Inki is the lead character in an animated cartoon series of Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies short films by animator Chuck Jones. Five Inki cartoons were made between 1939 and 1950.

History and description

Inki, created for Warner Bros.' Merrie Melodies series of theatrical animated shorts, is a little African boy who usually dresses in a simple loincloth, armband, legband, earrings, and a bone through his hair. He never speaks. The character's pickaninny look was designed by Disney veteran Bob Givens and was cleaned up by Charlie Thorson. The plot of the first cartoon focuses on little Inki hunting, oblivious to the fact that he himself is being hunted by a hungry lion.

Also central to the series is a minimalist and expressionless mynah bird, which Givens also designed and said he based on a bird he saw in Hawaii, spelled "minah bird" in the title of the third short. The bird, who is accompanied by Felix Mendelssohn's The Hebrides Overture, a.k.a. "Fingal's Cave", According to Terry Lindvall and Ben Fraser, Inki is an everyman who encounters mysterious forces of life. He serves as a symbol of all humanity, "frustrated and rescued by the wonderfully inexplicable". According to Jones, "he grew up sensitive to the feeling of minorities" and so never set out to mock them.

The series did not end due to outside pressure, but Warner Bros' cartoons dropped the use of racist caricatures at the end of the 1940s. Some of the last Warner cartoons with racial stereotypes were Bugs Bunny's 1949 Which Is Witch and Daffy Duck's 1949 short Wise Quackers; the last Inki cartoon was Caveman Inki, in 1950.

  • Inki and the Lion (1941)
  • Inki and the Minah Bird (1943)
  • Inki at the Circus (1947)
  • Caveman Inki (November 25, 1950) Also, in 2004, the "Cartoon Craze" DVD included Inki and the Minah Bird.

Sources

References

  • List of Inki shorts at IMDb