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Just So Stories: the book vs. the movie

The Elephant's Child (1986) — Rabbit Ears' 26-minute animated telling, narrated by Jack Nicholson with music by Bobby McFerrin · Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories (1992) — a British animated series, Bevanfield Films with the BBC, that works through all twelve tales

Read first, or watch first?

Nothing to decide here, because nothing will spoil anything — these are twelve separate tales with no plot to give away. Watch the Rabbit Ears Elephant's Child whenever you like; it is a fair audition for the book's voice and it rents for a couple of dollars. What it will not do is stand in for the book, because eleven tales, all the verse, and every one of Kipling's captions are outside it. If you want the shortest possible test of whether this book is for your family, read the first page of How the Whale Got His Throat aloud — the one with the starfish and the garfish and the really truly twirly-whirly eel. That page decides it.

What the movie changed

There is no feature film, and that is not an accident

Every other book on this shelf has a movie. This one has short films, a 1990s animated series, a stage musical, some Soviet cartoons, and an Amblimation feature that died with the studio in 1997. The reason is structural: the book has no plot to adapt, no hero, and no ending — just twelve separate answers to twelve separate questions.

The best version is one story out of twelve

Rabbit Ears' The Elephant's Child runs 26 minutes and takes on a single tale. It is genuinely good — Jack Nicholson narrates, Bobby McFerrin sings and does most of the sound effects, and it was nominated for a Grammy — but it is one twelfth of the book.

The pictures are somebody else's

The Rabbit Ears film is illustrated by Tim Raglin, and the 1992 series is animated in its own style. Kipling drew this book himself, and the drawings are strange — a globe with volcanoes for the N of NOT, an ear standing in for the H of HEAR. No adaptation uses them.

The captions cannot survive the jump

The funniest writing in the book is in the paragraphs under Kipling's drawings, and they only work as writing — a voice pointing at a picture and telling you what everything in it is. A film shows you the picture instead, so the joke has nowhere to live.

What only the book has

Kipling's captions

Under the whale drawing he tells you the Whale's name was Smiler and the Mariner was Mr. Henry Albert Bivvens, A.B., that the little 'Stute Fish is hiding under the tummy or else he would have drawn him, and that the sea looks ooshy-skooshy because the Whale is sucking it all in. Most free ebooks of this book have no drawings, and therefore none of this — about five thousand words of Kipling that simply are not in them.

How the Alphabet Was Made

Taffy and her father invent writing one letter at a time, and Kipling draws all thirty-three attempts so you watch a carp's open mouth turn into an A. It is the one story that cannot be told out loud at all, and no film has ever tried it.

The poems between the stories

Each tale is followed by verse in a completely different register — "I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew)", the Camel's cameelious hump, and a strange, quiet one about a road on Merrow Down where a father still walks with a daughter who is no longer there.

The map of the Turbid Amazon

Drawn by Kipling in red and black, covered edge to edge in his own hand-lettered commentary, and signed. It is a picture a kid will sit and read for a quarter of an hour.

Making it a movie night?Find the 1986 film on Amazon →

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