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Kaa
	; Kaa as he appears in the first film
First appearance	The Jungle Book
Created by	Rudyard Kipling
Voiced by	Sterling Holloway (The Jungle Book, Disney's Halloween Treat) Jim Cummings (Jungle Cubs, The Jungle Book 2, Mickey's House of Villians current)

For other uses, see Kaa (disambiguation).

Kaa (left), as illustrated on page 159 of the 1895 edition of The Two Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling

Kaa is a fictional Python molurus from the Mowgli stories written by Rudyard Kipling. Kaa is one of Mowgli's mentors. He, Baloo and Bagheera sing for Mowgli "The Outsong" of the jungle. First introduced in the story "Kaa's Hunting" in The Jungle Book, Kaa is a huge and powerful snake, more than a hundred years old and still in his prime. Bagheera and Baloo enlist Kaa's help to rescue Mowgli when the man-cub is captured by the Bandar-log (monkeys) and taken to an abandoned human city. Kaa breaks down the wall of the building in which Mowgli is imprisoned and uses his serpentine hypnosis to draw the monkeys toward his waiting jaws. Bagheera and Baloo are also hypnotized, but Mowgli is immune because he is human, and breaks the spell on his friends.

In The Second Jungle Book Kaa appears in the first half of the story "The King's Ankus". After he and Mowgli spend some time relaxing, bathing and wrestling, Kaa persuades Mowgli to visit a treasure chamber guarded by an old cobra beneath an ancient city. The cobra tries to kill Mowgli but its poison has dried up. Mowgli takes a jeweled item away as a souvenir, not realizing the trouble it will cause in the second half of the story, and Kaa departs.

In "Red Dog" Mowgli asks Kaa for help when his wolf pack is threatened by rampaging dhole (the red dogs of the title). Kaa goes into a trance so that he can search his century-long memory for a stratagem to defeat the dogs:

“

For a long hour Mowgli lay back among the coils, while Kaa, his head motionless on the ground, thought of all that he had seen and known since the day he came from the egg.

The light seemed to go out of his eyes and leave them like stale opals, and now and again he made little stiff passes with his head, right and left, as though he were hunting in his sleep. Mowgli dozed quietly, for he knew that there is nothing like sleep before hunting, and he was trained to take it at any hour of the day or night. Then he felt Kaa’s back grow bigger and broader below him as the huge python puffed himself out, hissing with the noise of a sword drawn from a steel scabbard;

“I have seen all the dead seasons,” Kaa said at last, “and the great trees and the old elephants, and the rocks that were bare and sharp-pointed ere the moss grew. Art thou still alive, Manling?”

”

With Kaa's help Mowgli tricks the dhole into attacking prematurely. Kaa takes no part in the resulting battle, but Mowgli and the wolves finally kill all the dhole, though not without grievous losses. Kaa makes his last appearance in "The Spring Running," as the teenage Mowgli reluctantly prepares to leave the jungle for the last time. "It is hard to cast the skin," he tells Mowgli, but Mowgli knows he must cast the skin of his old life in order to grow a new one.

[edit] Disney version

In the 1967 Disney animation The Jungle Book, Kaa, voiced by Sterling Holloway (and later, by Jim Cummings after Holloway's death), is markedly different from his original counterpart. Rather than being a mentor, he is a villainous character who twice attempts to trap Mowgli in his coils in order to devour him throughout the film. He does this through the use of hypnotic eyes as opposed to the original version, in which he uses a serpentine dance to control his prey. His attempts to eat Mowgli always end in a comical failure. He is also quite cowardly, attempting to curry favor with Shere Khan whenever he is around.

While all his appearances are marked with comedy in some form or another, Kaa is, on the whole, much more menacing in the first movie than in the second, to the point where Bagheera is, in fact, afraid of him when he realizes that he is angry. However, his cause for hunting Mowgli (to appease his hunger with what he perceives as easy prey) is in direct contrast with the movie's other main villain, Shere Khan, whose cause for aggression is wrath and intolerance. This contrast is most acutely shown in a scene in the first movie, where Kaa berates (to himself) Shere Khan's mock gentlemanly manner, comparing what he's doing to picking on the child, before he remembers that he aims to consume Mowgli himself.

Kaa's first appearance is at the beginning of the film, as Bagheera is taking Mowgli to the man-village. As Bagheera is afraid of the predators of the night, he and Mowgli climb up to a tree. Ironically, that was probably the most dangerous place in the jungle, excluding next to Shere Khan. After Bagheera went to sleep, Kaa slithered from the leaves, smacking his lips as he observed Mowgli. First trying to scare him with his long body, Kaa then displayed his ability to use hypnosis to make his victims fall asleep. While his eyes keep the victim mesmerized, he uses his long body to wrap up Mowgli. Trying to call out to Bagheera, Mowgli is quickly silenced when Kaa chokes him with his powerful and dark-colored coils. However, Bagheera sees this and smacks Kaa, which makes him drop Mowgli. Enraged, Kaa instead puts Bagheera under his spell, but is stopped when Mowgli pushes his coils off of the tree, sending him plummeting to the ground. Kaa leaves, swearing revenge.

Kaa reappears later in the film when Mowgli runs away from Baloo, who is trying to return the boy to his own kind. Kaa deceives Mowgli into trusting him and seizes the opportunity to quickly put the Man-cub back under his spell. Seductively singing "Trust in Me", he makes Mowgli relax and sleepwalk on his body, before slipping the boy back into his tight, powerful and dark brown coils. This attempt to eat Mowgli is also foiled, ironically by Shere Khan, who is not convinced by Kaa's bluff even after searching Kaa's coils and not feeling Mowgli inside; the distraction caused by Khan allowed Mowgli to regain consciousness and escape.

Kaa also appeared in the short-lived TV series Jungle Cubs, this time seen as a friend of the other animals when they were cubs. Although he still uses hypnosis on occasion, his skills at this age are far less efficient than when used as an adult, with him failing to hypnotize a sleeping Baloo and only hypnotizing a couple of vultures by accident. He was also seen having far a less malevolent personality as a cub than as adult, once going to great lengths to save Baloo after he believes that he has endangered his friend with his hypnotic abilities, but he still has his sneaky ways in which he often attempts to (unsuccessfully) hypnotize the other cubs, partly threatening on one occasion.

He was also seen in the prologue to the series on the Disney Video version, where he again happens to be in the tree under which Mowgli is sleeping. Strangely, he doesn't seem to recognize Mowgli as he slithers to observe his prey. Then, he wakes Mowgli up only to hypnotize him again, and makes him rise towards him. Before Mowgli falls completely in trance, Baloo thwarts Kaa away. His voice was done by Jim Cummings, who reprised this role in Jungle Cubs and The Jungle Book 2. Kaa appeared briefly in the feature film "Mickey's House of Villains" where he sang again during the main villain musical number. A background character resembling Kaa can be seen during the final scene of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, even though the film takes place twenty years before his debut. Kaa is also a playable character and a mini-boss in Monkey City.

Ubisoft and Disney Interactive Studios released, The Jungle Book Groove Party, for the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 video game consoles. The game featured Kaa as a character and also featured Kaa singing "A Mood for Food".

In The Jungle Book 2, he appears when Baloo takes Mowgli into the jungle, delighted that the "succulent man-cub" had returned for him to devour. His attempts during Baloo and Mowgli's rendition of "The Bare Necessities" prove fruitless, as he ends up bruised and sticked by prickly pears. As he's about to give up on eating Mowgli, he shifts his interests to Shanti, who's lost in the jungle. First scaring her into looking into his eyes, he quickly subdues Shanti into a deep trance and hypnotizes her while moving around to make her sleepwalk onto a rock where he attempts to eat her. But, as he attempts to swallow her, Ranjan, Mowgli's stepbrother, knocks her out of the trance, causing Kaa to swallow a boulder and getting a severe beating from Ranjan. Shere Khan arrives later and again tries to pry answers from Kaa, who fibs and says that Mowgli is at the swamp. He does not appear for the rest of the film, but is mentioned several times.

Sir Hiss, a character in another Disney film called Robin Hood (1973 film), is based on Kaa. He has the same hypnotic ability that Kaa possesses, the ability to hypnotize merely by looking into his eyes.