the way of things when I used to read H.o.p. the story. But in the movie the absence of Babar’s aunts became a problem.

In the book, the elder elephant Cornelius wears glasses. In the movie he is instead in need of glasses, unable to recognize Babar when he returns, and Babar grants him spectacles, the boon of civilization. Someone thought, “It makes no sense for Cornelius to be a wild elephant with glasses.” The movie was odd that way.

The movie charges through the first couple of books without any time for philosophical reflection on how Babar keeps getting smacked by humans–his mom killed, sold into the circus (which the movie leaves out)–and before you know it King Babar is building a city for the elephants based on what he’s experienced of the same civilization that killed mom and sold him into circus slavery. This does happen in the Babar books but the movie embraces it fully.

I guess one has to wonder why to bother with the first of the Babar books at all.

I don’t really know why.