Lady Bagheera

[igenlode]

Apparently Soviet Bagheera is female :-)

Watch on YouTube

I hadn't realised this, as the character doesn't actually speak in the various comparison clips I'd seen... and yes, the Soviet version is not only, as advertised, much closer to Kipling -- Kaa is a dangerous ally, not an ineffectual enemy -- but a greater deal darker as a result.

Watch on YouTube

Although to be fair, Disney apparently did originally plan to make a much more 'realistic' version of "The Jungle Book" (at one point I had a tape that included some of the music written for it before the project was abandoned), and made a conscious choice to go for a comedy take on the story that has a lot of charm and good songs in its own right. And it has George Sanders, of course :-)

Comments

[erimia]

I think the vibe they were going for with the Owl was something like "self-satisfied elderly schoolteacher" and it worked well enough.

It's never weird for me to see anyone geeking over languages. I'm myself a language geek, after all.

[igenlode]

Oh yes, I can definitely see "self-satisfied elderly schoolteacher" working out :-)

I'm not sure I believe the claims put forward on various (English) pages of the Internet that Owl and Bagheera simply *had* to become female in Russian because their names end in '-a', given that Russian children (and grammar) cope perfectly well with the idea that intimate forms of male names all end in '-a' as it is: Sasha, Misha, Volodya, Petya, Vanya... Just as English children are, or were, perfectly capable of coping with the idea that the diminutives of boys' names ended in the 'feminine' '-ie': Johnnie, Timmy Willie -- and 'Winnie'-the-Pooh is of course actually a girl's name in the first place (as I recall either A.A. Milne or Christopher mentioning in autobiography) but we are so used to hearing it that we don't question that.

I do remember Margaret Thatcher being 'Tetchera' in the Russian press in order to make declining her name easier, but I think that making sure female names are appropriately female is different from coping with the existing large number of familiar male names with a 'feminine' ending. Though I do wonder how Larisa Luppian manages with her resolutely 'foreign' name...

(So far as I can see they simply get around it by referring to her as "Larisa Reginaldovna" when the grammar makes it important ;-)
"Но спустя три года Владимиров попросил Ларису Регинальдовну вернуться."
"В 2021-м на малой сцене по задумке Ларисы Регинальдовны был запущен совершенно новый продукт..."
https://24smi.org/celebrity/2620-larisa-luppian.html )

[erimia]

This reminds me of how I was so sure as a five year old that Dracula was a woman, because his name ended in "a".

I think the genders were changed not so much because of the names but rather because of the species: сова and пантера are words in female gender and so the animals are perceived as female too. Of course, they could have made them филин and леопард. Plus, perhaps traslators thought it would be better to add more female characters to the cast.

Yes, Winnie is a girl name. Pooh is named after a female bear from a zoo that Milne visited, iirc.

Hm, that's the first time I hear about adding "a" to Thatcher's name. Not a practice that I've ever heard about Russian press doing. Foreign female names ending in consonants, especially last names, is not something that wouldn't be unfamiliar to Russians; there are even last names like that that are or were relatively common in Russia, for example, the ones with "ich" ending, or Armenian "yan" names. I know that Czechs always add "female" endings to women's last names (so Hermione is Grangerova in Czech translations of Harry Potter), but Russians don't.

[igenlode]

To be fair, an English five-year-old would probably assume Dracula was female because it ended in "a" ;-)

(I'm not sure, on reflection, quite sure why it *does* end in "a", given that so far as I remember the chap's actual title was "Vlad Dracul"...)

I think the genders were changed not so much because of the names but rather because of the species

For some reason I am irresistably reminded of the extremely silly video YouTube decided to show me... https://youtube.com/watch?v=aygZBk81h3g
(It made more sense once I'd managed to track down Stierlitz on Wikipedia, but I got the gist anyway ;-p)

--We have a Tiger in the bathroom!
--So what? a tiger is just a big kitty-cat (кошка)
--It's not a кошка, it's a Tiger tank! :-P


Yes, the overall impression I got was that the translators simply wanted to add more female voices to the cast...

Hm, that's the first time I hear about adding "a" to Thatcher's name. Not a practice that I've ever heard about Russian press doing.

We were assured of it at the time by our (elderly -- probably White Russian) teacher when being told about noun-endings, and I had no reason to doubt her... but come to think of it, we never actually *saw* any of those press articles ;-)
That sort of thing would have been way beyond our abilities to read at that stage, of course.

there are even last names like that that are or were relatively common in Russia, for example, the ones with "ich" ending, or Armenian "yan" names.

Now I'm reminded of the jokes about "Dartanyan" clearly being Caucasian :-P
(Also based on Boyarsky's appearance, I think: the dark coloration, high cheekbones and slightly slanted green eyes of his d'Artagnan do look a bit 'Armenian'...)

[erimia]

Dracul was the name of Vlad's III father; Dracula is basically a patronimic, and the "a" ending is what turns it into a patronimic.

Ah, if she was a White Russian, it might explain it. It makes sense for them to be out of loop regarding the use of Russian language in the Soviet Union.

[igenlode]

I've watched the first episode, and the comments there point out that the characters Akela and Kaa also have 'female' names (although one of them appears to also say that Kaa is female -- самка -- in the novel and male in the cartoon, which is definitely not the case!)