Nasrudin CAT AND MEAT

Luke Menichelli emailed this Nasrudin storyboard and excerpt from the script.Nasrudin storyboard (from International Film Guide)


CAT AND MEAT (Sequence 7)
Cut to Kerima, still stirring her pot, furious. Crowd noises die down slightly, as they start to give up,
Muttering ...

Cut to Nasrudin beside window, looking at Kerima,

Cut to Kerima, who looks around craftily, takes a big bowl and ladles out a great quantity of meat balls into it. She looks
around again and eats the whole thing in three seconds,
Nasrudin tiptoes downstairs.
NASRUDIN:
Kerlma, dear ... what is for lunch?
She says nothing, scrapes the bottom of the pan and ladles out two and a half potatoes on his plate and three on hers, She
gulps hers down.
NASRUDIN:
Potatoes? - what happened to the three pounds of meat I brought you?
KERlMA:
(finishing off another potato)
The cat ... the cat ... the cat ate it! All three pounds of it !
Nasrudin puts down his plate, goes over to the slumbering cat on a chair, picks it up and puts it on a set of hand-held
scales, He puts on three one-pound weights,
NASRUDIN:
This cat weighs three pounds
KERIMA:
So? ... Slobber! Slobber ... So?
NASRUDIN:
If this is the cat, where is the meat?
If, on the other hand, this is the meat
where is the cat?
He puts the cat down on the chair and, angry now, stamps out to the backdoor, turns around and gives Kerima an angry glance
and slams the door. Fade to black.

Last Nasrudin images (Exploits)

This concludes the current Nasrudin season. The images posted over the last 2 weeks are Illustrations that Richard Williams did for the book "The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin".

Nasrudin in the Papers

Matt Jones just sent these scans:

Nasrudin 15

Nasrudin 14

Nasrudin 13

Script research

In reply to the last post Luke Menichelli writes:
"Though it's the donkey in this script, I remember reading an account from someone there (can't remember who) that the sequence involved the Thief with brightly colored wolves.

Garrett Gilchrist noted this from the early Nasrudin script:

THE MAJESTIC FOOL

WOLVES (Sequence 11)

Cut in to reveal six long-headed wolves posing as a tree, They zip in and run over to another pole, a little closer to Nasrudin, and pose again as a tree.
A snow storm hits and as it clears, we cut to Nasrudin asleep, with snow covering his body, looking like a white coffin, the donkey still sits, bored, at his feet,
Cut to the wolf-tree entirely covered in ice. The ice cracks and the icicles drop off, revealing the wolves who have turned blue from the cold. They shiver terribly and run to another tree.
Cut to the donkey whose ear lifts and whose eyes open wide,
Cut to the woIves who run to another tree.
Cut to the donkey, more worried.
Cut to the wolves sticking out from behind a tree, all six of them clutching at their stomachs - they are obvious1y starving to death. They zip back in and go down the hill from tree to tree, like a slalom,
Cut to the donkey, now very worried, Iooking round stupidly.

Cut to the wolves who shoot out from behind the tree, do a long run and zoom into the air.
We hear the sound of a screaming jet engine and they land on the donkey, who disappears in a cartoon bIurr.
Jet and buzz-saw and eating noises as the blurr zooms around,


Cut to Nasrudin with one eye open looking at the demotion of his donkey, entirely calmly, he leans to us and says.

NASRUDlN:
Such is life! One thing is conditional upon another.

Cut to the wolves, now with huge, full bellies, who burp and snicker, pick their teeth and laugh gleefully to each other in
front of Nasrudin, rubbing their bellies with delight."

Ken Harris and Wolf

Luke Menichelli just sent this photo from the International Film Guide.Interesting. I wonder who or what the wolf just swallowed.

Nasrudin

Wolf?

I wonder if this is one of the wolves that Ken Harris animated. Has anybody seen these wolves pencil tests?

Nasrudin (cont.)

Thief without ears?

Nasrudin, 3 more

2 for Monday

3 for the weekend

Nasrudin 5, Bread guy

This seems to be one of the characters from the bread sequence...

Nasrudin 4

Nasrudin 3

Nasrudin 2

A while ago Michael posted some of Dick's illustrations for "The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin". (LINK)
Matt Jones just sent more scans from the same book. I'll try and post one every day.

Nasrudin

In the mid sixties Dick apparently got interested in the teachings of Sufiism, a middle eastern philosophy from the middle ages, and around 1966, he collaborated with Idries Shah on a series of books. Shah had written "The Sufis", the seminal work on Sufiism and was now collecting the Folk tales about the famous Mulla Nasrudin.
Nasrudin, who is known throughout the middle east and Russia, combines the figures of Teacher and fool, sometimes based on the idea, that, if you make a preposterous statement to your pupil, the pupil, by contradicting you, will have to reason his own way to the truth.
I am pretty convinced that Dick illustrated 2 books for Shah,
The exploits of the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin
of which I have a copy, and
The pleasantries of the incredible Mulla Nasrudin
which I once had a snoop through at Dick Purdums house.
The stories are mostly philosophical jokes and some of them resemble parabels that I remember being told in my childhood, so the basic concept seems to be a universal one. They're great fun and the illustrations are a perfect match for the strange tales.
The interesting thing is how many elements in the illustrations are predecessors of what would ultimately become the "Thief style".
Middle eastern illustrations, the influence for the backgrounds in the movie, rely heavily on the use of perfect geometrical patterns, that have an almost mathematical quality to them.
I remember, working up patterns for the crane across the golden city up to the minaret and being amazed by their logic.
Patterns that looked like a collection of star shapes would turn out to be nothing else but lines that turned left and right alternatively, but would weave over and under the lines they met in perfect regularity.
This created quite remarkably complex patterns.
Just look at the scene where Zig Zag contemplates men being "fools who walk in dreams" in his study.
The window in the background consists of ten pronged stars, surrounded by ten diamonds, interspersed with ten pentagons and ten pentagrams, before repeating again, yet, it's just bars going: turn right, over, under, turn left, over, under and so on.
Quite apart from the use of arabic patterns, the illustrations also featured many characters that resemble those in the film.
There is a Proto-thief, a Proto princess and many references to the Escher style optical jiggery pokery that later made up King Nod's palace.
Being a great fan of mathematical games and conundrums, I'm sure I will come back to these patterns later, especially when it comes to the work of Roy Naisbitt, the single most important influence in my life, as far as what "really melts my butter" is concerned, when it comes to graphic translations of reality into screen imagery.
I include some images from the book, published by Jonathan Cape.
There must, at some time, have been the plan to turn Nasrudin into a series of animated films because piles of boxes labelled with that name were populating the shelves at the forum, and many a rough animation on the theme seems to have been canibalized to populate the scenes of the final movie.
Incidentally Dick fell out with Shah after illustrating the book and there are rumours that Zig Zag is based on the character of the great Sufi master.
After what I heard Dick say about his film-villain, I would be very interested to meet Shah, with his 12 fingers, extra digits, two elbows on each arm and two arses...

I wonder...

Anyway, here's a Nasrudin Story:
In a dream Nasrudin saw himself being given money.
When there were nine silver pieces in his hand, the invisible donor stopped giving them.
Nasrudin shouted: "I must have ten" so loudly that he woke himself up.
Finding that all the money had gone, he closed his eyes again and murmured:
All right then, I'll take the nine...