Babar the Elephant

After Babar's mother is shot and killed by a hunter, he flees the jungle and finds his way to an unspecified big city with no particular characteristics.[5] He is befriended by the Old Lady, who buys him clothes and hires him a tutor. Babar's cousins Celeste and Arthur find him in the big city and help him return to the Elephant realm. Following the death of the King of the Elephants, who had eaten a poisonous mushroom (the illustrations indicate that it is a fly agaric), a council of old elephants approach Babar, saying that as he has "lived among men and learnt much", he would be suitable to become the new King. Babar is crowned King of the Elephants and marries his cousin, Celeste.[6]

In Jean de Brunhoff's second Babar book, The Travels of Babar, when the married couple leave by balloon on their honeymoon:

...stormy winds down the balloon on an island, and yet again will the royal couple escape by whale, be marooned on an even smaller island and be rescued by a passing ocean liner only to be turned over to an animal trainer and put to work in a circus. And when they escape and return home, what awaits them but war with the rhinoceroses.[7]

It was sparked when Arthur tied a firecracker to the tail of Lord Rataxes. Babar wins the war by having the elephants paint monster faces on their backsides, which cause the frightened rhinoceroses to run away. After the victory celebrations, the book ends with Babar, Celeste and the Old Lady sitting together and discussing how Babar can rule wisely and make all the elephants happy.[8]

In the third book, Babar the King, Babar founds the city of Celesteville. After many dromedaries are found, they help with building the city. Each elephant citizen is given a job to do. Once the city is built, everyone celebrates. However, problems arise; the Old Lady is bitten by a snake, and Cornelius' home catches fire. Babar has a dream where he is visited by Misfortune and other demons which are chased away by elephant angels representing Courage, Hope, and other virtues. The morning after the hopeful dream, the Old Lady and Cornelius make full recoveries.[9]

Among Babar's other associates in the various incarnations of the series are the monkey Zephir, the old elephant counsellor Cornelius (also later Pompadour who was created for the Babar television series), Babar's cousin Arthur, and Babar's children, Pom, Flora, and Alexander. A younger daughter, Isabelle, is later introduced. The Old Lady comes to live in the Kingdom as an honored guest.

Despite the presence of these counsellors, Babar's rule seems to be totally independent of any elected body, and completely autocratic. However, his leadership style seems to strive for the overall benefit of his elephant subjects—a form of benevolent dictatorship.

Besides his Westernizing policies, Babar engages in battle with the warlike rhinoceroses of a hostile bordering nation, led by Lord Rataxes. Much later, in Babar and the Adventures of Badou, Pom grows to become the father of Prince Babar II (known as Badou).

Marriage and coronation of King Babar and Queen Celeste, The Morgan Library & Museum

In 1931, Jean de Brunhoff introduced Babar in Histoire de Babar, and Babar enjoyed immediate success.[1][10] In 1933, A.A. Milne introduced an English-language version, The Story of Babar, in Britain and the United States.[11]

Before his death in 1937, Jean de Brunhoff published six more stories. His son Laurent de Brunhoff, also a writer and illustrator, carried on the series from 1946, beginning with Babar et Le Coquin d'Arthur.[12]

An animated television series, Babar was produced in Canada by Nelvana Limited and the Clifford Ross Company, originally running from 3 January 1989 to 5 June 1991, with 65 episodes. An additional 13 episodes aired in 2000. The character has also appeared in a number of films. The first two of Jean de Brunhoff's Babar books have inspired two major concert works: L'Histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant (The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant) by Francis Poulenc in 1940; and The Travels of Babar (Le Voyage de Babar) by Raphael Mostel in 1994.[13][14] In 2010, a sequel and spin-off, Babar and the Adventures of Badou, was released, introducing new characters, including Badou, Babar's grandson and Pom's son. It takes place several years after the original series.

L'Histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant (The story of Babar, the little elephant), FP 129, is a composition for narrator and piano by Francis Poulenc, based on Histoire de Babar and written between 1940-1945.

Babar, who likes to wear a bright green suit, introduces a very French form of Western civilization to the elephants, and they soon dress in Western attire. The attention to stylish clothing perhaps reflects the fact that the original publisher of the books was Editions du Jardin des Modes, owned by Condé-Nast. The Babar books were the first Condé-Nast publications not specifically about fashion.[15]

Author Maurice Sendak described the innovations of Jean de Brunhoff:

Like an extravagant piece of poetry, the interplay between few words and many pictures, commonly called the picture book, is a difficult, exquisite, and most easily collapsible form that few have mastered....Jean de Brunhoff was a master of this form. Between 1931 and 1937 he completed a body of work that forever changed the face of the illustrated book.[16]

A Babar stuffed animal with a bright green suit, shoes with spats and a yellow crown.

The series has over 100 licensees worldwide, and the "Babar" brand has a multi-generational following. There are 12 Babar stores in Japan. A global cultural phenomenon, whose fans span generations, Babar stands along with Disney's Mickey Mouse as one of the most recognized children's characters in the world. There are now over 30,000 Babar publications in over 17 languages, and over 8 million books have been sold. Laurent de Brunhoff's Babar's Yoga for Elephants is a top seller in the U.S. with over 100,000 copies sold to date. The Babar series of books are recommended reading on former First Lady Laura Bush's national reading initiative list. All 78 episodes of the TV series are broadcast in 30 languages in over 150 countries, making Babar one of the largest distributed animation shows in history. Babar has been a perennial favourite for years at the White House Easter Egg Roll.[17]

Since 2001, the Babar franchise has been owned by Corus Entertainment's Nelvana in conjunction with the artist, Clifford Ross.[18]

Babar made a nameless appearance in The New Traveller's Almanac (part of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series). Babar and his elephants escort Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain through the African jungle. Mina considers them "civilized and gentle", but Allan denies that their leader is really wearing a crown.[19]

In the 1988 comedy film Coming to America, the Joffer royal family have a pet elephant named "Babar". In 1993,[20] de Brunhoff's elephant inspired the BaBar experiment, an international hadron physics collaboration based in the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University.

Herbert R. Kohl and Vivian Paley,[21] have argued that, although superficially delightful, the stories can be seen as a justification for colonialism. Others argue that the French civilization described in the early books had already been destroyed by World War I and the books were originally an exercise in nostalgia for pre-1914 France. Ariel Dorfman's The Empire's Old Clothes[22] is another critical view, in which he concludes: "In imagining the independence of the land of the elephants, Jean de Brunhoff anticipates, more than a decade before history forced Europe to put it into practice, the theory of neocolonialism".

Babar's Travels was removed from the shelves by library staff in East Sussex in response to parental complaints for what was perceived as stereotypes of Africans.[23]

A more sympathetic view is expressed in the 2008 New Yorker article "Freeing the Elephants", in which Adam Gopnik argues it "is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination. The gist ... is explicit and intelligent: the lure of the city, of civilization, of style and order and bourgeois living is real, for elephants as for humans".[24] He concludes that the satisfaction derived from Babar is based on the knowledge that "while it is a very good thing to be an elephant, still, the life of an elephant is dangerous, wild, and painful. It is therefore a safer thing to be an elephant in a house near a park".[24]

Jean de Brunhoff wrote and illustrated seven Babar books; the series was continued by his son, Laurent de Brunhoff.[25]

Jean de Brunhoff's Babar books (1931–1941), and the titles of the English translations, were:

Laurent de Brunhoff's books (1948–present) (selected list):

English translations of the original Babar books are routinely republished in the UK and in the US, individually and in collections.

Other English-language titles about Babar include the following:[26]

• Les Aventures de Babar (French language TV series) (1968)[27]

Bill Melendez Productions:

• The Story of Babar the Little Elephant (1968)[28]
• Babar the Elephant Comes to America (1971)[29]

Atkinson Film-Arts:

• Babar and Father Christmas (1986)[30]

Nelvana Productions:

• Babar (1989–91; 2000)[31]
• Babar: The Movie (1989)[32]
• Babar: King of the Elephants (1999)[33]
• Babar and the Adventures of Badou (2010–2015)[34]

Mindscape released Babar and the Royal Coin Caper for the PC in 2005, Both Babar and Cornelius are voiced by Daniel Davies and Dave Pender. The Danish game company The Game Factory published Babar to the Rescue for the Game Boy Advance in 2006.

• Official website of Random House, North American publisher of the Babar books of Jean de Brunhoff
• Digital maquette of Jean de Brunhoff's Histoire de Babar le petit Éléphant
• Official website of Raphael Mostel, composer and publisher & production proprietor of "The Travels of Babar" based on Jean de Brunhoff's classic book and art Le Voyage de Babar
• Official website of Harry N. Abrams, North American publisher of the Babar books of Laurent de Brunhoff
• Official Babar site of Treehouse TV
• New York Review of Books article
• Laurent de Brunhoff - Video Interview
• Maurice Sendak essay celebrating golden jubilee of Babar the Elephant
• Laurent de Brunhoff Reveals Shocking Beginning of Beloved Babar Series