Adventure and animals

[altivo]

How many of the older adventure stories involved animals, either as companions or characters of a sort? I'm referring here to natural animals, not fantasy animals who wear clothing and live in houses, but animals whose forms we would recognize as perfectly normal, yet they reasoned and in many cases spoke as if they were human to some degree.

Here are a few authors that came to mind today after I started thinking about the first of them:

James Oliver Curwood

wrote several novels in which various animals were primary characters whose thoughts and feelings were revealed, including Kazan, Baree, and The Grizzly King. The last was made into a film called The Bear just a few years ago.

Jack London

was author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang.

Anna Sewell

wrote Black Beauty to promote more humane attitudes toward working horses.

Marshall Saunders

was the author of Beautiful Joe, which sought to do for dogs that Sewell did for horses.

Mark Twain

published two short stories later in his life, "A Dog's Tale" and "A Horse's Tale," that highlighted issues similar to those discussed by Sewell and Saunders.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

in his Tarzan series presented thinking rational animals, some of whom had their own languages.

Rudyard Kipling

The Jungle Book and Just So Stories.

Felix Salten

was the author of Bambi and Perri, both of which were eventually made famous by Disney adaptations.

Albert Payson Terhune

wrote many dog stories, most of them about collies. Lad: a Dog is probably the best known of them.

I'm cutting off my list somewhere around World War II, though there are many later authors who created remarkable animal characters. What other authors can you add, who wrote prior to about 1940? I contend that these authors are the fathers and mothers of modern furry fiction, and all of them are worthy of study and emulation to some degree. None of these authors were writing for children, though most of the works mentioned here are today shrugged off as children's stories.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with that version, but if you haven't read the book, how can you be sure they didn't alter it or leave parts out?

As I've mentioned, one incident that is frequently altered or left out involves Gulliver extinguishing a dangerous fire by pissing on it, and being given a death sentence as a consequence.

The visits that take place between Brobdingnag and the country of the Houyhnhnms are also frequently omitted or truncated. Laputa contains a lot of social and political satire with sharp barbs pointed at the universities and schools, as well as some speculative fiction, including the first recorded suggestion of aerial warfare. Balnibarbi is also interesting, but hardly any film version has ever even mentioned it. Most omit Laputa as well.

Laputa

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

This is straying off topic just a bit, but I found it interesting when Studio Ghibli used the Laputa reference for the movie Tenkuu no Shiro Rapyuta, or Laputa: Castle in the Sky.

Re: Laputa

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Everything I've ever seen from Ghibli, including that one, has been so incomprehensible and bizarre that I can't figure out why people bother with them.

I've always thought it interesting that "la puta" in Spanish would mean "the whore" and I assume Swift intended it that way though it's rarely mentioned in commentaries.