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Description
Despite his terrifying presence, Kaa is actually a protagonist in Rudyard Kipling's 1894 anthology novel, The Jungle Book. This may seem odd to those who are most familiar with the Disney version, but it turns out that making Kaa a villain was an executive decision on the part of Walt himself. Apparently he thought audiences just wouldn't be able to connect with a friendly snake. Damn Walt, you've been accused of a whole lot of horrible shit, but I never expected you to be snakist too. Shame on you. Let's try to clear up this horrible misconception, then. The character of Kaa is an impossibly enormous Indian rock python who is well over a century old. First appearing in Kipling's short story "Kaa's Hunting", Kaa actually serves as a mentor to the man-cub Mowgli alongside the panther Bagheera and the bear Baloo. In fact, it is Kaa whom the mammals recruit to rescue Mowgli from the Bandar-log, a tribe of monkeys who kidnap Mowgli for the lolz.

After storming the old ruins that serve as the monkeys' fortress, Kaa uses his infamous hypnosis abilities to get the monkeys to literally walk right into his serpentine maw. This particular story doesn't pick up until Kipling's sequel, the creatively named Second Jungle Book. Here, Mowgli and Kaa are just kinda hanging out in their sweet new clubhouse now clear of its monkey infestation. One day, though, Kaa comes up to Mowgli and is like dude, I found a secret room, and there's treasure! Mowgli, like any little boy who unearths such a discovery in their clubhouse, is absolutely elated, and goes down to retrieve the goods buried within the chamber. Like all dungeons, though, it's booby trapped with a venomous cobra. A bit anticlimactically, though, this cobra's venom is all dried up, so Mowgli just kinda… goes around it and takes the shiny Indiana Jones macguffin it was guarding. This turns out to be a gilded ankus (a hooked tool traditionally used in India for training elephants). Mowgli ultimately ends up realizing that men will kill one another to claim the treasure, and decides to return it to its original resting space. From this point, Kaa makes some little appearances here and there, and he's actually one of the animals alongside Bagheera and Baloo that give Mowgli his final farewell before the boy returns to the human village. See, snakes are friends too, even giant centuries old pythons with hypnotic powers. Or… come to think of it, maybe that's just what he hypnotized us all to think.

Design notes, designing Kaa very much had the same problem as designing Shere Khan. In the original story, he's pretty much just a big snake, and a specific species at that. I tried to proportion him more like an anaconda or a reticulated python to better emphasize his size, but uh… turns out there's not a lot of variation in snake proportions since they're literally just noodles with heads. I think I did a decent enough job at highlighting his girth, though. The real pain in the ass came when I tried to visually depict his hypnosis abilities. Obviously the most famous rendition of this is Disney's eye swirls, but that's too uniquely Disney. In Kipling's telling, Kaa actually uses the motion of his coils to hypnotize his prey, apparently taking this from old urban myths about snake behavior. The only animal that comes to my mind that actually hypnotizes prey is the cuttlefish, who use their insane color-changing abilities to rapidly flash mesmerizing waves of color. I figured that would be a neat direction to take this in, afterall, some reptiles are known to be able to change colors too, though I'm not sure it really comes across well in this drawing. The problem with that is that you kinda need a gif to convey the color shift well, and I'm confined to still illustrations. You can kinda get the idea with how the pattern fades out from the head down, but idk I feel like that's something that has to be pointed out to really get. I also gave him cuttlefish pupils, though that detail doesn't really show up in the scan too well either. Ah well, maybe something to revisit some day, but I'm not a huge fan of The Jungle Book, so for now I'll let sleeping snakes lie.

Description
Despite his terrifying presence, Kaa is actually a protagonist in Rudyard Kipling's 1894 anthology novel, The Jungle Book. This may seem odd to those who are most familiar with the Disney version, but it turns out that making Kaa a villain was an executive decision on the part of Walt himself. Apparently he thought audiences just wouldn't be able to connect with a friendly snake. Damn Walt, you've been accused of a whole lot of horrible shit, but I never expected you to be snakist too. Shame on you. Let's try to clear up this horrible misconception, then. The character of Kaa is an impossibly enormous Indian rock python who is well over a century old. First appearing in Kipling's short story "Kaa's Hunting", Kaa actually serves as a mentor to the man-cub Mowgli alongside the panther Bagheera and the bear Baloo. In fact, it is Kaa whom the mammals recruit to rescue Mowgli from the Bandar-log, a tribe of monkeys who kidnap Mowgli for the lolz.

After storming the old ruins that serve as the monkeys' fortress, Kaa uses his infamous hypnosis abilities to get the monkeys to literally walk right into his serpentine maw. This particular story doesn't pick up until Kipling's sequel, the creatively named Second Jungle Book. Here, Mowgli and Kaa are just kinda hanging out in their sweet new clubhouse now clear of its monkey infestation. One day, though, Kaa comes up to Mowgli and is like dude, I found a secret room, and there's treasure! Mowgli, like any little boy who unearths such a discovery in their clubhouse, is absolutely elated, and goes down to retrieve the goods buried within the chamber. Like all dungeons, though, it's booby trapped with a venomous cobra. A bit anticlimactically, though, this cobra's venom is all dried up, so Mowgli just kinda… goes around it and takes the shiny Indiana Jones macguffin it was guarding. This turns out to be a gilded ankus (a hooked tool traditionally used in India for training elephants). Mowgli ultimately ends up realizing that men will kill one another to claim the treasure, and decides to return it to its original resting space. From this point, Kaa makes some little appearances here and there, and he's actually one of the animals alongside Bagheera and Baloo that give Mowgli his final farewell before the boy returns to the human village. See, snakes are friends too, even giant centuries old pythons with hypnotic powers. Or… come to think of it, maybe that's just what he hypnotized us all to think.

Design notes, designing Kaa very much had the same problem as designing Shere Khan. In the original story, he's pretty much just a big snake, and a specific species at that. I tried to proportion him more like an anaconda or a reticulated python to better emphasize his size, but uh… turns out there's not a lot of variation in snake proportions since they're literally just noodles with heads. I think I did a decent enough job at highlighting his girth, though. The real pain in the ass came when I tried to visually depict his hypnosis abilities. Obviously the most famous rendition of this is Disney's eye swirls, but that's too uniquely Disney. In Kipling's telling, Kaa actually uses the motion of his coils to hypnotize his prey, apparently taking this from old urban myths about snake behavior. The only animal that comes to my mind that actually hypnotizes prey is the cuttlefish, who use their insane color-changing abilities to rapidly flash mesmerizing waves of color. I figured that would be a neat direction to take this in, afterall, some reptiles are known to be able to change colors too, though I'm not sure it really comes across well in this drawing. The problem with that is that you kinda need a gif to convey the color shift well, and I'm confined to still illustrations. You can kinda get the idea with how the pattern fades out from the head down, but idk I feel like that's something that has to be pointed out to really get. I also gave him cuttlefish pupils, though that detail doesn't really show up in the scan too well either. Ah well, maybe something to revisit some day, but I'm not a huge fan of The Jungle Book, so for now I'll let sleeping snakes lie.